After Jasha’s brutal workout, which does indeed bring us all near to barfing, Anastasia and I sit on the sidelines and watch while he works with the children.

Jasha has never been particularly friendly to me, and I keep an eagle eye on him, but I can’t fault his treatment of Helenka and Yuri. He doesn’t hurt them or even belittle them. He’s brusque but efficient. His teaching is excellent, and very tactical. He encourages them to turn their weaknesses into strengths. For instance, they’re children, small and slender. That’s a weakness. But anyone who doesn’t know them will underestimate them. That’s a strength.

He has them practice acting helpless and terrified, going limp quickly when he grabs them, and shows them various pressure points where they can strike once they’ve lulled an attacker into a sense of false security. Several times, I hear him grunt in genuine pain.

“Well, I must say I’m enjoying the show,” I say to Anastasia. “If we get lucky, they’ll cripple him for life. Helenka’s a lot meaner than she looks.”

“Yes, she is,” Anastasia says with quiet pride. She nods approvingly as Yuri twists out of Jasha’s grip. Then she sighs. “This is all bullshit, of course.”

I look at her in surprise. “Look at you with your filthy mouth. I didn’t know you had it in you, Anastasia.”

“I’ve learned all kinds of fun things while you were at work,” she says. She watches them wrestling. “Like strategy. I study strategy. Sergei is trying to fool us into thinking he’s helping us, here. But he’s also sending a message, that he knows we were taking self-defense classes in Ohio. I mean, he even named the type of class we took. And the same when he mentioned my computer classes. That’s a warning. He’s telling us there’s nowhere that we can run and hide, he’ll always be watching us. And also, every single trick that he and his men teach us, they not only know those tricks, but they know how to predict, block, and counter-attack. They would never teach us anything we could really use against them.”

Now I’m openly staring at her. I’d figured out all those things, but I’ve never seen this side of her. “Wow, Anastasia. It’s like I don’t know you at all.”

“You don’t.” There’s a flash of danger in her eyes.

For years, she was this quiet, meek woman who only spoke when spoken to, who screwed her smile on tight and trailed behind her husband with her head down. Now that she’s been freed from Vilyat and she’s off the prescription opioids, she’s turning into something I don’t even recognize.

We turn back to watch the kids, and suddenly I’m a little more confident about Helenka and Yuri’s future.

I try to think about what I know about her. I remember that when I was nine years old, my parents told me that my uncle Vilyat had gotten married to a girl in Russia, and he was bringing her home to California. They showed me a picture of Vilyat and his new wife, who liked like a Hollywood movie star. She wore tons of makeup and had her hair teased into a big, dramatic updo. She had just graduated from high school. She was eighteen, and Vilyat was thirty-seven.

“Gross,” I said when I heard their ages. “I’m never going to marry an old man like that.”

“You will marry whoever you’re told to!” My father barked at me, and I could feel the anger rolling off him.

“But I get to choose!” I stared at him in shock. That wasn’t how life worked.

My father stormed towards me. He’d never hit me, because he’d never had a reason to. I was the perfect daughter; I made sure of it. There was a violence, a rage, that rippled just under the surface of his skin, and even as a very small child, I knew that the only way to be safe in my house was to keep my father happy.

My mother shot to her feet, moving between me and him.

Right then, I knew he wasn’t just about to hit me – he was about to kill me. I was light-headed with fear.

“I will talk to her. Demyon. Please. She is just a child. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

The undercurrent of terror in my mother’s voice stole the breath from my body.

What was happening?

I knew exactly what I’d said. I knew what the fairy tales told you. You met a prince and you fell in love with him. You married because you were in love.

She hurried me out of the room. She talked to me, all right, but she did so in whispers. She told me that she’d make sure that my father would never force me to marry anyone, but we had to pretend that I would do whatever he wanted.

That was when she first started planning to buy a secret apartment, to get fake ID for both of us. From what I gathered, as soon as I finished college, my father was going to arrange a marriage for me. If my parents hadn’t died in that plane crash, she and I would have vanished right after my graduation ceremony – and before I was sentenced to a lifetime of marital servitude.

