Page 32
“The debt?”
“Something else. Something my dad left behind. I can’t explain it right now but I need to see it through.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I hear ice clinking in a glass, the muffled sound of someone laughing at a nearby table. Her world, full and warm and populated with people who don’t have secrets that defy biology.
“Sophia, you’re scaring me a little. Are you safe? Is someone hurting you?”
“No. No one’s hurting me. I promise.”
“Are you eating?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sleeping?”
I hesitate one beat too long.
“Sophia.”
“I’m sleeping. Just not great. It’s a new place. New bed.”
“Is it the guy? The one with the debt? Is he pressuring you?”
I think about Dominic’s hand on my wrist. The slow pull. The time he gave me to resist. The kiss that I leaned into, reached for, grabbed with both fists.
“He’s not pressuring me.” That’s almost true. He’s not pressuring me in any way I can describe to a woman sitting in a bar in a normal city living a normal life. He’s not threatening me, not coercing me, not using his power over my debt to extract anything physical. What he’s doing is worse than pressure. Pressure you can push back against. Whatever is happening between us operates below the level where resistance is possible.
“Because if he is, you can tell me. We’ll get you a lawyer. We’ll get you out of there.”
“Becca. I’m okay. Really.”
She doesn’t believe me. I can hear it in the way she shifts the conversation, the careful pivot to lighter topics, the way she’s banking her concern for a later call when she’ll push harder. She’s a good friend. She deserves better than the half-truths I’m giving her, but the full truth would require a vocabulary I don’t have yet and a level of belief in the impossible that no amount of friendship can manufacture over the phone.
We talk for another twenty minutes about nothing important. Her job, her dating life, a mutual friend who got engaged. Normal things. Human things. I listen to her voice and I try to feel the tether she represents, the rope back to a life where people are just people and attraction is just attraction and nobody’s eyes change color in the dark.
The tether holds. Barely. I can feel it fraying at the edges, the fibers thinning under the weight of everything I can’t say, and I wonder how long it will last. How many more conversations I can have with Becca before the distance between her world and mine becomes uncrossable. Before the woman I was when I knew her and the woman I’m becoming in this world full of impossible people diverge so far that the friendship becomes a memorial to someone I used to be.
After we hang up, I sit in the silence of my apartment and I think about the kiss.
Not the physical sensation of it, though that’s still reverberating through my body, a low hum in my nerve endings that flares every time I think about his hands. I think about the mechanics of it. The engineering.
He pulled me toward him by the wrist. And I didn’t resist, because my body was screaming yes with a volume that drowned out every rational objection my mind tried to raise. But here’s the thing that’s been nagging at me since I watched him walk out my door. The thing that sits at the intersection of my father’s notebook and my own experience.
Was the screaming mine?
The pull I feel toward Dominic is not normal attraction. It’s too strong, too constant, too physical to be explained by chemistry and proximity and the psychological dynamics of a power imbalance. Normal attraction waxes and wanes. It responds to context. It can be overridden by rational thought, by self-preservation, by the simple recognition that wanting someone doesn’t mean you should have them.
This pull doesn’t wane. It gets stronger every day and it doesn’t care that the man it’s aimed at might be responsible for my father’s death. It doesn’t care that his family isn’t human. It doesn’t care that I have every reason to run and no reason to stay that would survive logical examination.
My father documented anomalies in the Voronov family’s biology. All of those things point to a physiology that operates outside human norms.
What if the pull is another anomaly?
What if whatever they are, whatever biological category the Voronovs belong to, comes with a mechanism that draws people in? A chemical signal, a pheromone, a frequency that human bodies respond to on a level below conscious awareness. Something that makes the prey come to the predator willingly, eagerly, desperately.
Something that makes the prey enjoy it.
I press my hand against my chest where the pull lives and I feel it throb in response, warm and insistent, and I think: is this me? Is this want mine? Or is it something he’s doing to me, something his body is communicating and my body is receiving, a signal I can’t hear but that my cells obey like a command?
