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Viktor lets out a breath, and Anika looks at me warily. I can tell she’s suspicious of my motives, and honestly, if anything, it makes me like her. She’s a smart child, and in this world, that will serve her better than innocence or naivete.
“You can finish your dinner,” Viktor relents. “But you still need to apologize to Caterina for speaking to her that way.”
“M’sorry,” Anika mumbles, stabbing a carrot with her fork. At best, it’s a half-apology, but Viktor lets it go, turning his attention back to his own plate.
“It’s okay,” I say gently, watching the girls from across the table as I poke at my own food. I’m not really hungry. The stress of today has completely stolen my appetite. But I don’t want the girls to see me not eating—something I often saw my own mother do, so I force the food down, bite by bite. It’s good. Viktor has an excellent cook.
After dinner, Viktor and I wind up in the living room, where he sits down to work on a puzzle with Anika. There’sanotherfancy, intricate dollhouse there for Yelena. After a moment’s hesitation, I sit down next to her, asking her to show me what’s happening in this one.
“Well,” she says in her small, quiet voice, “These are the parents.” She shows me a tall dark-haired doll and a pretty blonde doll in a fancy dress. “They’re going to a ball. They’re in love and they want to go dance.”
“That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.” I watch as Yelena picks out an outfit for the blonde doll to wear, explaining to me why the one she chose is the right one, and then follow along as she takes the dolls to the “ball” in front of the house, spinning them in circles as they dance.
“What are the doll's names?” I ask, watching her. She’s warmed up to me faster than Anika has, which gives me hope. If both girls had hated me, I would have been more inclined to feel hopeless about the situation, but I can deal with Anika’s stubbornness. Hopefully, we can form a truce in time, and if I don’t have to fight both girls at once, that will make it so much easier.
“This is Viktor, of course,” Yelena says, looking at me with surprise. “Just like my papa.”
“Of course.” The doll doesn’t really resemble Viktor in any way beyond the dark hair. Still, I can appreciate her ability to pretend. “And the lady doll?”
Yelena presses her lips together, looking at me from under her lashes nervously, as if she’s afraid I might be mad. “This is Vera,” she says quietly. “Like my mama.”
“Oh.” I look at the blonde doll. “Well, I’m sure that you miss her very much. Does this help you feel closer to her?”
Yelena shrugs. “Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me sad. Then I put her away and play with my other toys.”
“That’s a very healthy solution.” I’m surprised, actually, that she’s managing it as well as she is. Viktor’s household isn’t as dysfunctional as I might have imagined it. I’m also surprised by how attentive he is with his daughters. I don’t doubt that my father loved me, possibly in the way you love a very expensive racehorse or piece of art that you can use to invest in later. He would never have been caught doing puzzles with me around the coffee table or listening to the sagas of my dolls. After dinner, he always went straight to his study, if he made it home for dinner at all. My mother was better about showing love, but hers came more in the form of preparing me for the life I would have one day—lessons of all kinds, teaching me to run a household, preparing me for the fact that my love life wouldn’t look like that of some of my friends. She’d encouraged me to make friends with other girls who would live similar lifestyles, but that was hard. No one else was the daughter of Vitto Rossi. No one else had had the same weight on their shoulders since birth.
My father would have said that weight was nothing compared to the responsibility of running his branch of the Family. But he couldn’t possibly have understood. He couldn’t have understood how it would feel, as a young girl, a teenager, and still as a woman, to know I’d likely never fall in love. Never know what an equal partnership of marriage felt like. Never have the fairytale or ever dream of it. Never be able to aspire to a career of my own. While other girls were out getting internships in college and networking, I was just getting my credits, knowing that I was only putting off the inevitable day when I’d never actually get to use any of this.
“Mr. Andreyev?” I hear Olga’s voice from the doorway and see her smile indulgently at both girls before she continues. “I’ve come to get the girls for their baths and bedtime. I’m sure Mrs. Andreyv isn’t quite up to the task yet.”
My first instinct is to be offended, but there’s nothing in her tone that suggests she means it that way. If anything, she looks at me kindly as she comes to gather up Yelena, who is protesting about bedtime. I, too, want to protest because I’m not at all ready to go to bed with Viktor, even if all we’ll be doing is sleeping.
