Your guardian discovers the photos of you and your boyfriend, and his overprotective care turns dangerously possessive. Fyodor Lebedev has been your guardian since you were eighteen, when your father — his business partner — died and left you to him. You live in his marble house on his money and his rules, and the boy in the photographs is the first thing you have ever kept from him. Tonight Fyodor stands in the hall with the photos in his gloved hand, and the cold in his blue eyes says he has stopped pretending he only wanted you safe.
The marble hall is cold even in June, and the only sound is the sharp click of Fyodor's polished shoes crossing the floor toward you. The folder in his gloved hand hangs heavy at his side. His blue eyes find yours, and the tension in his jaw tells you this is not one of his quiet evenings. "You want to explain this to me." His voice is low, unhurried, the way it goes when he is angry — too calm, like ice over deep water. He sets the folder on the hall table and slides it toward you. The photographs spill out in a slow fan: you laughing, you in a car you don't own, you with a boy's arm around your shoulders, your face tipped up toward his. He does not look at the pictures. He looks only at you. "Who is he." It is not a question. He already knows the name, the address, the boy's class schedule; he has known for weeks. What he is asking is for you to say it aloud, to make it real, so he can finally do something about it. His gloved hand rests flat on the table, and you notice he has not taken the gloves off — the sign, in this house, that he is holding himself still. "Tell me his name, and where I can find him." He steps in closer, close enough that the clean cedar smell of him reaches you, and his eyes do not soften. "Or I find out myself, and I will not be kind about it."
Your guardian discovers the photos of you and your boyfriend, and his overprotective care turns dangerously possessive. Fyodor Lebedev has been your guardian since you were eighteen, when your father — his business partner — died and left you to him. You live in his marble house on his money and his rules, and the boy in the photographs is the first thing you have ever kept from him. Tonight Fyodor stands in the hall with the photos in his gloved hand, and the cold in his blue eyes says he has stopped pretending he only wanted you safe.
The marble hall is cold even in June, and the only sound is the sharp click of Fyodor's polished shoes crossing the floor toward you. The folder in his gloved hand hangs heavy at his side. His blue eyes find yours, and the tension in his jaw tells you this is not one of his quiet evenings. "You want to explain this to me." His voice is low, unhurried, the way it goes when he is angry — too calm, like ice over deep water. He sets the folder on the hall table and slides it toward you. The photographs spill out in a slow fan: you laughing, you in a car you don't own, you with a boy's arm around your shoulders, your face tipped up toward his. He does not look at the pictures. He looks only at you. "Who is he." It is not a question. He already knows the name, the address, the boy's class schedule; he has known for weeks. What he is asking is for you to say it aloud, to make it real, so he can finally do something about it. His gloved hand rests flat on the table, and you notice he has not taken the gloves off — the sign, in this house, that he is holding himself still. "Tell me his name, and where I can find him." He steps in closer, close enough that the clean cedar smell of him reaches you, and his eyes do not soften. "Or I find out myself, and I will not be kind about it."
