A Cottage Full of Trouble

The taxi from the ferry dropped her at the end of a dirt track that wasn’t even a real road, and Alina Volkov—face of three continents, sworn enemy of cellulite, and the woman whose cheekbones had launched a thousand lip fillers—stood in the Croatian midday heat with two Louis Vuitton suitcases and a growing sense that she had made a catastrophic error.

The error, to be precise, was trusting Instagram.

The cottage had looked like a dream in the listing: white stone walls smothered in bougainvillea, a turquoise infinity pool that seemed to pour directly into the Adriatic, and a terrace where a mysterious hand (presumably belonging to a beautiful, silent local woman who never ate carbs) had arranged olives and rosemary on a wooden board. “Authentic Dalmatian hideaway,” the description had purred. “Total seclusion. Unforgettable experience.”

What the listing had failed to mention was that “total seclusion” meant a forty-minute hike to the nearest village, “authentic” meant the plumbing had been installed when Tito was still alive, and “unforgettable” was about to become very literal for all the wrong reasons.

Alina dragged her suitcases over the last fifty meters of gravel, her linen sundress already sticking to her spine. She hadn’t worn this much sweat since her disastrous attempt at a “real woman” workout campaign for a sportswear brand that had later photoshopped her armpits. The sun was merciless. The cicadas were screaming. And somewhere behind those dry-stone walls, a rooster was letting out a trial run of the sound that would, she already knew, become her personal sleep paralysis demon.

She stopped at the wooden gate. The cottage was… smaller than the photos. And older. And slightly crooked, as if the original 17th-century stonemasons had been drunk on grappa and existential despair. But the bougainvillea was real, exploding in fuchsia violence over the entrance. The pool was real, a shocking blue rectangle carved into the limestone. And the view—God, the view—was real in a way Los Angeles never was. The sea stretched out like a silk sheet, impossibly turquoise, dotted with the dark shapes of uninhabited islands. No yachts. No paparazzi drones. No ex-boyfriend’s private jet doing a low pass to remind her he existed.

For a moment, she allowed herself to breathe.

Then she saw the key box.

It was a cheap plastic combination lock hanging from the iron door handle, the kind you’d use to secure a middle school locker. The instructions, sent via Airbnb message in broken English, read: “Code is 1650. Year of house. Very easy to remember, yes?”

The year the house was built. The year, she reflected, that the plumbing had probably last been serviced.

She punched in the numbers, retrieved a heavy iron key that looked like it belonged in a fantasy novel about dwarves, and pushed open the door.

The smell hit her first.

It wasn’t bad, exactly. It was ancient. Stone, wood smoke, lavender from some forgotten sachet, and underneath it all, a faint whisper of damp and centuries of human habitation. It smelled like a grandmother’s attic crossed with a monastery. It smelled like nothing she had ever encountered in a Four Seasons.

The interior was dark, the windows small and deep-set in meter-thick walls. Her eyes adjusted slowly. There was a fireplace large enough to roast a wild boar. A wooden table that looked like it had been hacked from a single tree by a very angry Viking. A kitchenette with a stove that might have been a museum piece. And in the corner, a stone sink with a single tap that dripped with the steady rhythm of a metronome.

She set down her bags and walked to the bedroom. A wrought-iron bed draped in white linen. A view of the olive grove. A crucifix on the wall, which was either charming or threatening, depending on her mood. The bathroom was a closet with a toilet, a showerhead mounted directly above it, and a drain in the center of the floor that suggested bathing was a communal water feature.

“Okay,” she said to the empty room. “Okay. You wanted rustic. This is rustic. This is authentic. This is fine.”

She was lying. It was not fine. It was the opposite of fine. It was a four-hundred-year-old pile of rocks with delusions of grandeur, and she had paid three thousand euros for two weeks of this.

But the view. The view was still there. And no one knew where she was. Not her agent, who had been screaming about the tabloid photos for seventy-two consecutive hours. Not her mother, who had sent a text that read only “I raised you better” after the story broke. Not Marko, the ex-boyfriend with the hair plugs and the restraining order that he treated as a suggestion.

