She's reading faster now, eyes moving over the false intelligence I spent all morning creating. The trap carefully laid between legitimate documents to make it believable.
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because I want you to understand something. The Rosettis have enemies everywhere. Your brothers are fighting a war on three fronts, and they're losing."
"We're not losing."
"You're bleeding. Slowly. The kind of bleeding you don't notice until you're already dead." I take the file back, watch her fingers twitch like she wants to grab it. "I could help. Or I could watch you fall."
"What do you want in return?"
"I haven't decided yet."
The bait is set. The location, the date, the players, all of it false but plausible enough that if the Rosettis act on it, I'll know she found a way to communicate. I'll know she's been playing me all along.
"You can go."
She stands but pauses at the door, one hand on the frame. "The Barones. If what you're saying is true, why tell me? Why not just let it happen?"
"Maybe I'm not ready for you to die yet."
"Because you haven't finished playing with me?"
I meet her gaze across the room. "When you die, it will be by my hand."
She holds my stare for a long moment, something unreadable in those blue eyes. Then she's gone, leaving me with an empty glass and a trap that will either prove her guilt or her innocence.
Either way, I'll have my answer.
The study feels too quiet after she leaves. I pour another vodka but don't drink it, just hold the glass while I stare at the bonsai.
Thirty years of patient shaping. My grandfather started it, my father continued it, then Mikhail, and now it's mine. Each cut deliberate, each choice affecting years of future growth. You can't rush it. Can't force it. You work with what the tree wants to become, guide it slowly toward something beautiful.
I make a small cut on one branch, barely a whisper of the shears. By next year, this will change the entire balance of the tree. Patience.
But my hands shake slightly as I set the shears down, and I know why.
The gala rushes back uninvited. Her gasp when my fingers found her. The way she arched into my hand even as she cursed me. The slick heat, the flutter of her walls around my fingers, how she shattered in my arms but never broke. The texture of her skin under my hands when I pinned her wrists today, soft over steel.
And her taste. Christ, her taste. Sweet and salt and female fury that I can't wash away no matter how much vodka I drink.
I close my eyes, let myself remember for just a moment. The way she looked in the training room, deadly and graceful and magnificent. "There's my girl," I'd said, and I'd meant it. Mine. Even if she's going to destroy me.
I think about the trap I've set. Within the next three weeks, either the Rosettis will move on false intelligence and I'll have my proof, or they won't and I'll have to accept that maybe she's exactly what she claims, a kidnapped princess making the best of an impossible situation.
Part of me hopes she takes the bait. It would be simpler. Cleaner. I could kill her for betraying me and move on.
But the larger part, the part that can still taste her on my tongue, that gets hard just thinking about her pressing against that mirror, that part hopes she doesn't. That part wants her to be here for something else entirely. Something that has nothing to do with family loyalty and everything to do with the way she said she needs answers only I can give her.
I pick up the shears again, make another tiny cut. The bonsai doesn't flinch, doesn't protest. It accepts the shaping, becomes what I guide it to become.
Sofia isn't a bonsai. She's something wild that I'm trying to contain, and she's reshaping me as much as I'm trying to control her.
Some things take time, I tell myself, setting the shears aside.
And some things are worth the wait.
Even if they destroy you in the end.
