Those cold blue eyes found mine across the table and stayed there.
“You could resort to bestiality for all I care,” she said, with a smile that didn’t reach them.“Give you the genes you deserve.”
“Better a bastard from a whore than an heir from a bitch,” I snapped back.
The woman gasped.
Iskra’s smile broadened.
She sipped her tea and scrolled on her phone.
Chapter 44
Iskra
The woman was attractive, even with last night’s makeup smudged beneath her eyes. Her hair was a few shades lighter than his—not blonde, I noted, not even close—and her eyes sat somewhere between hazel and green with small black flecks. Interesting eyes, on another morning, in another life.
She didn’t like being called a whore.
And yet here she was, cosying up to him, her hand on his arm, laughing at things that weren’t funny.
Hm.
Not a whore then.
The only whore at the table was him.
She was something else. Opportunistic. Hopeful, perhaps, in the specific way of a woman who had been brought home by a powerful man and was calculating what that might be worth.
A gold digger, then. I couldn’t fault the instinct.
My attention drifted back to where it had been since I sat down.
The headstones.
Makari Kozlov-Dragunov.
But I would amend it. Makari Kozlov. Because fuck him and his name and his claim and his here is your replacement.
Makari meant blessed. No matter how brief his time was—how few months he existed, how little of the world he ever saw—he had been my blessing. He deserved to be named. He deserved the name I spent days mulling over. But now at the kitchen table with his father’s companion laughing too loudly beside me, it felt tainted.
The woman laughed again.
I winced. The pitch of it.
When I glanced toward the door Tau was there. Leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, watching the room with the unhurried attention of a man who had already assessed every exit and found them all satisfactory.
He had become my substitute company since Vadim dismissed Ruslan from the house.
“It was lovely to meet you,” I said to the woman, and stood.
The flash of anger from Vadim was delicious.
I smiled—the real kind, the one that had nothing to do with him—and lifted my dishes. Olya appeared immediately and took them from me with a small firm shake of her head that communicated several things at once.
I strode across the kitchen floor. Tau stepped back from the doorway and fell into step beside me without being asked.
I could show him the headstone design I had chosen during my morning walk. The marble. The lettering. He had already approved the name—that small nod in the corridor two days ago that meant more than any formal agreement could have.
