Chapter 17: The First Night of Trust
The morning light was different.
It came not as an intruder, but as a gentle reveal, seeping through the small, high window of Alexsi’s quarters and painting a slow, warm stripe across the plush wool of the blanket. Alexsi became aware of it first as a pressure on his chest, a pleasant, solid weight. Then, the scent—not pine and gun oil, but the clean, simple smell of soap and sleep, and beneath it, the faint, wildflower hint of her hair.
He opened his eyes.
Mila’s head was resting just over his heart, her dark curls spilling across the faded green of his undershirt. One of her hands was tucked between them, a loose fist resting against his ribs. His own arm was around her, his hand splayed possessively across the dip of her waist. He hadn’t moved it all night.
He held his breath.
Her breathing was deep and even, her lips slightly parted. The last of the yellowing bruises along her jawline was almost gone. In sleep, the wary tension that seemed to perpetually frame her eyes had vanished. She looked her age. She looked peaceful.
A surge of something vast and terrifying welled up in him. It wasn’t desire, not in any simple sense. It was a ferocious, aching protectiveness, mixed with a guilt so profound it felt like a physical sickness. He owned her. The thought arrived, unbidden and ugly, from the dark chamber where he stored his father’s politics. She was a treaty asset, a transferred token to seal a border dispute. According to the state registry in the capital, she was his property.
And she was trusting him enough to sleep on his chest.
He carefully extracted his arm, millimeter by millimeter, but the loss of warmth woke her. She stirred, nuzzling against his shirt before her eyes fluttered open. For a heartbeat, there was pure, unguarded softness there. Then awareness returned, and with it, a flicker of uncertainty. She didn’t pull away, though. She stayed where she was, looking up at him.
“You snorted,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep.
“I do not snore,” he said, the automatic response roughened by disuse.
“You do. It’s like a distant tractor. Very soothing.”
A corner of his mouth twitched. “You talk. Nonsense. About chickens.”
She smiled then, a real one, that crinkled the corners of her eyes. “I miss my chickens.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, the blanket pooling around her. The space between them felt charged, but not with danger. With a new, fragile reality. “I did not have nightmares.”
“Neither did I.”
They stayed like that for a long moment, the hum of the battalion’s morning routines—distant shouts, the clank of a field kitchen—filtering in from another world.
“I am going to make tea,” she announced, swinging her legs out of bed. She wore a long, soft shirt of his and a pair of thick socks. She padded across the oak planks to the small stove, her movements sure and domestic. He watched her, the way she shook the old leaves from the pot, the precise tilt of the kettle. This was the ritual they had built, a tiny fortress of normality.
It had started with that hard conversation, the one that now lived between them like a settled stone.
It had been after the incident with the oligarch’s wife. After Mila had pulled him into the bath and washed the scent of another woman’s predation from his skin with hands that were gentle but firm. That act had changed something. It had tilted the axis of their strange arrangement. She was no longer just the victim in the corner; she had seen his shame and had offered a balm, however simple.
A few nights later, she had stood in the middle of the room, looking small but resolute, her arms wrapped around herself.
“Alexsi.”
He had looked up from a logistics report. “Mila.”
“I have been thinking. I believe you are not going to try and have sex with me.”
The bluntness of it had winded him. He’d set the papers down carefully. “I am not.”
She’d nodded, once, as if confirming a fact to herself. “Good. I want to have sex someday. I think. When it is my choice. I understand if it cannot be you.”
The statement, delivered so calmly, had been a spear through his gut. He did love her. A lot. The feeling had grown quietly, stubbornly, like moss between cracks in granite. He’d grown so fond of her stubbornness, her unexpected humor, the way she learned the battalion’s routines faster than some recruits. He felt protective to the point of violence. And he hated, a little, how perfectly this situation played to those feelings. It felt like a trap designed specifically for him.
For a fleeting second, he’d wondered if it was a trap. His father’s long game: give the honorable son a broken bird to fix, bind him with compassion, and thus bind him tighter to the family’s political machinations. But he’d dismissed it just as quickly. His father did not know him that well. The Minister saw a useful tool, a loyal soldier, not a man who lay awake wrestling with the ethics of ownership. His father wouldn’t have conceived that Alexsi would actually care about the girl’s suffering.
But Alexsi did care. And as far as loving her went… it was a mess. He owned her. The age gap was a chasm—thirteen years, far more than he would ever find comfortable in what she had once called “the real world.” None of it was right. He wasn’t trying to make her make him feel better, either. He had told her that.
“I am not a project,” she had said firmly, her dark eyes holding his. “I do not feel broken. And I am not going to try and touch you like that, to… fix you, either.” She had looked away then, out the window at the gray barracks courtyard. “But I miss being close to people. At home, my cousins and I, we all slept in a pile. Like puppies. We braided each other’s hair. We held hands. Life here with you… it is good. You are kind. But I am still sad sometimes. And scared. I wonder if we could just… fall asleep together. Sometimes.”
He had been acutely apprehensive. Every instinct screamed about her autonomy, about the precariousness of her power. How could any choice she made here be truly free? Yet, the thought of denying this simple, human request felt crueler than any abstract principle. It seemed, in its own way, more honest than the stiff, performative touches he was forced to give her at state functions—the hand on the small of her back, the arm offered like a prop.
The third night after that talk, she had simply gotten into his bed after brushing her teeth. She’d lain on her side, facing him, and waited. He’d turned off the lamp and lay down, keeping a careful foot of space between them. The silence had been deafening, full of his own hammering heart.
