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Ivan came close, though.
The thought of him has tears pressing against the backs of my eyes again, and I fight them back. Ivan is gone. He isn’t coming back.
As soon as the thought crosses my mind, I hear someone in the hall. Just like that, I change my tune.Ivan. He’s here. I’m being rescued.
Then the door opens and it’s Mikhail.
That ought to teach me to pin my hopes to pipe dreams. But somehow, I doubt it. My heart has always been a little too tender for this world.
Mikhail wrinkles his nose and looks around. “Remind me not to let you make any design decisions.”
“I was a teenager.” I casually close my journal, trying not to bring too much attention to it. The last thing I need is my heartfelt words in the hands of Mikhail Sokolov. He has enough of me in hand as it is.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “You won’t be here long anyway. Your dad and I were just talking.”
My jaw clenches, my molars grinding together.
Alexander isnotmy dad. But my correction would fall on deaf ears, so I swallow it down and practice suffering through Mikhail’s bullshit in silence. I’ll be doing a lot of that, it seems.
“I found you a year ago, you know?”
I snap my attention to him, eyes laser focused. “No, you didn’t.’
“You dropped four letters from your name, Cordelia. You didn’t flee the country. Of course I found you.”
It sounds so stupid when he says it like that. I thought I could escape.
“I thought… I thought you found me because of Ivan. Because of the party and—”
“I found you way before that,” he scoffs. “And when I saw the dingy shithole you were living in, I was positive you’d come crawling back.”
He’s wrong to call it a shithole. Sure, my little studio wasn’t in a great part of town, and yes, I had to caulk around the pipes in the bathroom so my neighbor couldn’t watch me through the gap, but it wasn’t a shithole. It was modest. Affordable.
It was freedom.
Or at least, that’s what I thought then. Now, I see it for what it really was: a delusion.
“I don’t get it,” I whisper. “Why did you wait for me? Why spend all of this energy on me? Your daddy could have picked another bride for you.”
Mikhail’s lip curls up in barely-restrained rage. “Because you werepromisedto me, Cordelia. And I always get what I deserve.”
What he deserves is a ride down a slide made of razor blades into a pool full of lemon juice, but I bite my tongue and meet his eyes. If I have to figure out how to live in this world, I’m not going to spend my days staring at the ground.
If they want to hold my prisoner, they’ll have to look me in the eyes.
“I had no idea I was such a prize,” I drone. “Seems like you’d want a wife who is more interested in interior design and pretty dresses.”
He sighs. “That would be the easier choice. Fuck knows plenty of women have offered themselves up. I sampled many of them. But they didn’t hold my attention.”
“Is it because they were willing? Consent can be so boring.” The question sounds innocent, but I can tell by the flex in Mikhail’s jaw that he knows I’m goading him.
He kneels down in front of me and grips me hard by the chin. “When I was twelve, my dad took me hunting. It’s a Sokolov tradition. Our family’s yearly excursion. To reconnect with nature, earn our place in the hierarchy of things. All that bullshit.”
I try to turn away, but he holds tighter. His face is so close to mine that I feel his every exhale on my skin.
“The first year, I went all day without hitting a single target. Just before sunset, my father shot a coyote in the leg. Once it was crippled and unable to move, he let me shoot it in the head.” He sighs. “When they asked me if I wanted the animal stuffed and mounted for my room—”
“And you complain about my design choices,” I mutter.
