Page 90 of Bratva Bride
"The Stockholm syndrome is worse than reported. You've imprinted on objects like an institutionalized patient. We'll need extensive therapy to undo this damage."
Day two was the coloring book.
I'd hidden it under my mattress, but Viktor's guards were thorough. They found it during their morning "inspection," delivered it to Viktor like evidence of a crime.
He burned it in the fireplace while I stood there in my nightgown, forced to watch. Each page curled and blackened, taking with it the peaceful hours I'd spent choosing colors while Ivan worked nearby. The purple-to-blue sunset I'd been so proud of. The underwater scene where I'd finally understood how colors could bleed into each other to create something new.
"Art therapy," Viktor mused, poker stirring the ashes. "They manipulated you through crafts projects. Reduced your brilliant mind to kindergarten activities. The psychological manipulation is fascinating, really—how quickly an isolated adult will regress when offered pseudo-parental approval."
He was rewriting my history, turning healing into sickness, love into manipulation, safety into Stockholm syndrome. And part of me—the part trained by twenty-six years of his voice—started to believe him.
Day three brought interrogations.
"Did Volkov force you into this 'Little' persona?" Viktor sat across from me in the study, taking notes like a psychiatrist."Did he threaten you? Withhold affection unless you complied? Use your anxiety medication as leverage?"
"No." My voice came out steady, though my hands shook in my lap. "I chose it. It helped me process—"
"Process." He wrote something down, pen scratching against expensive paper. "Interesting choice of words. What exactly were you 'processing'?"
The trap was obvious, but I walked into it anyway. "The trauma. From here. From you."
His pen stilled. When he looked up, his pale eyes held that particular coldness that preceded something terrible.
"Trauma. From the father who protected you, educated you, kept you safe from a world that would have devoured an anxious, unstable girl like you." He leaned back, studying me. "This is what I mean by manipulation, detka. They've convinced you that love was prison, that protection was abuse. Classic cult tactics."
Meals became weapons after that. Nothing for twelve hours, then rich foods that made my empty stomach cramp. Sometimes meals at 3 AM, sometimes nothing for a full day. I never knew when food would arrive, what it would be, whether I'd be allowed to finish it. Classic destabilization—destroy routine, create dependency, break down resistance through unpredictability.
The room itself became another form of torture. Everything soft had been removed while I was at the third interrogation. My pillows, replaced with one flat thing that offered no comfort. Extra blankets, gone, leaving only a thin sheet that didn't quite warm me at night. The curtains had been removed "for my safety," leaving me exposed to anyone who might look up at my window.
And the camera. Mounted in the corner where I couldn't reach it, red light always blinking. Watching me dress. Watching me try to sleep. Watching me pace the fourteen steps from wallto wall—I'd counted, couldn't stop counting, numbers being the only thing I could still control.
I tried to stay "big." Tried to be the controlled, analytical daughter who could survive this through intellect and emotional distance. But trauma doesn't respect intention. At night, alone in the dark with that camera watching, my body betrayed me.
I'd wake to find my thumb in my mouth, sore from sucking. Catch myself rocking, the motion automatic and desperate. Realize I'd been counting prime numbers aloud in Russian—two, three, five, seven, eleven—for who knows how long. The regression was involuntary, my mind seeking the safety of littleness even when I knew it was dangerous.
On day four, Viktor caught me.
I'd been asleep, or thought I was, curled in that familiar hollow with my thumb between my lips. The door opened so quietly I didn't wake until he was already standing over me, phone in hand, recording everything.
"Fascinating," he said, and the word slithered through the darkness like something venomous. "We'll need to show this to the psychiatrists, of course. Evidence of the mental instability. You understand what this means, don't you, detka?"
I pulled my thumb from my mouth, the wet sound obscene in the quiet room. My jaw ached. My body had betrayed me again, seeking comfort in the only way it knew how.
"It means," Viktor continued, sitting on the edge of my bed with the casual ownership of someone who'd never questioned his right to my space, "that I was right. You're not well, Anya. You need treatment. Professional help. Somewhere secure, where they can address these . . . regression issues properly."
Somewhere secure. An institution. He was threatening to have me committed.
Iwokeondayfiveto find Viktor standing in my doorway, studying me with the patient interest of an entomologist who'd pinned a new specimen to his collection board. My thumb was still in my mouth—I could feel the wetness, the slight pruning of skin, the ache in my jaw that said I'd been sucking it for hours. The camera's red light blinked steadily, and I knew with sick certainty that everything had been recorded.
"Don't stop on my account," Viktor said, pulling out his phone with theatrical deliberation. "I have enough footage already."
The screen showed me curled in sleep, thumb between my lips, occasionally making small sounds that might have been whimpers or might have been words. The image was green-tinted from night vision, alien and pathetic. I watched myself rock slightly, the motion so subtle I hadn't even known I was doing it. Then the counting started—barely audible Russian numbers, two, three, five, seven, the pattern I'd used to soothe myself since childhood.
"My sources were right about the mental instability." Viktor replayed a particularly damning segment where I'd pulled my knees up, making myself impossibly small. "These episodes of infantile regression—this will be excellent evidence for the annulment proceedings."
"Annulment?" The word came out cracked. An annulment would mean the marriage never legally existed. Everything Ivan and I had built, erased like a calculation error.
Viktor pulled the chair from my vanity, positioning it like this was a formal meeting rather than a father terrorizing his daughter in her nightgown. "I've already consulted the appropriate specialists. Three psychiatrists who'll testify that you were in no mental state to consent to marriage. That the Volkovs took advantage of a vulnerable woman with clear dissociative disorders."
