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“You know I don’t love being in the city,” I tell her, reaching for Yelena and scooping the little girl into my arms. “I missed being here.”I missed my family.
It’s hard to believe, sometimes, how much my relationship, not just with this family, but with Caterina, has changed in a year. When I’d first been brought here, after the events on the docks, Caterina had been highly suspicious of me, thinking that I was a girl her husband had brought home for himself, to enjoy on the side. Her marriage with Viktor hadn’t been a happy one back then. It had been a necessary arrangement to make peace with what had been her father’s mafia and Viktor’s Bratva. He’d set eyes on her once and decided that he had to have her.“Now, I find it romantic,”she’d told me with a rueful laugh, a while after we’d come back from the harrowing events in Russia. “But then, I hated him. I hated what he did, who he was, the fact I was forced to marry him.”
As much as my relationship with the Andreyevs has changed, Caterina’s relationship with her husband has changed even more. The events in Russia changed everything, really, for all of us. I can’t ever forget that night in the cold upper rooms of Alexei’s safe house, when I’d called CaterinaMrs. Andreyva,as I’d grown accustomed to. She’d laughed sadly and told me to call her Caterina, or Cat, even.“Especially after all this, I think we’re past formalities.”
It had been hard not to be angry at her for what happened to me later at that awful house. Hard not to blame her for fighting back and being the reason I still bear the faint marks of those nights on my legs, where Alexei lost control, even as he’d said he wouldn’t scar me. But it hadn’t been her fault. I’d wanted to fight back just as badly when he’d threatened Anika and Yelena.
I’d just known, in a way that even Caterina didn’t, just what men like that were like. That theyenjoyedit when the girls they tormented fought, so they could justify to themselves even more easily what they wanted to do to them, the ways they wanted to break them. There was no point in fighting.
I’d felt so much guilt, too, for my part in it. For begging her to give in to Alexei, to give him what he wanted, so he’d stop beating me. For being too weak to take the pain.
We’d forgiven each other, she and I, in a long and tearful conversation after we’d comehome. That was when I really started to think of this place as my home. I’d begun to feel safe here in a way that I’d never thought I would feel safeanywhere.
“Sasha?” Caterina’s voice snaps me out of my thoughts, and I see a hint of concern in her eyes. “Really, you should take the day off. I know how emotionally taxing therapy can be. You should go lay down or go for a walk—”
I start to tell her no, that I’m fine in here, but a walk does sound nice. It’s still springtime—albeit late--in New York, the air light and clear, without any of the heavy heat that will come later. And after the closeness and smells of the city, fresh air sounds wonderful.
“Alright,” I concede. “I’ll go for a walk.”
“A walk!” Yelena exclaims, clapping her hands. “Let’s go for a walk, Sa-sha!”
“Me too!” Anika calls out from where she’s drawing on the couch. “A walk!”
Caterina opens her mouth, undoubtedly to tell the girls that I’m going on my own, but I shake my head quickly. “They can come with me,” I tell her. “It’ll be nice to spend some time with just them. I feel like the babies take up so much of our attention these days.”
“That they do,” Caterina says ruefully, shifting Viktoria in her arms. “Alright, fine. You can go with Sasha, girls. Butlistento her, and don’t chatter her ear off. She deserves some peace and quiet today.”
It takes another fifteen minutes of wrangling two overexcited children into walking shoes, but we’re trooping along the path that leads behind the house and over the manicured grounds of the Andreyev property before long.
As we walk, I scoop my long hair back with both hands, tying it up on my head with a velvet scrunchie. Anika watches me with pursed lips as if she’s filing whatever I’m doing to consider later. She’s been that way for as long as I’ve known her—inquisitive and curious, with a sharp mind and a sharp tongue, as unlike her shy and sensitive younger sister as oil and water. While I adore them both relentlessly, Yelena reminds me much more of myself than Anika’s fiery personality.
If I had a daughter, she’d be more like Yelena. Especially if her father was—
Oh god. Oh no.I turnthattrain of thought off instantly, before it can go any further off the rails. I shouldn’t even think of Max the way I often do, let alone in terms likethat. I don’t even know if I ever want to have children. Helping Caterina raise her small brood of four—which Viktor will undoubtedly want to add to at some point—is very close to having children, or at least younger siblings of my own, and I can’t really imagine anything other than that.
I can’t even imagine myself on adate, let alone getting far enough along in a relationship to have children with someone. And while, of course, there are ways for me to go about it even if I never met someone—I’m not sure if that’s something I want. If anything, I’ve often thought about adopting, just to give a future to a child like I once was, who doesn’t know if they’ll ever have one.
And as far as Max goes—
“Max! Uncle Max!” Anika crows his name, jerking me out of my trainwreck of thoughts and back to the present, and my heart somehow both flips and sinks in my chest simultaneously. I look up from the path, which is winding past the guesthouse and towards the lake, and see the handsome dark-haired man who never seems to be far from my thoughts very close, indeed.
He smiles broadly at Anika as she runs towards him, grabbing her and sweeping her up into the air. For one brief moment, I have a flashback to that cold safe-house bedroom, Max coming through the door as I huddled inside with Anika and Yelena, covering their ears from any noises that might filter up. I remember him backing away as Anika ran for him, holding his bloodstained hands away from her, and how, in the end, he’d picked her up anyway as she cried for him, lifting her into the air—
“Sasha?”
I just can’t stop woolgathering today. So much for not caring that it’s been exactly a year.I look at Max’s face, creased with concern in the same way Caterina’s was earlier, and force a smile. “Just a little out of it today, is all. I must not have slept well last night.”
Something flickers across his face that I can’t quite read, but it quickly turns to a lopsided half-smile as he swings Anika around and sets her back down. “Well, hopefully, you sleep better tonight.”
He doesn’t know what day it is. But of course, he doesn’t—there’s no reason for it to be burned into his mind the way it is mine. No reason for him to know that at this time a year ago, I was shivering with shock and fear in one of Viktor’s offices, having just seen a man shot in front of me minutes before.
I’d been glad the man who hurt me was dead. But that hadn’t changed how it felt to see someone go fromalive, blubbering and pleading nonetheless, to lifeless in a blink of an eye. To see, in a way I never had before, how quickly the spark of life can be extinguished.
“Are you coming up to the house for dinner?” The question comes out of my mouth before I can stop myself, but Max is already shaking his head.
“It was a long trip back from Boston. I’m probably just going to heat something up and then crash.” He gives me that lopsided smile again, his handsome face even more so, his hazel eyes twinkling as he gives in to Anika’s begging and swings her around again.
He’s a natural with all of Viktor and Caterina’s children. It seems like a sort of cosmic joke, actually, that he’s both so devastatingly handsome and so good with kids, considering the fact that he was meant to be a celibate priest for the rest of his life, with no partner or family—and considering that even now, he seems convinced to keep those vows.