Then, her small hand had found his in the dark.
They had fallen asleep like that, fingers knotted. And it was true—neither of them had ever slept so well before. It was very lovely. In the bleak arithmetic of their situation, it wasn’t even the most morally ambiguous thing. She had chosen it. And he did love her.
Now, she brought him a cup of tea, steam curling in the cold morning air. He took it, his fingers brushing hers.
“Thank you.”
“You have the meeting with the logistics colonel today,” she said, leaning against the heavy oak desk. She knew his schedule better than he did.
“At eleven hundred.”
“He is a pig. He looks at me like I am a pastry.”
Alexsi’s knuckles whitened on the cup. “I know.”
“Do not start a fight, Alexsi. It is just his face. It is a pig-face.” She said it with such dry resignation he almost laughed. She sipped her tea. “Can I walk with you to the command building? I want to get air.”
“Of course.”
The walk across the compound was a daily test. He wore his full dress uniform, the high collar itching his neck. She walked beside him, not behind, in a simple wool dress and a thick scarf. He saw the glances from the soldiers—some curious, some envious, a few disdainful. He saw how Mila’s chin lifted a fraction, how she kept her eyes forward, her hand not touching him but resting near the crook of his elbow. It was a performance, but one they were co-authoring.
The logistics colonel was indeed a pig-faced man, with small, moist eyes and a wheezing laugh. His office stank of cheap tobacco and cheaper cologne. His eyes crawled over Mila as she waited by the door.
“A sight better than the last tribal tribute, Volkov,” the colonel chuckled, lighting a cigarette. “Seems… housebroken.”
Alexsi’s vision tinted red at the edges. He placed his hands flat on the cold metal of the colonel’s desk. “The reports on winter grain shipments, Colonel. They are incomplete.”
The meeting dragged, a torture of petty power plays and veiled insults. Alexsi absorbed it, his responses clipped and professional, a dam holding back a river of rage. All the while, he was hyper-aware of Mila, a silent sentinel by the door, breathing in the foul air.
After twenty agonizing minutes, a young comms officer burst in, breathless. “Commander Volkov. Urgent signal from the Ministry. Secure channel, sir.”
Alexsi stood, using the movement to step between the colonel’s line of sight and Mila. “Our business is concluded for now, Colonel. The reports will be on my desk by end of day.”
Outside, in the relative cleanliness of the concrete corridor, he let out a slow breath. Mila fell into step beside him.
“I told you he was a pig.”
“You were correct.”
“What does your father want now?” she asked, her voice lower.
“We will see.”
The secure comms room was a cold, windowless vault. Mila waited outside as Alexsi entered, the steel door sealing with a hydraulic hiss. The screen flickered to life, not with his father’s stern face, but with that of his father’s chief aide, Yuri.
“Commander. The Minister requires your presence—and that of your wife—at the dacha this weekend. A family gathering. Strategic allies will be present. It is… important you both make a positive impression.”
Alexsi’s blood went cold. The family dacha was a gilded prison in the woods, a place where his father’s control was absolute. Taking Mila there felt like delivering a lamb to a field surrounded by wolves.
“The battalion readiness exercises are at a critical phase,” Alexsi said, his voice even.
“The Minister is aware. He insists. Your deputy can handle the exercises. This is about unity. About presenting a strong front. The… integration of your new family member is of particular interest to our guests.” Yuri’s smile was thin and meaningless. “Pack for three days. A car will collect you Friday at 0800.”
The screen went dark.
Alexsi stood in the humming silence for a full minute, his fists clenched. When he emerged, Mila took one look at his face and her own paled.
“What is it?”
“We are summoned. To my father’s dacha. For the weekend.”
All the color drained from her face. The fragile peace of the morning shattered. The dacha was where she had first been presented to him, drugged and terrified. It was the heart of the beast.
“No,” she whispered.
“We have no choice.”
She turned and walked quickly down the corridor, back towards their quarters. He followed, a grim shadow. Once inside, she spun to face him, her eyes wide with a fear he hadn’t seen in weeks.
“He will… the people there, your father’s friends… they will look at me like the colonel did, but worse. They will touch my arm and ask me questions about my ‘people’. They will make me wear a dress that is too thin. I cannot go back there, Alexsi.”
“Mila.” He stepped toward her, but she flinched back, a reflexive gesture that cut him deeper than any knife. She was seeing not him, but all of them. He stopped. “Listen to me. We must go. But we go together. You stay by my side. Every second. You are my wife. You use that. You are rude if you have to be. You are cold. You hold my arm and you look through them. Do you understand?”
She was breathing fast, on the edge of panic. “What if he tries to make me stay? What if he separates us?”
“He will not.”
“You cannot know that!”
“I will not let that happen.” The force in his voice stilled her. He meant it. It was a vow. “This is a performance. Like the parties in the city, but harder. We have done harder things.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, the gesture mirroring that night of their negotiation. “I hate this.”
“I know. So do I.”
She looked at him, really looked, seeing the strain around his eyes, the tight set of his jaw. Her own fear slowly metabolized into a sharp, shared anger. “What do they want from us? We are doing what they said. We are married. What more is there?”
“A show of control,” he said, the truth bitter on his tongue. “My father needs to demonstrate that every part of his world, including his son and his son’s… acquisition, is obedient. That the border is truly settled. That I am settled.”
“And are you?” she asked, the question quiet and profound. “Settled?”
He held her gaze. “No.”