Who knows what day?

Who cares? I will never have the strength to leave here. I’ll die here. I deserve it.

I stagger around my room. I trip over things. I bump into the wall because I can barely see. That’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. I cannot feel my own body.

The cold white sun tells me it’s daylight outside, but what day? What part of the day? Morning, afternoon?

My father’s putrid blood taints me.

He used to fly to Russia every couple of months, and when he came back, he’d bring presents for me. Russian nesting dolls. Chocolate eggs with toys in them. Necklaces with charms dangling on them. Beautiful handmade dresses.

I would dance with joy. I would thank him in perfect Russian. My father would nod his approval, which would make my mother smile in relief. She’d trained me well in how to keep him happy.

And the money that financed those trinkets… I ate chocolate and wore beautiful dresses that were purchased with the blood of child whores.

And my poor mother. Forced to marry him at such a young age, dragged to this country, away from everything she’d ever known, and she never said a word. To protect me. She was little more than a child, only a few years older than Helenka is now, when she was snatched up by my father.

I knew that my father was a strict, old-fashioned man, and that my mother walked on egg-shells around him, but she hid the true horror of our lives inside her for all those years.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I had rationalized our family’s dirty dealings. I told myself, nobody forces people to do drugs, do they? And the guns that the criminals used were only used on each other, right?

So I tried to pretend to myself that even though what they were doing was horrible, it was mostly a victimless crime.

Wasn’t it?

But this…no.

This stole everything from me. My identity, my past, my mother…all polluted by the bastard who’d fathered me. The man who supplied half of my DNA. Half my flesh is evil. Which half? Could I cut the evil out of me?

I pick up a framed picture from a book shelf, and raise my hand to smash it. I imagine the glass sliding through my flesh, digging out the rotten parts.

Maks snatches it from my hand and slaps my head so hard my ears ring.

I gape at him.

“How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

“How…how long have I been here?”

“Two days.”

Two days?

I remember somebody trying to feed me. I remember gagging.

He looks at me in disgust. “And if you’re looking for pity, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“I don’t deserve pity,” I whisper.

“Fucking right. If it were up to me, I’d let you kill yourself.”

I walk into the bathroom and collapse to my knees, and dry heave into the toilet. He follows me and stands in the doorway.

I shakily stand up and walk back out. “Is Sergei all right now?” My voice is a rasping husk.

Maks’ lip curls as if he’d smelled foul rotting flesh. “If he wants you to know how he’s doing, he will tell you himself.”

“Yes,” I whisper, and stagger back to bed.

A nurse comes in. It’s dark outside now. She hands me a glass of water and I drink a little and set it down. My throat is raw. Have I been screaming again? My head pounds dully, but if someone gave me aspirin, I’d spit it out.

“You need to eat,” she tells me sternly.

I curl up in a ball and wrap my arms around my head. “Fuck you. Fuck everybody.”

Some time later, an hour or a day, Sergei comes in.

He has a fading black eye. His nose is swollen. His lip is cut. He carries a tray with a bowl of stew on it, and sets it down on the side table next to my chair.

“Eat, or I’ll shove it down your throat.”

I close my eyes. “Okay.”

“This self-pity shit isn’t doing it for me.”

“I know.”

A spoon bangs against my mouth.

I taste blood.

He grabs me by the hair and pulls me into a sitting up position.

He holds out the spoon again. Obediently, I let him spoon feed me. I couldn’t stop him. All the strength has left my muscles.

“How many days?” I whisper.

“It’s the seventeenth day of our agreement.”

* * *

Day eighteen…

He feeds me breakfast the next morning. Eggs. Bacon.

He feeds me lunch and dinner again. Bite by bite. He cuts it up into small pieces and slides it into my mouth. I chew without tasting, and swallow.

He barely speaks to me. His eyes are haunted, and I know that’s my fault. I dragged up his filthy putrid past and made him relive it. I made him walk over the burning coals of hell again, just to satisfy my curiosity.

* * *

Day nineteen…

He comes in again, setting a tray of food down on the table next to the armchair. I am still in bed. The distance from the bed to the chair felt too far this morning.

