Page 27 of His Stolen Bride

8

ALINA

The days after losing my mother blur together in a way that makes time feel unreliable.

I wake up in the same bed. The guards are still outside the door. The schedule hasn’t changed. Breakfast arrives when it’s supposed to. The house runs exactly the way it did before.

But I don’t.

Something in me shifted that day, and now I move through the rooms aware of my body in a way I wasn’t before. Not in a vain way, but a risk-aware way. I notice how close people stand, how conversations stop when I enter, how staff choose their words more carefully around me, and how quickly my own reactions rise and how much discipline it takes to keep them from showing.

I also notice the political change, because grief doesn’t insulate you from power. The guards rotate more often. New faces appear where familiar ones used to be. Messages arrive for Mikhail that don’t wait until morning. The house isn’t just protecting me anymore. It’s measuring me, as if my value has shifted and no one has said it out loud yet.

Mikhail avoids me, though he doesn’t do it dramatically or obviously. He doesn’t forbid my movements or summon me to remind me who he is, and he doesn’t punish me with rules. He simply removes himself, and the absence feels deliberate. If we’re in the same room, he doesn’t stay long. If he passes me in a corridor, his eyes don’t linger. If he speaks to me, it’s brief and clipped, as if he’s handling something volatile and doesn’t trust himself not to mishandle it. The coldness feels intentional, as if he’s asserting control by denying proximity, both to me and to himself.

I tell myself the sex didn’t matter, and I tell myself it was grief and proximity and a lack of alternatives, and I tell myself it was survival dressed up as want. I repeat it often, especially when my body remembers his weight or the way he held me afterward, not possessive and not gentle, but deeply unsettled, like something inside him had shifted out of alignment.

Over the next few weeks, I start noticing subtle shifts in the staff’s behavior. More careful glances and quiet respect. Less pity. Whatever happened that night traveled faster than words, even if no one speaks of it.

I don’t ask questions I don’t need answered.

Instead, I watch.

I start taking my meals in different rooms, sometimes alone, sometimes near the kitchen, where conversation slips out when people forget I can hear them. I walk the garden daily and make sure the guards know my routine so that any deviation is obvious.

If I’m being watched more closely, I want to know how.

Lira becomes my anchor.

She’s the maid who brings tea in the afternoons, always the same blend, always the same careful knock. She’s in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, with dark hair pulled back and a posture that suggests she learned early not to take up space.

The first time I thank her by name, she looks startled. “You remembered,” she says.

“I pay attention,” I reply, surprised that people here don’t remember names in the first place.

She smiles at that, small and cautious.

Over the next few days, she starts lingering just a little longer when she comes in. She asks if I need anything else. She offers small things she doesn’t have to. Extra blankets. A book she thinks I might like. Information she gives without realizing it’s information. The house has rules, but it also has habits, and habits are easier to learn. “You’ve been here a long time,” I say one afternoon as she pours tea.

“Three years,” she replies.

“And before that?”

She shrugs. “Another house. Similar work.”

That tells me enough.

“Do people talk?” I ask, keeping my tone casual.

She hesitates. “About what?”

“About me,” I say.

Her eyes flick to the door, then back to me. “People notice things,” she says carefully.

“So, they noticed…?” I press.

She nods once. “They noticed he hasn’t killed you yet.”