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Natalia Obelensky’s life is no longer her own.
It lasts only as long as I decide it should.
Natalia
The moment that Mikhail leaves the room after our conversation, leaving me cuffed and dirty with the door shutting heavily behind him, I feel the sobs burst out of me, panicked and terrified. I’d held them back for as long as I could, but now I turn my face into the pillow to muffle them, my entire body wracked with crying. I’m exhausted, drained, unaccustomed to being woken up in the middle of the night, and more than a little in shock.
I can’t let him win.I’ve never been so afraid in my life. I think back to everything that I’d let slide, everything I’d explained away, and I don’t know how I could have let it go so easily.
The threatening letters slipped under my door, the bracelet left there, the footsteps behind me as I walked to work, that ever-lingering feeling of being watched. I’d talked myself out of all of it, wanting to believe that Ruby was right, that Mikhail was nothing but a sugar daddy, a rich man fixated on me as the next girl he wanted to spoil–someone that I could use to my benefit.
I’d gotten too comfortable in the life I was pretending to live.
I’d been blinded by my need for escape, and I’d walked right into the trap that he’d set for me.
He must have been the stalker all along.Even when I’d been suspicious of him, I hadn’t quite believedthathad been him. It hadn’t seemed to fit him, those kind of trope-y tactics, taken straight out of a cheap cop show or serial killer documentary. Even that night when he’d appeared to rescue me from the person following me, mysteriously in my part of town despite it being very far from what should have been his usual haunts, I’d talked myself out of suspecting him.
Now I wonder if the person who’d been following me hadn’t been a danger at all–just someone walking the same way I was, and I’d panicked my way into the car of the man I should have been afraid of.
I’d tried to be so careful, hide myself so well, and yet I’d ended up getting caught anyway.
I don’t even know why he wants me, what connection he has to make him decide to come after me. I have no idea who it is who sent him–I can’t imagine that he’s done this of his own accord, without anyone else pulling the strings.
I didn’t know all that much about my father’s dealings. I knew the men closest to him, their names and some valuable traits that they had–ways that they might be able to be manipulated as much as anything else. I knew his compound well, and I’d learned the guards who rotated through it well enough to help Sasha when she needed to escape. But I didn’t know who my father had deals with, who he trusted more than others, who might have hated him enough to come after me once he was dead–or who might have loved or respected him enough to avenge him after his death.
My father had never struck me as a man capable of inspiring love or respect–only fear.
After I’d returned to Moscow, I’d found myself wishing I’d paid more attention, that I hadn’t ignored so much of the politics of his position out of a desire to have nothing to do with it. Knowing who hated him might have given me an insight into who might be convinced to help me–or who might have wanted to finish the job of wiping out the Obelensky name and make sure I was dead too. Knowing who respected him could have given me the same–if I’d covered up my part in it well enough, I might have been able to trade on my name and status to get assistance.
As it was, I’d come back to Moscow with nothing and no one. I’d relied on myself–and look where that got me.
I cry for a long time, until it feels as if there’s no tears left, my throat sore and my eyes swollen. I’ve never wanted so much to give up–and at the same time, to fight until there’s no possible chance left of winning.
He has to have a weakness,I think desperately.All men do.My job is to find out what it is, so I can exploit it. That was what I did at the club, and I can do it now–if I can manage my fear and think straight.I just have to find it. I have time. He’s not going to kill me immediately.
I hope.
I try to think back to before he left, when he was still on the bed with me, the way he reacted. I try to think of ways he’s reacted in the past, to try to find a pattern.I can’t let him break me. I can’t let this be how it ends.
I’ve been able to tell for a while that he likes that I have fight and sass in me, that I don’t just give in to anything he wants. He’s always been one of those men who prefers a girl with a sharp tongue to one who fawns over him.
So I’ll fight back, then. It should intrigue him, instead of making him angry.
If I admit who I am, I’m fairly certain that I’m as good as dead. I can’t do that. I have to try to find a way to convince him that I’m not who he thinks I am–and barring that, I have to find a way to escape. A moment of weakness, a crack in his plans, a sliver of time where I’m alone. I have to exploit that, or I won’t ever get out of here.
The longer I can make him work for it, to dance the line between giving in and angering him so much that he does something truly horrible to me, the better the chance I have of staying alive long enough to find a way out.
Despite myself, despite all the fear and confusion, I feel my eyes sliding shut. I’m exhausted beyond all reason, and I can feel myself drifting off. My last thought, before I fall asleep, is one of amazement that I can sleep here at all.
I’d been afraid of what I might dream of, but I shouldn’t have been. As I fall asleep, I’m whisked far away from the room where I’m held captive, back to another place and time–a better one, even.
I’m a child again, young enough that I’m surprised that I remember at all, my fingers twined through a soft adult hand. The diamond on her hand rubs against mine, and I look up at her, tall and blonde and beautiful, the parent I had who loved me.
The one who never let my father hurt me. Who stood between me and his frustrations, his anger, his resentment that I was a girl and not the son he wanted, something that could be sold off in marriage but shouldn’t inherit. I can hear all of those conversations echoing in my head as I walk, hand in hand with my mother, but the day sweeps them away like chaff, leaving nothing but the sunlight and her beautiful, sweet face as she crouches down and asks me what I want to do.
I tell her that I want to go to the ballet. She laughs, light and lovely, and before I know it, the dream has shifted to an auditorium, huge and expansive, a stage just ahead of us on which women twirl and pivot, moving like spring butterflies in pink and white.
I hear myself say that I want to be one of them, watching with wide eyes at the grace and beauty of it all, and I feel my mother clutch my hand, hear her whisper that I can be anything I want to be.
