And that’s why she’s here now.
Not as a captive. Not as leverage. Not even as a prize. She’s here because for the first time in her life, someone looked at her and didn’t try to reshape her into something easier to control.
I think about what it means to take her as my wife, and it isn’t romance that fills my mind. It’s structure. Stability. Choice. A partnership that doesn’t demand obedience or silence, but loyalty freely given. I don’t want a woman who bows. I want one who stands beside me and knows exactly why she’s there.
Victoria would never be content as something decorative.
She’d be devastating as my equal.
My heirs wouldn’t be raised in fear. They’d be raised by a woman who understands consequence and courage, by a mother who would teach them that power isn’t taken, it’s grown with purpose. She wouldn’t soften them. She wouldn’t break them. She’d make them strong enough to survive the world we live in without losing themselves to it.
That matters to me more than legacy ever has.
Boris thinks this is about betrayal. About pride. About bloodlines and diamonds and old grudges. He’s wrong. What’s happening now is correction. A debt being called in long overdue.
I rise from my chair and move toward the window, watching the estate stretch out under the night sky, old stone and deep woods and quiet certainty.
I’ll speak to the Pakhan in the morning. The evidence is already in motion. Boris’s exile will be clean. Final. Irreversible.
After that, the world will shift, and when it does, Victoria won’t face it alone.
Victoria
I don’t fall for Leonid all at once.
That would be too easy. Too stupid. I fall in pieces I don’t notice until they’re already lodged inside me.
It starts with the mornings.
He doesn’t crowd me. Doesn’t summon me. Doesn’t appear like a threat disguised as politeness. I wake when I wake, move through the house without being intercepted, drink coffee that tastes better than anything I’ve ever had. The guards don’t look at me twice. No one watches me like I might break something just by existing. It’s unnerving, at first, being treated like a person instead of a liability.
Then it’s the way he listens.
When we talk it isn’t a performance. He doesn’t interrupt to correct me or steer the conversation somewhere useful to him. He asks questions and waits for the answers, even when they’re messy, even when I circle the truth like I’m afraid it might bite. When I go quiet, he doesn’t fill the silence. He lets it breathe, like he knows some things need space before they can exist out loud.
I start to notice the small things next. The way he moves through his own house without asserting dominance, like power is something he carries internally and doesn’t need to prove. The way he gives instructions once and never repeats himself because he expects competence, not obedience.
He looks like he’s memorizing me, not consuming me. Like I’m something rare he’s terrified of mishandling.
That realization unsettles me more than anything else.
At night, when I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, I think about what it would feel like to stop calculating every interaction. To not be braced for the moment kindness turns into savagery. I think about how Leonid touches nothing unless invited, how he gives me space even when everything between us hums tight and electric.
I know he watches me too, when he is in his office. I can feel his eyes on me through the camera’s and it sends a thrill through me that’s so sharp it could cut.
The truth creeps up on me one evening while we’re sitting in his office again, the tension between us quieter now, deeper. He’s reading through the Pakhan’s response, jaw tight, focus absolute. I watch him from the chair across the desk and realize I’m not scanning for exits.
I’m watching him breathe.
That’s when it hits me; I don’t want to leave anymore. Staying feels like a choice that might actually belong to me.
It scares the hell out of me.
“So,” he says eventually, looking at me fully. “We’re almost done.”
My pulse picks up. “Done with what?”
“With Boris,” he says. “With the evidence. With the last pieces.”