I look up at him wearily. The air is leaden and so heavy I can’t stand, but he shouldn’t have to come in and baby me just because I’m too depressed to move. “I’m sorry I’m like this,” I say dully. “I’m sorry about everything.”

He’s unimpressed. “Sorry doesn’t mean shit. Pull yourself together.” He glares at me. “What will help you?” he demands. “Do you want to see a therapist?”

“It wouldn’t help.” It wouldn’t miraculously rewrite my past or cleanse my DNA of evil.

At that, he grimaces. “Yep. Tried it a few times. Didn’t help me.”

“You don’t have to try to fix things, Sergei. It’s all right.”

He gives me a stony look. “I told you I needed you. You’re pulling me down with you.”

That brings tears to my eyes, but I don’t even have the energy to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I would do anything to help you. I just can’t. I’m not doing this on purpose. There’s nothing left of me.”

He sighs, and bends down and scoops me up from the bed and carries me to the chair.

He plops down in the chair next to mine and holds up the spoon. “Feed yourself.”

I take the spoon and obey, mechanically. I eat fifteen bites, counting each one carefully, then set the spoon down.

He stares off into space for a while before speaking, and his voice is soaked in regret and sorrow. “When I first brought you here…I mistreated you. I shouldn’t have. I apologize. All right? It was wrong of me.”

“Was it?” Right now I feel as if he wasn’t cruel enough to me. He should have burned my flesh. Cut me. Disfigured me. Made my outside as ugly as my insides, as hideous as the DNA that pollutes me.

“Yes. You know it was, Willow.” There’s an impatient snap to his tone now. “Don’t be the fucking martyr. You said it yourself; my fight was with your uncle, not you. When I let your family twist me into a sadist, I let them gain a victory over me that they didn’t deserve.”

“How can you even touch me?” Tears spill down my cheeks. I am surprised; I didn’t think I had any more tears left. I’m not sobbing; my tears are just flowing as if someone turned on a tap.

“Cut out this self-pity crap, Willow!” He stands up, glowering. “Quit being a spoiled little bitch.” I look up at him in shock. I didn’t think anything could hurt me any more, but his words are razor-sharp arrows that find their mark.

“Were you kidnapped as a child, held down and raped up the ass by perverted old men every day for months? Were you forced to suck cock after starving for days on end, just to earn a dry slice of bread? Did you find your brother’s body being eaten by an animal? No? Then get off the fucking self-pity train.”

Every word is a hammer-blow to my chest. I feel myself sinking lower and lower, drowning in a sea of revulsion and self-loathing. Blackness swims in front of me, and I can’t see or feel.

“I’m not…” I drag the words up from the slimy depths of my soul. I don’t know which direction to look, because there’s a wall of darkness in front of my eyes. If I cared about what happened to me, I’d be very frightened by that. “I’m not asking you for pity. I’m not asking you for anything. I don’t deserve anything. I’m disgusting. I’m gone. I’m not here. I’m nothing.” I keep babbling, spewing words of despair like sewage running from my mouth.

My vision clears, and I see that Sergei is gone.

That is what I deserve.

* * *

Day twenty…

Morning, I think.

Sergei bangs open the door and storms in. I am curled up in my chair again, wearing the same pajamas I’ve been wearing for days. I can smell my own body odor; I stink like a rotting corpse. I can’t believe Sergei can stand to occupy the same airspace.

“Lukas will be here in two minutes. So clean yourself up.”

I sit up, shaking all over. “He ca-ca-can’t see me like this!” I protest weakly.

“Exactly.”

“Two minutes? You couldn’t have given me a little more time?”

Sergei snorts. “The world doesn’t adapt to your schedule, princess.”

I stumble to the bathroom and wash my face. I hear Lukas’ voice, calling for me, tugging at my heartstrings. “Willow? My friend Willow?”

Damn it. Why is Sergei doing this to him? Hasn’t the poor kid been through enough?

