#nik.

Daiyu should know better than this. Than to slip from under the covers, get out of her room and pad down the hallway with not even shoes on and to go to where Nik resides. This floor is treacherous, the rooms filled with Alexei’s strongest and cruelest, desperate creatures vying for his approval, watchful eyes and ears. But she finds she cares little, as another restless night lies ahead of her. So she does what she shouldn’t and knocks on his door the way she always does, waits ten seconds and then slips in. 

Let them tell her father. Perhaps then he’ll talk to her. That’s the issue here, isn’t it? The way Daiyu feels like she’s stuck in shadows. She doesn’t recognise it as paranoia, this conviction that everyone seems to know something she doesn’t — her father in his silence, Mike’s stabbed body, the eyes passing over her, the treacherous conversation she doesn’t hear but knows exists, the pointed fingers. 

“Now there’s a sight for sore eyes,”  Penny mused from one of the tables at the pub, a sidecar sat in front of her, nearly empty now. “Fancy a drink?” she suggested, since it was impossible for her to pretend she hadn’t already seen Nik enter the bar and just as difficult for her to escape unnoticed. She hadn’t been much of a drinker the first time she’d turned twenty-two but as she entered her late twenties, she’d found comfort at the bottom of a bottle. Comfort she couldn’t find anywhere else. Alcohol didn’t ignore her text messages or block her on Instagram. Alcohol didn’t call her a slag at Fabric on a Saturday night or tell her she couldn’t stay at their apartment after a shag a weekend later.

She looked Nik up and down as butterflies welled in her stomach. Sure, she’d looked him up on Instagram a handful of times, she’d even Googled his name once or twice but that was different to sitting in front of him. She had half a mind to tell him to fuck off, another half that wanted to kiss him, just to see if he’d kiss her back. Instead, she sat in place with her fingertips pinching the stem of her glass and changed the subject, “The bobbies up your bum about the fire as well or just me? I’m sick to the back teeth of all the nonsense ‘round here. Is it truly too much to ask for a drama-free week in this bloody town?” she asked rhetorically, a light laugh chasing her words.

The aftermath of violence hurts. Her knuckles are split and there’s no gauze, no disinfectant, nothing to soothe it. Her body is tired, but there’s no mattress to lay down on, no pillow to lay her head on. Here, in this room, there is nothing at all: not even a strip of light, hardly a sound. Daiyu tells herself she’s too strong to break under this kind of pressure, that she’s been through this before, that she’s, in spite of it all, still a Volkov and will not fucking break.

If the blaze of her rage is inevitable, then so is this: the cold of absence, the despair of loneliness, the pounding wave called grief. It’s after thirty six hours, that she first sees Vissa, when she wakes and is half asleep. Had they not shared this room once before, knees touching, odd comfort found in someone who had often felt more predator than brother? There had been warmth then, even if it was the Volkov brand, a voice that was not her own to listen to. They had used each other as pillows and spoken little, but more than they ever had before. But Vissa was dead, and so was Ray, and so were Inna and Anna and her mother. 

And so Daiyu sits with only her demons.

She does break. That’s how it always goes: in the end, Alexei always wins. Even if he bears a scratch on his face, even if one of his best enforcers is in the infirmary, he wins this round. Because she starts asking for him, when the guard creaks the door open to supply her with another portion of bland beans, begging for her father to meet her, talk to her, see to her. But he does not come. All that comes are small rations of food and bottles of water. All that comes is the darkness, time and time again. So, she rots.