“That’s enough.” Ruslan stepped between us from the doorway, where he had apparently been long enough to read the room. He was quieter than I remembered him being even a year ago. Taller too.
Galina stopped. Something shifted in her face—the fury draining back behind her eyes, replaced by something more deliberate. She smiled.
“Or maybe you’ll end up with your throat slit once he’s done with you,” she said pleasantly, and walked past us both and down the stairs, her laughter trailing up behind her.
The silence she left was a specific kind. The kind that follows something said with the intention to lodge itself and stay.
I closed my eyes. Shook my head.
“She’s crazy, Ruslan.”
“You’ve only just noticed?” he asked, and the wryness in it almost made me smile. He looked me up and down properly then, and whatever he had been preparing to say next, he didn’t say it. His expression settled into something gentler.
“Too much?” I asked.
“Just perfect,starshaya sestra,” he murmured.
We shared a smile. It had been a long time since he’d called me big sister. I hadn’t realised until now how much I’d missed it.
I wore a simple white dress with a small floral print—it reminded me of the pale blossoms that were just beginning to bud at this time of year, the first tentative colour after a long winter. It was a little more fitted than I remembered, but modest. It would please my father. That had been the point when I chose it.
“Mama sent me to hurry you along,” Ruslan said, the lightness dropping slightly from his voice.
I swallowed. Stared at the open doorway.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned in close, the way he used to when he was small and I was the one doing the comforting.
“I am too,” he admitted.
It shouldn’t have helped. But it did. It made me feel less like I was the only one standing at the edge of something with no way back.
I was the big sister. I straightened my shoulders. Lifted my chin. Pushed my hair back from my face.
I was a Kozlova.
Whatever that was worth, it was all I had.
??????
We stopped in the hallway and I took a slow breath. Through the closed sitting room door I could hear men’s voices—talking, laughing, reminiscing with my father about the old days. The avtoriyet. The captain who had led others. Who had given orders and had them followed without question.
A criminal.
My father, the criminal.
“Don’t follow Papa’s path, Ruslan,” I whispered.
“I may not have a choice,” he said quietly.
I turned and gripped his shirt with both hands.
“What do you mean? Since when?” I shook him, but he didn’t budge. He was bigger than me now, and the realisation of that landed strangely—when had that happened?
“Papa told me yesterday,” he said.“He wants me to join the shestyorka.”
The probationary period. The bottom of the chain. An errand boy who ran and fetched and proved himself worthy of worse things to come.