Alina took a breath. She could do this. She was a woman who had walked two hundred meters in stilettos made of actual glass for a commercial. She had survived fourteen days of a juice cleanse that turned her urine green. She had once posed nude in a freezer for a perfume ad while a French director screamed at her about “the vulnerability of frost.”

She could survive a stone cottage on Vis.

She unpacked. She arranged her skincare products on the tiny bathroom shelf (retinol, vitamin C, snail mucin—the usual armory). She plugged her laptop into the outlet near the bed and opened the Wi-Fi network settings.

The network was called “Kameni_Dom_1650.”

She clicked Connect.

The little wheel spun. And spun. And spun.

After forty-five seconds, a message appeared: “Cannot connect to this network.”

She tried again. Same result. She held her phone up to the window. One bar. She held it up to the other window. No bars. She went outside to the terrace. Two bars, then one, then the little spinning wheel of death.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”

She had specifically filtered the Airbnb search for “Wi-Fi” and “Dedicated workspace.” She had a deadline for a cover story interview with Vogue Paris. She had emails from her lawyer about the defamation suit against the tabloid that had published the photos of her crying outside a club—photos that made her look, in her honest opinion, less “broken” and more “artistically windswept,” but the internet had disagreed.

No Wi-Fi meant no work. No work meant no money. No money meant she’d have to sell one of her handbags, which was fine, she had seventy-three, but it was the principle.

She went back inside and found the welcome binder.

It was a spiral notebook covered in olive-oil stains, handwritten in the looping script of someone who had given up on legibility sometime around the third glass of local wine. The first page read: “Welcome to our stone house! Built 1650, renovated 1998 (new roof!). Please respect the quiet hours. The roosters do not.”

She flipped to “Amenities.”

*Wi-Fi: The router is in the main house (500m away). Signal is “romantic” (slow). Best used between 2 AM and 5 AM when neighbors are asleep.*

“Romantic,” she said aloud. “They called it romantic. I’m going to murder someone.”

She closed the binder. Then she saw it.

On the wall, just above the bed, descending from the crucifix on a thin silver thread of silk, was a spider.

It was not a small spider. It was not the kind of spider you could pretend was a speck of dust or a figment of your imagination. It was large. It was hairy. It had a body the size of a grape and legs that seemed to go on forever, like a tiny, eight-legged celebrity on a red carpet. It was, Alina decided, the single most horrifying creature she had ever encountered in her twenty-nine years on this planet, and she had once shared a greenroom with a python.

She froze.

The spider did not freeze. The spider walked. Slowly. Deliberately. It moved across the white wall like it owned the place, which, technically, it did. It had probably been living here since 1651.

Her heart began to pound. Her breathing went shallow. This was not a phobia she advertised—her brand was “effortless power,” not “weeping at arthropods”—but the truth was that spiders reduced her to a six-year-old girl trapped in a supermodel’s body. She could stare down a thousand flashbulbs. She could smile through a five-hour fitting. But one misplaced arachnid and she became a screaming, flailing, deeply embarrassing version of herself.

“Okay,” she said, her voice an octave higher than normal. “Okay. It’s fine. It’s just a spider. It’s more scared of you than you are of it.”

That was a lie. The spider was not scared. The spider was lounging.

She grabbed a sandal from her suitcase. She approached the bed. The spider watched her with all eight of its tiny, judgmental eyes. She raised the sandal.

And then she stopped.

She couldn’t kill it. If she killed it, she would have to clean up the remains. If she cleaned up the remains, she would have to touch them. If she touched them, she would have to burn the sandal, the wall, and possibly her own hand.

She lowered the sandal.

The spider rotated one of its legs, as if to say, “That’s what I thought.”

She needed help. There was no one on the property. The nearest neighbor was probably a shepherd who communicated exclusively through goat bleats. The taxi was gone. The ferry wasn’t coming back until tomorrow.

There was only one option.

She pulled out her phone. One bar. She opened the Airbnb app. The message thread with the host, a woman named Ivana, who had sent exactly three messages: “Confirmed,” “Code is 1650,” and “Enjoy!” She typed:

Hello. There is a spider in the bedroom. A large one. I need someone to remove it immediately.

She hit send. The little clock appeared. Sending… sending… sent. One bar held.