I watch Helenka land a hard, savage kick in Jasha’s stomach, and a smile curls my lips. Vilyat would never have allowed her to take self-defense lessons. What he would have said was that a woman should be able to depend on her man to protect her. But the truth was, he believed that women should be helpless and scared.

Sergei is a terrible person, and yet he’s better to these kids than their father ever was. He took the time to find out exactly what they wanted and needed, and he gave it to them. He let them know that the things they enjoyed weren’t silly little hobbies. He encouraged them to pursue their passions, to excel at them. Anastasia, too.

Yeah, he was being a dick and making a point when he let her know that he was aware she had been taking computer classes, but he could just have told us that he knew what we were up to, without giving any of us a damn thing. Instead he built these wonderful rooms for the kids and made sure that my aunt could finish studying and get her online certificate.

No man in our family would have done that; the women and children only existed to be molded into the shape the Toporov men desired.

After our practice session, I go back to my room to shower before dinner, and it’s as if I never left. A closet full of beautiful clothes, all brand new, that are exactly the styles I love.

Art supplies on my desk.

And a laptop. That’s new.

I wonder how much Sergei knows about what I’ve really been up to. My aunt and I have both been obsessed with teaching ourselves how to hack, and we’ve gotten good at it, better than we are at physically defending ourselves. To protect ourselves from our enemies, we needed to know what they were doing. Vilyat has gotten sloppy since Sergei drove him out of the country, and we at least had some idea of his comings and goings.

While we were in Ohio, I also tried to find out anything I could about Sergei. It wasn’t easy. He’s very careful. He owns many businesses, including an international shipping company based out of a port city in the Leningrad Oblask, a chain of warehouses both here and in Russia, and a construction company.

One day, I managed to hack in to the email of one of his vendors, and they were talking about Vilyat and “Operation Salvat”, but they were very vague. The next day when I tried to sign in, I was blocked.

I feel like it has something to do with my family, with whatever plan Sergei has for my two surviving uncles, Vilyat and Edik. For whatever reason, Sergei bears a ferocious hatred for the Toporovs. I want to know why.

I log in to the laptop that Sergei has set up for me and check all the programs on it. There are security programs that I don’t recognize. For now, I just do some pointless web-surfing to throw him off track, looking up shoes and turquoise jewelry, and then log off. I could create a virtual private network on there, and I don’t think he could see what I was doing on it, but I don’t want him to find out my new skill level yet.

That evening, I eat dinner in the dining room with my family. Sergei doesn’t join us. I could almost have predicted that. Sergei hates that he needs me, because he sees it as a weakness. He’s the type who’s into self-denial, and right now he’s proving to himself how strong he is by making himself wait until he sees me again.

After dinner, one of the servants takes us to a media room with soft leather chairs, and we pick a science fiction flick to watch on an enormous screen, and eat fresh buttered popcorn delivered by a maid.

The night stretches on and on, and finally we go back to our rooms. I get to see Anastasia, Yuri and Helenka’s suite, at the end of a hallway, rooms grouped together.

“You’ll sleep in my room,” Anastasia declares to her kids, and they don’t even argue. A normal thirteen-year-old girl would argue about being treated like a baby. Helenka’s life has never been normal.

I head back to my room and toss and turn, wondering if Sergei will come for me. Wondering why he’s not there.

In the morning, I wake up with a start. Someone is pounding on my door. The clock says I’ve slept in until nine a.m. Helenka is yelling something about breakfast.

As I hurry to the door to answer her, I stop short. Someone’s been in my room while I was sleeping. Someone has left turquoise necklaces, bracelets, and earrings on the desk next to my computer. On the floor by the desk are at least fifty pairs of shoes; sandals, espadrilles, ballet flats. They’re the shoes I was looking at online yesterday afternoon – a pair in every color.

I feel the bars of my gilded cage shrinking in on me.