21: Dasha.

One month later

When I hear Clement’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, I quickly hide the folded newspaper beneath my school books, but my heart is still bouncing and zigzagging off my rib cage, the bold headline impressed on my memory.

Body of Russian Mobster Washes up on Riverbank.

In the month since the second fire that almost took my life, there has only been one night when Clement and Nicholas didn’t sleep beside me. They kissed me on the head, made me promise not to open the door…and when they returned home, there was a dark satisfaction in them I should have found alarming.

I didn’t.

My two lovers are obsessed beyond reason with me. It shows in everything they do. The way they escort me to and from class, help me with projects, encourage me. Their obsession is in the two sets of hands that wash me in the bathtub, usually right before those same hands drag me out with lustful intention, positing me how they need me. It’s in the way they never let a day pass without telling