Stefania
I hit the bag so hard the chain rattles against the ceiling mount.
"Again," Jess says. "But rotate your hips this time. You're punching with your arms."
I reset. Plant my feet. Drive the next hit from my core and feel the impact travel up through my shoulder and into my teeth. The bag swings wide and Jess catches it on the backswing, bracing it with both hands.
"Much better."
My lungs are on fire, my knuckles throbbing through the wraps, sweat clinging to my skin in a way that makes everything feel too tight, too loud, too much. Jess thinks I train like this because I’m disciplined. Because I enjoy it.
Jess has been training me for three years. She comes to the estate three times a week, sets up in the converted gym on the ground floor, and spends two hours pushing me until I can't think about anything except the next breath. She thinks I train this hard because I'm disciplined, or maybe because I'm one of those women who finds peace in the pain.
She's half right. I do find something in the pain. It's just not peace.
"Water break," she says, stepping back from the bag. "You're going to split your knuckles if you keep hitting like that."
I grab my bottle from the bench and drink. The gym is quiet except for the hum of the ventilation system and the distant sound of someone moving around upstairs. Ruslan, probably. My brother has been in and out of the house all week, making calls, taking meetings, ordering my other brothers around.
Our parents died when I was eleven in a car accident on the interstate. After that it was our Aunt Yana who raised us. Our father's younger sister. She moved into the house we inherited and raised us with steady hands and a quiet voice and the kind of love that didn't ask for anything in return.
She was raped and murdered six years ago. I was eighteen.
I don't think about it during training. I don't let myself. But today the memories keep pushing through because three days ago, Ruslan sat me down in our father's old study and told me I'm getting married.
"The Orlovs need wives," he said, like he was reading from a contract. "The council is restructuring and the families that cooperate get priority positioning. I've offered them you."
Offered. Like I'm a watch he's gifting to a business associate to sweeten a deal.
Ruslan doesn't feel guilty about trading me because Ruslan doesn't think of it as trading. He thinks of it as strategy. He's twenty-eight years old and he's been running what's left of the Rudakov name since the night our parents died, and every decision he makes is calculated to push us higher in our world.
An Orlov marriage is the biggest move he's ever made.
"You're somewhere else today," Jess says.
She's watching me with that careful, assessing expression she gets when she knows something's off but isn't sure she's allowed to ask. Jess isn't Bratva. She doesn't know what my last name means. She thinks I'm a rich girl with a home gym and toomuch free time, and I've never corrected her because the less she knows, the safer she is.
"I'm fine," I say. "Let's do the floor work."
We move to the mats. Jess runs me through combinations. Defensive sequences first, then offensive. She's a good teacher. She taught me how to redirect momentum, how to use a bigger opponent's weight against them, how to strike fast and get out before the situation escalates.
She doesn't know what I use it for.
Nobody does.
My thigh burns as I drop into a low stance. I'm aware of the scar without needing to look at it. Four inches long, slightly raised, running diagonally across my upper left thigh. A kitchen knife. His kitchen knife, actually. The one he grabbed from the counter when I came at him too fast and too sloppy and too blind with rage to think about what he might be holding.
I was eighteen. He was the man who killed Aunt Yana.
It was messy. I didn't know what I was doing. I had no training, no plan, just a name I'd pulled from pawn shop records where he'd sold Yana's ring and a rage that had been building inside me since the day they lowered her casket into the ground. I followed him, I waited, and when I broke into his apartment, I did everything wrong.
I didn't control the space. I didn't check his hands. I went straight at him and he pulled the knife and the blade caught my thigh before I even registered the flash of metal. The pain was blinding and white-hot. I remember looking down and seeing the blood and thinking, very clearly, that I was going to die in this apartment and nobody would ever know why.
Only I didn't die.
He did.
I don't remember the details after the knife. I know I took it from him. I know I used it. I know I walked out of that building with blood running down my leg and a dead man behind me and the absolute certainty that I was never going to feel powerless again.