But protesting won’t do any good. Viktor already made it very plain how he feels about my sleeping in a different bedroom. While I hadn’t thought he would be the kind of man who cared all that much about gossip, it’s becoming more and more clear to me throughout my first day here that he seems to be a man who values domestic peace. It’s strange, really, considering all the stories I’ve heard about the Bratva.
I can’t help but wonder if, despite the tentative truce that we came to during our fight earlier, he’ll still try to touch me. I have a single change of nightclothes with me, silky light blue pajama shorts and a tank top. Even that feels too revealing, considering that I want nothing more than for my new husband to keep his hands off of me. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and see the edge of the blue silk clinging to my thighs, the tank top pressed against my thin waist, my nipples poking out of the lightweight fabric. It’s hardly lingerie, but looking at myself in the mirror with my hair tumbling down around my shoulders and so much of my arms and legs and upper chest exposed, it suddenly seems far too sexy.
But it’s all I’ve got, and being naked would be worse, so I just focus on quickly splashing water on my face and brushing my teeth, managing to slip into bed and tightly close my eyes before Viktor comes into the room.
“I know you’re not asleep,” he says in his deep, rumbling voice as he opens a dresser drawer. “But don’t worry, Caterina. You might think I’m a brute, but I’m a man of my word. I won’t touch you, and tomorrow there will be an appointment made with an excellent fertility clinic.”
I let out a slow breath, cracking one eye open to see him striding towards the bathroom. There’s an intimacy in sharing a suite of rooms that I don’t feel prepared to share with Viktor, but I’ve been given no choice. I think about him seeing my things on the counter, my skincare and the splashes of water left over from me washing my face, him standing where I was a few moments ago as he brushes his own teeth. This man was a stranger to me yesterday morning, and now we’re sharing a nighttime routine.
Now I’m a stepmother to his children. Thinking about it in the simplest terms, it’s ludicrous. It only doesn’t seem completely outlandish to me because I was raised to believe it was normal. To know that this was my future. But to anyone else, it would seem like a horror show.
I just know there are far more horrific things out there now.
Viktor barely looks at me as he switches on his bedside light, climbing into bed. I see to my surprise that he’s holding reading glasses and a novel with a title in Russian. I can’t hide the expression on my face when he slips into bed in his pajamas and glasses, opening his book to where he’d marked it.
Viktor Andreyev, the terror of the Italian mafia,Ussuriof the Russian Bratva, a man who I know from what I’ve heard strikes fear into men all over this country and Europe besides, is sitting beside me in bed with his glasses perched on his nose, reading a Russian novel.
I can’t quite believe my eyes.
He narrows his at me when he catches sight of my face. “I like to read before bed,” he says shortly. “It calms my mind. So you can stop looking at me like a zoo exhibit. Have you never seen a man read before?”
“Of course I have,” I manage, still staring at him. “I just—”
“What did you think I do to relax at night? Shoot a few men in the back garden and leave their bodies for the gardener to bury before crawling into bed?” His mouth twitches and I realize he’s having a joke at my expense. I clench my jaw, suddenly angry. I don’t like being mocked. Franco mocked me often, and even if his jokes were much crueler, I’m not about to be the butt of another husband’s humor.
“You know that’s not what I thought. But enjoy your book,” I snap. “I’m going to sleep.”
“Suit yourself.” Viktor shrugs, looking away from me as if it truly doesn’t matter to him one way or another what I do. That stings, too, for some reason.
I should be glad Viktor doesn’t care. The less he cares about what I’m doing, the more freedom I’ll have. But something about his nonchalance almost hurts. As if I’m completely inconsequential to him.
Which, I will be as soon as I’ve given him a son. I focus on that, on what my life could be like raising my son and Viktor’s daughters with minimal input from him into my day-to-day. It’s not the freedom I’d hoped for, but it’s something. It’ll be freedom from the worry that he’ll push me into his bed, freedom from his opinions and moods, of which I’m sure he’ll have plenty. I might once have dreamed of doing more with my life than simply being a mother, but that at least I’ll enjoy. And if I decide I want another child, once I’ve given him the requisite son, IVF usually produces more than one embryo. I won’t have to go to bed with him even for that.
As deals go, Viktor might have gotten his, but I think I might have made a pretty good one for myself.
That thought, at least, ensures that I’m able to fall asleep.
