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Alexei is quiet beside me, with only the sound of the waves gently splashing against the hull breaking the silence, and when I peek at him from underneath my eyelashes, I find that he’s closed his eyes as well, though his eyebrows are still drawn together.
I have no intention of speaking to him, truly, but something about seeing him like this, pretending to be relaxed when he’s just as tense as I am, makes it impossible to maintain the silence.
“Don’t you care that I don’t want this?” My voice is low and bitter. I don’t know why I’m bringing this up when the answer is obvious—he doesn’t care—but my tongue seems to be operating of its own accord.
He opens his eyes and pushes up onto his elbow, facing me. “What do you want?” His gaze holds genuine curiosity.
“For you to leave me alone!”
He makes a curt, dismissive gesture, as if I’ve just spoken nonsense. “What are your life’s goals? Or at least career goals? If you had all the freedom in the world, what would you do?”
I stare at him, momentarily stumped by the question. No one’s ever asked me that before. With my inheritance, I won’t ever need to lift a finger in any sort of productive capacity, and everyone, my brothers included, assumes I won’t. To the world, I’m a socialite, a pretty but ultimately useless member of high society, and on some level, I’ve accepted that role, focusing all my mental energy on trying not to be something—Alexei’s bride. And yet, there’s one thing I’ve always wanted, a childhood dream I’ve only shared with Konstantin.
“I…” I dampen my lips. “I guess I’d make video games.”
“Ah.” Alexei doesn’t look as surprised as I would’ve expected. “So why haven’t you? You’ve been out of college for three years now. That’s plenty of time to get started on any career path you want.”
Why haven’t I, indeed? I think back to the dark blur that was my college years, when headaches kept me from spending any real length of time on a computer. Did I give up on my dream then? Or was it later, when social obligations kept me hopping from party to party, fundraiser to fundraiser, vacation to vacation, all the while trying to avoid the dangerous man shadowing my life? It wasn’t until I left Moscow for the solitude and natural beauty of Nikolai’s mountain compound that I even remembered how much I’d once enjoyed learning code and creating the visual stories that are video games.
My fourteen-year-old self would be ashamed of me, and in this moment, so am I.
“I’ve started working on a game,” I admit, looking away from Alexei’s piercing stare. “It’s just a small, simple one, but—”
“That’s great. Where is it?”
I blink, returning my gaze to his face. “What do you mean?”
“Is it in the cloud? On some hard drive? In general, what would you need to continue working on it?”
I stare at him, stunned. Is he offering what I think he’s offering? My heart picks up pace, a glimmer of hope sparking inside me. “Just any powerful computer with the proper software would work. What I’ve written thus far is in the cloud, so I’d need access to the internet and then—”
“Give me your login, and I’ll grab it off the cloud for you.”
The glimmer of hope winks out. Of course he wouldn’t just hand me an internet-connected laptop and hope for the best. If I do get a computer, it won’t have so much as dial-up AOL. And giving him my login? As if.
“I can have my hackers work on it if you’d prefer,” Alexei says, accurately surmising my thoughts. His dark eyes gleam. “It’ll take longer, but—”
“Fine.” I take a breath. “Fine, I’ll give it to you.” Not because I think his hackers will get through the encryption Konstantin developed for our family, but because they won’t—and I do want my game and a computer. I want it so badly my fingers literally itch to touch the keyboard. More importantly, I don’t have anything particularly private in my personal cloud, just school assignments, photos, and such. Valery handles my inheritance and investments, so I won’t be giving Alexei a back door to the Molotov business holdings or anything along those lines.
“Good. And tell me what software you need installed.”
I tell him. My heart is pounding with excitement again, but this time, it has nothing to do with the possibility of escape. Until this moment, I didn’t realize how much I needed this—to think about something other than the man beside me, to work on problems that actually have solutions.
“Okay,” Alexei says and lies back, closing his eyes. “You’ll have it all by tomorrow.”
I lie back too, and for the first time since he came for me, I find myself looking forward to the next morning.
