Heart and Heir

Chapter One The old woman looked at me the way my stepfather looks at a goat he's thinking of buying. "Sit." It sounded more like an order than an offer, so i sat. My shoes were half a size too small, My step father had bought them the day before so I'd look presentable, and I spent the next ten minutes curling my toes to stop them hurting. He stood behind me, breathing hard. He'd been sweating since the car. "She's healthy?" "Nineteen. Strong. Never sick a day." "Good." She turned her eyes on me. Mrs Sarah had Diamonds on every finger, face pulled tight as a drum. "You know why you're here." "Yes." "You will marry my grandson on Saturday. You will give him a child. When the child is born, you receive everything you were promised, and you leave. Until then you live in this house, you follow our rules, and you do not embarrass this family." A pause. "You do not disappoint me." "I understand." "Your name." "Anya ma, i am a...." "Anya." She said cutting me short, it like she was checking whether it had gone off. "Unusual." She didn't care about what i had to say, not about the stories of my mother, or the cottage by the sea where I'd spent every summer of my life, or the sketchbook in my bag. Nobody in that room cared what I was. I was a body, a womb, a signature. My stepfather had gambled away money that wasn't his, the people he owed wanted payment, and this family had offered to cover it in exchange for me. Three weeks ago he'd cried at my mother's kitchen table and said, "just a signature, Anya, just until it's sorted."I'd been looking for another way out ever since. There wasn't one. The door opened without a knock. I knew before I turned. The room changed, the way it does when someone walks in who has never been told no. He passed me with whiskey in one hand, tie already loose, and dropped into the chair beside his grandmother. Dark hair, hard jaw, a suit that cost more than my stepfather's house. "Elias. Your bride." His eyes went down me and back up. He wasn't hungry, Maybe Bored. Then he laughed. "This?" It landed somewhere under my ribs. "You picked a church mouse, Gran." "She is suitable." Mrs sarah argued. "She's a child." "She's nineteen." "She's not even pretty." he added My face burned. I wanted to say something clever, anything, but I knew my voice would shake and I wasn't giving him that. If I ran, my stepfather would drag me back, and the people he owed would not be as polite about it as this family. So I sat there with my toes curled and let him look. "You expect me to marry that? Touch that?" "You will do what is required. Or you lose everything." That statement felt like a key, i dont know what it unlocks , but it immediately changed his emotions especially across his face. Almost Rage, but not at me,hopefully . It was gone before I could be sure. He up walked to the desk close to me, and stopped close enough that I could smell the whiskey and something clean underneath it. "You don't want this, right?" he asked , raising his brows in an intimidating manner. "No." "Good. Neither do I." Then he walked out shutting the doir hard enough to rattle the glass in the cabinet. "He'll come around," his grandmother said. "They always do." She slid a pen across the desk. My name was already printed at the bottom of the page. "Anya Morozov." Typed in advance, as if the answer had never been in question. I thought about the Home, i prayed to go back to the prison i was used to, this place feels like a beautiful dungeon putting down my signature felt like stabbing myself, but i did anyways. They gave me a room bigger than the cottage. Silk sheets, a bathroom with a tub I could have slept in, a window over a garden. I looked for a lock on the door and found none. I checked again. Somehow that was worse. A lock would have meant they were afraid I'd run. No lock meant they knew I wouldn't perhaps, dare not. i sat on the edge of the bed lost in wonders when the door opened. Elias, with a bottle by the neck now instead of a glass. "You're still here." "Where else would I go?" He huffed something that wasn't a laugh. He came in and left the door open behind him. "You think you're clever. Signing yourself into a fortune." "I haven't been given a fortune. My stepfather sold me. That's different." That stopped him for a second. "Same result." "Not for me." He drank. "I came to see if you'd cry." he saud mocking me with gestures. "Am I crying?" "No. Why not?" "I ran out a while ago." He looked at me properly then, not like furniture. I think he hated it. "You'll give me a child. That's all I need. After that, go back to whatever you crawled out of." "Fine." "Fine?" "You want an heir, I want out. We both get what we want, then we never see each other again." I stood, because sitting felt like losing. "It won't be that simple." "It could be." He drew closer. I felt the heat coming off him. "You're in my house now. You do what I say, when I say it." " i hope you know, I'm not afraid of you." His eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there a second too long. "You should be." Then he walked out . I stood in the middle of that enormous room with my heart going like a trapped bird. I should have been terrified, and I was. But fear wasn't the only thing in me, and that scared me more. that night I begged God for sleep. - In the morning a red silk dress hung on my door, with a note pinned to the collar. "Breakfast. 8." Mostly out of spite, had i worn it . I got to the dining room at 7:50, because being early meant nobody could accuse me of anything. Elias sat at the head of the table with a newspaper and black coffee. He didn't look up. "Early. Desperate?" "You said eight." "Nice dress." "It was on my door." "I know." He looked at me then, down the silk and back. "It suits you." "I didn't ask." "No." Cold smile. "You didn't." "The schedule, Elias," his grandmother said from the far end. He rolled his eyes. "The wedding is Saturday. After that, once a month you see a doctor and I get the results. When you're pregnant, you carry to term. When it's born, you sign the papers and you go. You don't leave this house without permission. You don't talk to the press. You don't touch anything that isn't yours." "What's mine?" "Nothing." "I have my sketchbook." "Your what?" "It stays with me." His grandmother's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. Elias laughed. "You think I care about your drawings?" "I think you care about control. This is the one thing you don't get." i replied The smile went out of his face. "Bold, for someone who's signed her life away." "Cruel, for someone who has everything." i backed It was out before I could stop it. Nobody spoke. The old woman's eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch, which on her face was a scream. Then something strange happened. Elias smiled, a small real one, and he looked as surprised by it as I was. "Keep the sketchbook." He stood and bent beside my chair, close to my ear. "Don't mistake it for kindness. The moment you've given me what I need, I'm finished with you." He left. "You have no idea what you've started, girl," the old woman said. "Neither does he." That night there was a white box on my bed. . Inside was a leather-bound sketchbook, better than anything I had ever owned, and tucked in the cover a slip of paper. "For your drawings." its said I sat with it a long time. Then I picked up my pencil, I wanted to draw him, how ugly he looked when he bully's me . Elias in the doorway, tie loose, eyes dark, mouth caught between a sneer and something I would call shame At midnight I stopped and looked at the page, and he looked back. from it Somewhere around the second glass of whiskey he had stopped being my captor. And I wanted to draw him again. The knocking woke me before dawn. I had thought it was the maid. His grandmother stood in the doorway, fully dressed, in black, her rings off. I hadn't known she could look afraid. "Get up. Elias is gone." "Gone where?" "His bed wasn't slept in. His phone is on the kitchen counter. The guard says his car left at three." She held out her phone. "This came twenty minutes ago." A grainy photo. A gray car on a gravel road, wind-flattened grass, and behind it a small white cottage with a crooked blue door. My mother's cottage. "He doesn't know where that is," I whispered. "I never told anyone." "No," she said. "You didn't." Her eyes held mine. "So who did?" Only two other people had ever known where that cottage was apart from me. One of them was in a grave. The other had sold me.