Morning exploded with the crash of a door flung open.
Anya had barely managed to open her eyes when Viktor’s heavy hand clamped onto her shoulder and yanked her off the bed. There wasn’t a trace of last night’s tenderness or madness in his eyes—only the cold, annihilating fire of a fanatic who had discovered defilement in his temple.
He didn’t say a word of greeting. He didn’t let her put her shoes on, didn’t let her change. He simply dragged her toward the exit like a sack of garbage.
“Viktor! What are you…? Please, stop!” Anya cried, trying to brace her bare feet against the floor, but he was too strong. “What did I do? Viktor?!”
He was staring through her, into some abyss inside himself. His lips moved, spitting out clipped, poisonous phrases:
“You’re not her,” his voice broke into a growl. “I saw the recording! I saw everything! You have no right to be her!”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand!” Anya was gasping as he started hauling her down the stairs.
Her shins and feet slammed against the sharp edges of the steps with dull, nauseating thuds. Pain shot up her spine, but he didn’t slow.
“How dare you?! You thought you could be her! You’re an error! A glitch! A filthy fake!”
“Viktor, please! I didn’t mean to hurt you! I just…” She tried to reach him, to look into his face, but he only tightened his grip on her arm, bruising her skin.
He opened the basement door and literally threw her down the stairs. Anya fell, slamming hard onto her knees, and didn’t have time to get up—Viktor was already there. He grabbed her by the collar of her nightgown, hauled her up, and flung her onto the couch, dropping his weight on her.
“You defiled her! You decided you could replace her!”
He yanked at the collar of her nightgown. The fabric tore and split, baring her shoulders and chest. Anya went still. In her mind, despite the pain and shock, invisible relays clicked into place. She saw his hands—shaking, full of hatred—and understood that no words, no struggle would help now.
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She made the decision in a fraction of a second: stop resisting. Become the doll he had been shaping her into so obsessively.
Anya went limp under his weight. She didn’t cover herself, didn’t try to push him away. She just lay there, staring straight into his pupils with eyes gone dry from shock.
Blinded by rage, Viktor kept tearing at her clothes. He didn’t stop when the seam at her waist split; he didn’t stop when the silk turned to rags. He kept yanking, shredding, digging his fingers into her shoulders, shouting incoherent accusations. He was at the epicenter of his own storm, taking out on her all the shame and terror he’d felt when he saw his weakness on the recording.
A few endless seconds passed. His fingers convulsively clenched the remnants of fabric, and he had already raised his hand for another jerk when suddenly…
The stillness of her body lashed him harder than a slap.
He froze. Only now did it reach him: she wasn’t resisting. She lay under him utterly motionless. Her half-bared chest rose and fell in ragged, heavy breaths; gooseflesh stippled her skin from the cold, and her eyes looked at him without hatred, without struggle—only with a mute, endless torment.
He saw his own hands—red, trembling, gripping scraps of the expensive fabric he had chosen for her so lovingly. His gaze dropped. To her legs. Battered on the steps, covered in fresh red abrasions and swelling bruises.
His entire “architectural” world—his whole greatness as “protector” and “gardener”—collapsed in that second.
The contradiction seared through his mind: he had wanted to punish the impostor for defiling the memory of his daughter, but in the end he himself had become the defiler of his “value.” He had saved her from the cruel outside world only to… become a monster to her.
Viktor recoiled as if he’d touched a live wire. His face twisted with such wild revulsion at himself that he looked like a corpse. He stared at his palms, then at her battered knees, and a strangled, whimpering sound tore out of his throat.
Without looking back, he bolted for the stairs. He flew up, stumbling, almost falling, driven by his own shame. He needed to wash it off, to vanish, to erase that moment from reality.
Anya lay on the couch amid the scraps of torn clothing.
She didn’t sob, didn’t curl into a ball. She waited a minute, listening to his footsteps fade somewhere deep in the house and to the slam of his study door.
Then, slowly, fighting through the pain, she reached for the old wool blanket. Wrapping it around herself up to her chin, she sat up and hugged her knees. She was still trembling—from cold and adrenaline—but the victim’s mask had evaporated completely.
In her eyes, which a moment ago had held submissive torment, that same dead, calculating cold returned.