Page 41 of Vasily the Nail

R U OK

I smile as I sink down to the Turkish rug and lean against the bed. In normal times, I wouldn’t even notice the name Cartwheel. It wouldn’t register as anything significant. But it’s been a week now since I talked to my best friend, and yeah, I’m weirdly okay, but I’ve needed her.

I’ve needed the memory of the hours I spent trying to teach her how to do a cartwheel in my backyard, too. I could do it all:cartwheels, somersaults, back flips, hand springs. I had dreams that I’d be a cheerleader one day, that I’d have that kind of high school experience. When I was forbidden from trying out in middle school by my father, making it clear it wasn’t going to happen in high school either, I lost interest in gymnastics. But now, sitting here on the floor in a stranger’s guest room in the middle of winter, I can smell the grass and the buttercups and the sun blazing down on us as Camilla fell on her butt over and over again, never once completing a somersault unassisted but laughing the entire time.

We had no idea that our lives were entirely in the hands of the men surrounding us. In my backyard, we were free.

I type in a quickI miss youand send it before I realize that she sent a phone to Kseniya to hand to me. I’m typing in a much longer message to find out how she knew I was here and with the Bratva, how she knew anyone in the Bratva to get this passed to me, when the phone starts ringing.

I hesitate to answer. Not because I don’t want to talk to her but because there are already tears leaking out of my eyes and I’m not even talking to her yet.

“Cartwheel?” I whisper once I bite the bullet and hit the answer button.

“Can you talk? Is it safe?” she whispers just as quietly, an epic feat for Camilla.

I laugh through my sniffling. “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t know if the phone is okay, but I’m by myself. I’ll ask Vasily if I can have the phone when he comes home.”

“Don’t ask him that!” she hisses, like I’m too dumb to know what I should and shouldn’t ask. “Are you there by yourself now? Do you know how many guards are posted? Gino says he can have an extraction team there in forty-five minutes, but not if Baranov’s there.”

Baranov.Vasily Baranov. Now that I know his last name, I wonder if he has a middle name.

“Gino would do that for me?”

“Well, he would do it for me.”

I have to smile at that. Camilla bitches about Gino non-stop usually, and I’m smuggling her birth control because he’s not giving her an option and she’s not ready for babies yet, but Gino isn’t a terrible guy. Not amazing by any stretch of the imagination, and the fact that he’s twenty years older than Camilla skeeves me out while also reminding that there’s no guarantee my future husband will even be my generation, but he’s not cruel to her and generally does what he can to make her happy.

Yeah, if Camilla asked him to and it was feasible without creating too much disaster, he’d send an extraction team for me.

“That’s sweet of him, but I’m fine.”

Camilla takes an incredibly slow, deep breath before saying an equally long and skeptical, “Ohhhhhhkay.”

“What?”

“You just said a nice thing about Gino.You. Who hates Gino and has on many occasion promised you’d figure out some wayto get me out of this not ideal but also not terrible situation. So I don’t believe you’re fine.”

She has a point. But when I was bashing Gino, it was with the thought that my world was going to somehow be amazing, that Tony would pick the perfect man for me and I’d have a great life. I wanted Camilla to experience that, too.

I’ve since learned better. I’m treated better by the man Tony sold me to for nothing except to ruin me and throw me back than I’ve ever been by Tony. Which makes Camilla’s pairing with Gino seem a little less awful. Gino isn’t great, but she’ll be okay there, and he’ll keep her safe.

“I’m fine. I mean, I’m in a weird situation, which how did you even—” I gasp and am no longer fine. “You saw it. You saw the stream. Oh god.”

“Oh sweetheart,” she says softly. “It’s horrible what he forced you to do! And to make everyone watch it like that? Tobragabout it like that? To flaunt it? Also, I know you’ve never done this before so that might have seemed normal to you, but it was absolutely not normal. Like, are youokay? Physically?”

I cringe and sink down, curling myself into a ball on my side and wishing I could bury myself right in this Turkish rug.

That smells like corn chips.

That’s weird. Kind of gross. But fixable. I’ve learned things.

I sigh and drag myself back up to my feet to grab the vacuum and the stuff that gets sprinkled on carpets. I’ve been avoiding this room because I figured spare rooms didn’t need regular cleaning, but I guess I was wrong. “Okay, that was not my first time, and I wasn’tforcedto do anything. Not like that.”

Camilla gasps. It’s not a video call so I can’t see what she’s doing, but I swear I hear her leaning forward in excitement over the gossip. “You little slut!” she laughs. “I cannot believe you hid this from me. I’m your best friend! I tell you everything! And meanwhile, you pretend like you’re so sweet and innocent and too good of a girl to get on your knees for anyone but God while gobbling down Bratva meat like you’re going to starve if you don’t get another inch down your throat?”

I’ve reached the cleaning closet by the time she shuts up, which is perfect timing for me to bang my forehead against the molding there. “I never should have turned this phone on.”

“Come on, admit you’re a slut like the rest of us. Be proud of how yummy that Bratva boy is. And that voice? Fuck, I was never going to say this because I thought you were getting, you know, R-worded, but I got a little wet just listening to him when Gino showed me.”

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