“Yeah, right,” Risha mutters, but at that moment, the waiter comes, saving me from her badgering. We place our brunch orders—buckwheat crepes for me, an egg-white omelet for her—and once he’s gone, I pepper Risha with questions about her upcoming movie and she forgets all about my lack of boyfriends.
As she speaks, I steal another glance out the window. The man is gone, but I don’t feel relieved. He’s just out of sight, I know. He and whoever else Alexei hired to stalk me.
A familiar tightness squeezes my temples at the thought, and I take deep breaths, trying to focus on Risha’s chatter in an effort to stave off the headache. I’ve been better this year, going entire weeks without taking so much as an Advil, and I intend to keep it up. This is the first spring in years during which I’ve felt more or less like my old self, and I’m not going to let Alexei’s goons set me back.
I didn’t go back to school after that awful winter break. I stayed in Moscow, battling debilitating migraines and a depression so deep I wasn’t sure I’d ever emerge from it. But I did come out of it after a few months, thanks to a cocktail of antidepressants and specialty painkillers that reduced the duration and frequency of the migraine attacks. And thanks to the fact that Alexei left me alone—or so I thought at the time. It wasn’t until I returned to college the next fall and attempted to resume normal life that I learned the truth.
If he can’t have me, neither can anyone else.
I didn’t date at first. I had my hands full trying to catch up on all the classes I’d missed, and the recurring headaches didn’t help. I ended up switching my major from Computer Science to Economics and Political Science because staring at a screen while writing code for hours on end made the headaches worse. Plus, Econ and PoliSci were easy for me, and I needed easy. Though my depression had lifted enough for me to function, I still had more bad days than good.
By the end of the summer semester, though, I’d caught up and was back on track to graduate with my classmates. And at the start of my junior year, I was finally ready to date, despite a frequent sensation of being watched that I ascribed to lingering anxiety and paranoia.
The first guy who kissed me fell off a rooftop bar the next evening. A drunk accident, everyone said, but it shook me so badly I didn’t go on another date until many months later, when I met Jorge in a nightclub during my spring break in Bali. He was clever, funny, and had eyes so dark they looked almost black. I liked him immediately. We danced, made out a little, and agreed to meet on the beach the next morning.
He never showed up. The following day, I learned that he’d died the morning of our intended meetup. Apparently, he was riding to the beach on his scooter when his brakes failed and he went over a cliff.
A terrible accident, everyone said again, but I knew better this time. It was no accident that men kept disappearing and dying around me.
It washim.
Alexei wasn’t done with me.
That realization triggered my worst migraine attack in a year, one that took me several weeks and two bottles of pills to recover from. I missed the end of the spring semester and had to take summer classes to make up for it. I also began paying extra attention to my surroundings, no longer writing off my feelings of being watched as paranoia. I started evaluating everyone around me as a potential stalker, and now, every once in a while, I’ll spot them—one or more men following me who aren’t part of my regular security detail.
I’ve considered talking to my brothers about it, telling them about the threat still posed by Alexei, but the relations between our families have grown increasingly tense, with several instances of business sabotage that were just short of open war, and I don’t want that tension to escalate all the way to bloodshed because of me. I have too many deaths on my conscience as is. Besides, I don’t think Alexei actually wants me anymore. We’ve crossed paths at various Moscow events in recent years, and he’s ignored me as if we were strangers.
This stalking is his way of punishing me for breaking our betrothal, nothing more. I’m almost sure of that.
So here I am, just a few weeks away from my college graduation and still a virgin with zero prospects of losing that virginity. It would be sad if I actually cared, but weirdly, I don’t. In a way, it’s taken some pressure off of me. After I returned to school, I felt the need to prove to myself and to others that I could be like everyone else, that I was fully recovered. Catching up on classes was my number one priority, but resuming a normal social life was a close second.
I didn’t want a boyfriend so much as I simply wanted to move on, to forget the past with all its ugliness. I didn’t even care that I felt next to nothing when I kissed those two guys; I just wanted to have that experience.
Turns out, I can’t—and that’s fine with me. Something died in me the night my parents were killed, I’ve realized. Or maybe it was never alive in the first place. My sexuality had only begun to awaken when I was betrothed to Alexei, and from that moment on, it’s always been tangled up with him—and with dread, fear, and shame. To this day, all my sex dreams, all my dark, dirty fantasies, feature him. Despite the horrible things he’s done, I still want him, and I hate myself for that.
It wouldn’t be fair to date another guy, even if that wouldn’t place him in mortal danger. It wouldn’t be fair to sleep with him while picturing my stalker in his place.
“Seriously, are you even listening?” Risha snaps her fingers again, and I give her a sheepish smile.
“Sorry about that. You were saying…?”
She blows out an exasperated breath. “Forget it. Are you high today or something?”
“Or something,” I mutter, glancing out the window again.
Maybe Ishouldget high to rid myself of this anxious feeling.
Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound like a bad plan at all.
* * *
A blindingflash goes off as I approach the restroom, and I blink against it, annoyed. The paparazzi have no business photographing me. It’s Risha and the other stars of her award-winning independent film they should be interested in. I lengthen my stride, mentally thanking my dress’s designer for including the thigh-high slit in the tight, floor-length skirt, and before long, I’ve escaped the young reporter and her camera. Once I’m safely inside the luxurious bathroom, I lock myself in a stall, pull out the joint I just bummed off Giles, and take a few puffs.
There. Much better. I can already feel the tension in my temples easing.
I smoke the rest of the joint and flush the butt down the toilet. Then I wash my hands, touch up my makeup, and return to the party before Risha can accuse me of disappearing on her.
The screening is about to begin, so I head into the theater. Everybody is already seated, but two places in the center of the middle row are empty. One of them must be mine. Sure enough, it has a discreet label with my name on it attached to the back. The label on the other empty seat states, “Lion Holdings.” Probably one of the companies involved in the production.