“I’ll be right out!” I call. I’m trying for a light, happy voice, but instead I sound shrill and hysterical. I grab my toothbrush and scrub the foul taste from my mouth, and rub deodorant on my reeking pits. I comb my fingers through my tangled hair, and it makes it worse. I look like a witch who stuck her finger in a light socket.

I walk out of the bathroom. Lukas is standing there holding a pad of paper and a tin of colored pencils. He takes one look at me and bursts into tears.

Sergei fixes me with a cold look. “And that’s on you,” he snaps at me. Throwing my own words back at me.

“Where are Kris and Marya?” I demand, looking around frantically. I’m in no shape to take care of a little boy.

“I sent them away until you can get your act together. I don’t care if it takes hours or weeks. Right now, you’re all he’s got.” He leans in and whispers harshly. “He used to see his mother like this all the time, right before she overdosed.”

She ODed? Who was she? How did Sergei know her?

And just like that, the bastard walks out of the room and slams the door shut behind him, leaving the traumatized little boy with the shell that used to be a woman.

I make my mouth move into the shape of a smile. Apparently it isn’t very convincing, because he starts crying, really hard.

I know I can’t do this, but I have to at least try.

“I’ve been sick, Lukas, I’m sorry. I…I have a cold.”

“Cold?” He picks up a decorative throw that’s draped across my bed and holds it out to me. The sweetest boy on the planet.

“Let’s go outside and draw,” I say to him.

I grab my pastels and pad of paper, and he takes his paper and pencils, and we go into the garden.

He draws a crying seagull. He draws a crying rose.

I get the picture.

I draw a mother seagull hugging a baby seagull and he smiles a little bit.

We walk around the garden. I spot a particularly lovely rose, a fat pink cabbage-head bobbing on a slender stalk. We sit down on a bench, and he starts sketching, and the rose materializes on the paper, with little beads of dew on it.

Yet again, I marvel at his talent. When he grows up, he could show his pictures in galleries. I praise him, and he lights up like a little tiny sun, warming me with the joy that beams out from him.

The suffocating fog that’s been clinging to me seems to have faded. My world hasn’t blazed back to technicolor life, but I can at least see colors again.

I realize that Sergei knew exactly how to drag me back to reality. I may be long past giving a damn what happens to me, but I can’t make everyone else around me suffer.

I have to stop stewing in a swamp of self-pity. There are people here who care about me, and I’m useless to them if I’m curled up in a stinking ball of B.O. and misery. I have been forever changed, but I will move my numb body again, I will walk and talk and eat like a real girl, and stop being a burden on everyone around me.

For a man who claims to have no soul and no empathy, Sergei is amazingly in tune what those around him need.

As Lukas finishes his picture, it occurs to me how remarkable it is that, once Sergei realized that Lukas loved to draw, he made sure that he had art supplies. Vilyat would literally have broken Yuri’s fingers if he’d seen him sketching. He would have raged that no son of his was a pussy little faggot homo artist.

Sergei is the most macho, masculine, badass man that I’d ever met. He is built from tank parts and fueled with testosterone, but he is completely comfortable with encouraging Lukas to nourish his artistic talent.

He’s a better man than he lets himself admit. He’s a better man than any of the men in my family, any of the men I grew up with. He is tormented and torn apart by his inner demons, but if there weren’t some good left in him, he wouldn’t be so conflicted by his own actions.

It speaks to his core decency that despite all the brutal blows that life has dealt him, he still cares for others. I think that underneath it all, he’s more like his little brother Pyotr than he lets himself admit. And I understand why he tries to shove that soft side of him deep, deep into the darkness. Pyotr was soft and sweet, after all, and look what happened to him.

Lukas and I head inside the house and a maid takes us to the drawing room, and Sergei is waiting for us. He’s sitting there reading a book on military strategy, in Russian, and he nods at me but doesn’t say anything. Lukas sings me songs in Czech until Kris and Marya come to get him. I hug him goodbye and kiss the top of his head.

“Thanks,” I say to Sergei, after they’re gone. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that. Seriously. It pisses me off.” He puts the book down and gets up to leave. Then he turns back, his gaze catching and holding mine. “I will see you in your room tonight after dinner.”