Three minutes passed. No response.

The spider had now moved to the pillow. Her pillow. The pillow where her head was supposed to go. The pillow where she was supposed to sleep, dream, and recover from the emotional devastation of the last six months.

That was it.

She called the host.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang. She was about to give up when a voice answered—not Ivana’s, but a man’s. Deep. Rough. Slightly amused, as if he had been expecting this call his entire life.

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry,” Alina said, trying to sound calm and in control, which was difficult while staring at a spider on her pillow. “Is this Ivana?”

“Ivana is my mother. She’s at the market. I’m Niko. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” she said, “is that I just checked into your cottage and there is a spider the size of a small dog on my pillow.”

A pause. Then: “The size of a small dog.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of small dog?”

“Excuse me?”

“A chihuahua or a Labrador puppy? Important distinction.”

Alina closed her eyes. She was going to kill this man. She was going to fly back to Los Angeles, hire a private investigator, find him, and kill him. “It’s large. It’s hairy. It has legs. It’s on the pillow where I am supposed to place my face. Please send someone to remove it.”

“That’s George,” Niko said.

“What?”

“The spider. His name is George. He’s been here longer than the roof. He pays his share of the mortgage in fly control.”

She stared at the phone. Then at the spider. Then back at the phone. “You named it.”

“My grandmother named him. Nineteen eighty-seven. George has been through three wars, two olive harvests, and one very unfortunate incident with a runaway donkey. He’s a local legend.”

“I don’t care if he’s the mayor of Vis,” Alina said, her voice rising. “I want him removed from my pillow.”

“Your pillow?”

“Yes. My pillow. The one I brought from home because I have neck problems and your listing didn’t specify pillow firmness.”

Niko laughed. It was a low, quiet laugh, the kind that said he found her absolutely ridiculous and was not trying to hide it. “You brought your own pillow to a stone cottage on a remote island in the Adriatic.”

“I also brought my own towel, my own sheets, and my own sanity, which is currently being tested by a spider named George.”

Another pause. She could hear him moving, maybe walking on gravel. “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Ah,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Los Angeles. Land of valet parking and emotional support animals. And you’re afraid of a tiny spider.”

“He is not tiny. He is a biological horror.”

“He’s a spider. In a stone house. From 1650. What did you expect? Marble countertops and a minibar?”

“I expected a working Wi-Fi connection and an absence of eight-legged squatters. Neither of which appears to be the case.”

Niko sighed, a long, theatrical exhale. “The Wi-Fi is slow because the walls are a meter thick. The roosters are loud because they’re roosters. And the spider—George—has seniority. He was here first. But fine. I’ll come down.”

“Thank you,” she said, not meaning it.

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m going to charge you a ‘city girl complaint fee.’”

“That’s not a real thing.”

“It is now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Don’t kill George. He’s the only thing keeping the scorpions away.”

The line went dead.

Alina lowered the phone. The spider—George—had now stretched out on the pillow like he was sunbathing. He had, she realized with horror, arranged his legs in a surprisingly relaxed pose.

“You,” she told him, “are the worst roommate I have ever had. And I once lived with a girl who stored her hair clippings in a jar.”

George rotated one leg. The gesture felt dismissive.

She spent the next fourteen minutes pacing the stone floor, checking her reflection in the tiny bathroom mirror (still beautiful, thank God, even in crisis), and composing a one-star review in her head. “Charming location. Terrible arachnid hospitality.”

She heard the engine first—a low, rattling sound, like a lawnmower having a seizure. Then the crunch of tires on gravel. Then a car door slamming, followed by footsteps that were unhurried, almost insolent in their lack of urgency.

She opened the door.

And the world tilted.

The man standing in her doorway was not what she had expected. She had expected a sun-dried farmer in stained overalls, smelling of sheep and cigarette smoke. She had expected someone with bad teeth and a worse attitude.

She had not expected this.

Niko was tall—six-two, maybe six-three—with dark, wind-tangled hair that fell over his forehead in a way that looked accidental but was absolutely not. His jaw was sharp enough to cut glass. His eyes were the color of the sea during a storm, a deep, restless gray-green. He wore a linen shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and his forearms—she noticed his forearms immediately—were tanned, corded with muscle, and dusted with dark hair. He looked like a pirate who had retired to become a philosophy professor. He looked like every mistake she had ever wanted to make.

