Page 34 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I was awake when it started.
The storm’s arrival didn’t wake me because waking implied a prior state that I hadn’t achieved.
I lay on my side and watched the lightning move across the ceiling and counted the seconds between flash and thunder the way I had learned to as a child in the third foster home—the one with the woman who had been kind about weather specifically, who had sat with me on the staircase landing and explained the counting, the distance, the science of it.
The storm was coming.
Three seconds. Two. The thunder was directly overhead and the manor’s stone walls absorbed it differently than the thin walls of the houses I had grown up in—it came through as a deepvibration rather than a crack, something that moved through the building rather than just across it. I put my hand flat against the mattress and felt the faint tremor of it, thinking about how strange it was that the same phenomenon felt different depending on the walls around it.
Everything felt different depending on the walls.
Mikhail was asleep beside me. I slid out of bed carefully and did not look at him as I left.
The manor at night was a different house.
In the daytime, it had the energy of a functioning enterprise, complex and purposeful, and I had been learning to move through it.
At night, with the storm pressing against the windows and the security shift running its quiet rotations, it was simply itself.
I found the library on the second floor by accident during my first week. I had stood in the doorway and looked at the walls of books and the leather chairs.
I went there now.
The lamp was lit, turned low. Someone had fed the fireplace before the evening shift ended–the embers were banked, enough heat in them to make the room warmer than the corridors, the storm’s wet cold not quite reaching through the manor’s thickness. I sat in the chair nearest the fire and pulled my knees up and looked at the embers and listened to the storm reorganize the sky outside.
The thunder came again. Closer now, or the same distance, the interval not changing. Directly above.
I pressed my feet against the chair’s arm and made myself think about it directly, because thinking about it in the oblique way I had been doing for days was not working.
I had stopped cooperating. That was done, that decision was made and I was not revisiting it. The phone was in pieces in my toiletry bag and I had not reassembled it and I would not. Whatever they decided to do about my silence was a thing I had accepted as a consequence and was not currently spending energy on.
What I was spending energy on–what was sitting in the center of every waking hour and a significant portion of the sleeping ones–was a person.
Mikhail.
I looked at the fire’s embers and let myself look at the full shape of it without deflection. The man who had laid out his timeline for me. Who was, at this moment, running an investigation into a leak in his own household with the systematic rigor of a man who would not stop until he found it.
He would find it.
I had perhaps bought myself time by stopping. The information flow had ceased. I had been waiting for three days for the knock on a door that didn’t come. For the changed temperature in his expression, the specific quality of attention that shifted from me to something in me. I had been reading his face every time he looked at me, searching for the moment the calculation became visible, and every time I found nothing except the grey eyes and the usual unreadable coolness.
He looked at me the same way he always had.
I did not know whether that was reassurance or the most frightening thing in the room.
The lightning struck somewhere close, bringing my attention back to my surroundings.
Not on the grounds–the manor had rods, I had noticed them on my second day–but close enough that the flash and the sound arrived almost simultaneously, the gap between them collapsed into something that felt like a single event. The windows rattled. The fire’s embers pulsed with the pressure change.
I startled despite myself, which was embarrassing, and then felt the embarrassment recede because there was no one to witness it.
“The rods will take it,” Mikhail said from the doorway.
I turned. He was standing at the threshold in the dark of the corridor, the lamp’s low light not quite reaching him. He had dressed–not formally, the dark shirt and trousers of a man who had not gone back to sleep after I left rather than a man who had slept and risen. He was looking at me with the still, attentive quality that never quite left him even in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm.
I had startled at the lightning and he had been in the doorway.
“How long have you been there?” I asked.
