Watched the slow smile appear.
The old man was enjoying this. Every second of it—the bowing, the gratitude, the theatre of a man surrendering his daughter with both hands and calling it an honour. This was what he had wanted. Not just the heir. The performance of legacy. Proof that the Dragunov name still commanded rooms without raising its voice.
I let Leonid hold my hand a moment longer than I wanted to.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
He released me and stepped back, and I moved into the house without waiting to be led. My eyes swept the hallway once—coats on hooks, icons on the wall, the smell of a meal prepared too carefully for the occasion. Everything modest, deliberate and common.
I had work waiting.
I intended to make this quick.
Chapter 4
Iskra
Sunday was the Lord’s day. Not this.
It felt sacrilegious—to come from the cold quiet of the church, the incense still in my hair, the priest’s words barely settled, and return home to the dread of their arrival. My parents had brought extra chairs in and extended the table out.
I watched from behind the curtains as the street filled with black cars. Vadim Dragunov had bypassed thesmotrinyentirely. The formal viewing, the pretence of mutual consideration, the fiction that I might have been given a choice—all of it skipped. As though the decision was so foregone it hadn’t been worth the performance.
I supposed it hadn’t been.
I had caught a glimpse of him once. Galina’s wedding, six years ago. I had been nineteen and trying not to stare at the group of men who had arrived and rearranged the atmosphere of the room simply by entering it. Silent, watchful, coiled. I had noticed the way theirbykishifted when the celebration grew loud—hands dropping to rest at their sides, eyes scanning, bodies orienting toward exits. Ready. Always ready. Even at a wedding. Even surrounded by family.
I had been in awe then.
I was not nineteen anymore.
I knelt at the foot of my bed with my hands pressed together and prayed, though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was asking for. Deliverance seemed too much to hope for. Courage, perhaps. The ability to keep my face composed when I walked down those stairs.
Beneath the bed, behind the spare blankets my mother stored there, was the money I had been saving. Slowly, carefully, over years. I counted it every Christmas when I added my work bonus in, watching the number grow toward something that felt like possibility. A deposit. Distance. A life assembled quietly, without permission.
I was going nowhere now.
The door burst open.
My head snapped up.
Galina.
She was dressed for a different occasion entirely—something low-cut enough that even Mama had voiced disapproval at the neckline, which took some doing. She stood in my doorway and took in the sight of me on my knees and her expression curdled.
“Why are you praying?” she said.“You have the Pakhan.”
Before I could answer she scoffed, moved past me, and crossed to the window. She pushed the net curtain aside with one finger.
“Look at them,” she said.“Look at all of it.”
I didn’t need to look. I’d seen and heard it when they arrived. The sound of doors closing with that certain solid weight that expensive cars had.
“Borya has a ten-year-old second-hand car,” she continued, her voice pitching toward something that was half fury and half grief, though she would never have called it that.“He can afford me nothing. I live like a peasant.” She turned from the window, and the sneer that came with it didn’t quite reach her eyes the way it usually did. Underneath it was something rawer.“Papa always loved you more. He bought you a computer. He let you study. And now you get all this.” She gestured toward the window, toward the street, toward the black cars and what they represented.“It’s not fair.”
“Why don’t you marry him then, Galina?” I said, standing.
“Suka,” she snapped, and she came at me.
