Page 12 of Beautiful Ruin

This time, I don’t bother with politeness.

It feels ridiculous now.

The man’s expression stays perfectly professional, which only makes the tension beneath it more obvious. He is choosing each word before he speaks it. That, more than anything, tells me whatever happened is bad. “Your uncle has requested your immediate return to Moscow.”

“Did something happen to my uncle?” I ask.

Something in his posture shifts, a minute adjustment that feels less about being uncomfortable on his feet and more like I’ve driven right into the exact subject he’d hoped to guide me around. “I’m… not able to discuss the details here.”

A careful omission.

My mouth goes dry so quickly it almost hurts to force myself to swallow around the lump forming there. It follows with a terrible chill that rolls down my spine that has nothing to do with the cool breeze coming up from the harbor.

His detached tone doesn’t escape me, though not because it doesn’t fit the energy of this conversation. No, what unsettles me is that the refusal to be upfront tells me more than he probably means for it to.

If this were some routine pickup meant to bring me back for a social call or a temporary visit, he would tell me, because what benefit would it be not to? There is no version of this situation that doesn’t involve some catastrophic upheaval back in Russia. My uncle’s soldier going out of his way not to answer a simple question is reason enough for me to believe that whatever happened was bad enough to cross borders for. Bad enough to send men to collect me in person.

A dramatic extraction from campus would have set off just as many alarm bells as this conversation does, even if the methods are completely different. My uncle has never sent for me in any capacity. Why would now be any different unless something has gone horribly wrong?

My pulse is climbing fast enough now that I can hear it in my ears, a hard, ugly rhythm under the distant clink of dishes and the hush of the sea below.

“Your flight leaves in two hours,” he finally says after another beat of silence. “We will be taking you back to your dorm to collect your things and then leaving.”

My life here in Italy… reduced to a departure time.

I can’t help but glance back toward the table where Giulia and Matteo are watching.

A hot spark of anger flares briefly through the fear. I am only twenty-four years old. I live alone, I study what I want, I stay out too late with my friends and sleep until noon when my schedule allows it. I have built a hard-won little pocket of existence beyond my family’s reach, slowly, one intentional choice at a time.

Yet all it takes is one conversation to rip me away from it completely.

I never knew today would be the last time I’d see them. I understand now with perfect, miserable clarity that whatever is waiting for me in Moscow will be changing my life for good.

The next two hours pass by far too quickly.

No one speaks much on the drive back to campus. By the time we reach the university’s front gate, evening has started to settle over the grounds. The old stone buildings glow honey-gold under the lamplight, their ivy-covered walls suddenly looking completely foreign.

Students drift across the courtyard in loose groups, talking loudly with their backpacks slung over their shoulders as they walk home from their evening lectures. I am escorted through it with both men walking just far enough behind not to make it look suspicious and just close enough to remind me that this is not a choice I have to make.

I want to tell them to wait outside the dorm entirely and at least grant me some scrap of privacy and dignity while I pack my entire life up, but the look in the taller one’s eyes when we reach the entrance kills the words on my tongue before they even begin to leave my mouth.

The men remain in the hallway outside my room while I throw things into the only three travel bags I own. Clothes first, then underwear, then shoes shoved carelessly into the corners of my suitcase. My laptop goes into the next bag, still warm from the cafe. Toiletries are swept from the closet shelf in one angry, graceless armful, along with the textbooks that will soon become obsolete.

I don’t bother with keeping my passport on top. There isn’t a shred of doubt in my mind that I won’t need it once I touch down on Russian soil. Men like my uncle do not wait in queues under fluorescent airport lights behind businessmen and tourists for a customs officer to stamp paperwork. Whatever Ivan Kuznetsov may be, he is not the kind of man who allows bureaucracy to touch anything he considers his.

Least of all, me.

Red tape, to him, is just another part of society that is for those below us. I may be ignorant to what my uncle actually does for the most part, but I’m not naive enough to believe his work doesn’t involve avoiding the official channels. You don’t accumulate the kind of wealth that has paid for my schools, my dorm, my tuition, my entire carefully curated life abroad by respecting institutional boundaries. There is no benevolent explanation for that kind of reach, least of all with the kind of men standing outside my dorm room guarding it.

I have always known that even when I pretended not to. As a child, it was easier to romanticize. Then I got older and distance gave me a better perspective. I learned enough about politics and power to recognize the type of life I’d been born into, even if I’d been sent away from it years prior.

As I zip my shoulder bag closed, my attention catches onto the sun-bleached seashells Giulia gave me during our first year here still sitting on my windowsill.

I pick one up without thinking.

It’s pale and smooth from years spent tumbling underneath the water’s current with a pink interior that catches the light when I turn it in my fingers. She’d put three of them inside a small box wrapped with twine and handed them to me after too much wine one night, laughing as she declared them the official token of our friendship. I remember rolling my eyes at her while Matteo tried to make the whole thing into some dramatic proposal. We laughed until the room next to mine banged on the wall.

That memory hits me so hard, I have to sit down on the edge of the bed for a second to catch my breath.