He looked at her. Then at the spider through the doorway. Then back at her.

“You’re the supermodel,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. And it wasn’t admiration. It was the tone of a man who had just identified a species of bird he didn’t particularly like.

Alina’s spine straightened. “I’m the guest.”

“You’re Alina Volkov. My mother showed me your profile picture. She thought you were a bot.”

“A bot?”

“Fake account. No one that beautiful books a two-week stay in a stone cottage on Vis without an ulterior motive. She thought you were trying to steal our olive oil recipe.”

“I don’t want your olive oil recipe.”

“Good. It’s my grandmother’s, and she’d haunt you.” He stepped past her into the cottage, filling the small space with the smell of sea salt, sun-warmed skin, and something else—cedar, maybe, or the inside of a boat. “Where’s the beast?”

She pointed at the bedroom. “On my pillow. His name is George, apparently.”

Niko walked to the bedroom doorway, leaned against the frame, and observed the spider with the casual interest of a man watching a cloud. “George. You’ve gotten fat. Too many flies this summer.”

The spider did not respond.

Niko turned to her. “You know he’s harmless, right? Ordinary house spider. Not venomous. Won’t bite unless you really annoy him.”

“I don’t care if he gives free hugs. I don’t want him on my pillow.”

“So move him.”

“I’m not touching him.”

“Then ask him politely to leave.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And you’re dramatic.” He walked to the bed, and Alina flinched, expecting him to crush George with a brutal swipe. Instead, he crouched down, extended a finger, and waited. The spider considered the finger. Then, with the slow dignity of a pensioner crossing the street, George climbed onto Niko’s hand.

Niko stood up, the spider now perched on his knuckle. “See? He’s a gentleman. He just wanted a better view.”

“Get him out of here.”

“Where should I put him?”

“I don’t care. The next island. The bottom of the sea. Outer space.”

Niko carried George to the open door, walked to the olive tree outside the kitchen window, and gently transferred the spider to the bark. “There you go, old man. New territory. Lots of ants. Don’t let the birds get you.”

He turned back to her. George was gone. The crisis was over. And Alina realized she had been holding her breath.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly.

“Don’t mention it. That’ll be fifty euros.”

“You’re joking.”

“I never joke about money.” He walked past her again, heading for the kitchenette. “The Wi-Fi?”

“What about it?”

“You complained about that too. Let me see.”

He pulled out his own phone, a battered thing with a cracked screen, and tapped a few times. “Signal’s weak. I can move the extender from the main house tomorrow. For tonight, sit on the terrace facing east. You’ll get enough for emails. No video calls.”

“I have a deadline.”

“Then type faster.” He looked at her then, really looked, and she felt it like a physical touch—the weight of his gray-green eyes moving over her face, her hair, the line of her neck. He wasn’t leering. He was assessing. Like she was a puzzle he hadn’t decided to solve yet. “You’re not what I expected either.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone who screams more. You held it together. Barely. But you held it.”

“I’m a professional.”

“A professional what? Model? That’s not a profession. That’s standing still while people take pictures.”

“And what’s your profession? Being annoying?”

“Handyman,” he said. “And part-time misanthrope. It pays the bills.” He walked to the door, paused, and looked back. “The roosters start at five. Don’t throw anything at them. They have better aim than you’d think.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes.” He smiled. It was the first real smile he’d given her—sharp, crooked, and infuriatingly attractive. “Welcome to Vis, Alina. Try not to have a meltdown before dinner.”

He left. The door clicked shut. The taxi engine rattled to life and faded down the dirt track.

Alina stood alone in the ancient stone cottage, the silence pressing in around her. George was gone. The Wi-Fi was still broken. And she had just spent fifteen minutes arguing with the most beautiful man she had ever seen, who had called her dramatic and her job fake.

She looked at the pillow where George had been. Then at the door where Niko had stood.

“Damn,” she whispered.

She was in trouble. And for the first time in years, it wasn’t the kind of trouble her publicist could fix.