“What did you say?”
He looked at me with an expression that was older than seventeen had any right to be.
“What can anyone say to Papa?”
I pressed my lips together and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He was right.
“No wonder they call it the black city,” I muttered.“It’s cursed.”
Or perhaps it was my family that was cursed—tethered to the Dragunovs by my father’s choices, generation by generation, until none of us could remember what it had felt like before.
“The positions here are full. Papa said they’d send me up north.” Ruslan straightened his collar where I’d gripped it.“We can talk about it later. I didn’t want you going in there with more to carry.”
My mind was still turning it over as we walked through the door.
I didn’t look at any of them when I entered. I kept my eyes down and let Ruslan guide me to the empty seat beside my mother. He moved to stand behind my chair and rested his hand on my shoulder—steady, quiet, present.
“My word, Leonid. She is more beautiful than I remember.”
I glanced up. Lev Dragunov, the old Pakhan, was smiling at me with what appeared to be genuine warmth. I smiled back. It was automatic and entirely false. Beside him sat a slightly younger version of himself—the brother, Sergei, with the same faded blue eyes and the same quality of a man who had once been formidable and knew it.
Then there was the Pakhan.
He was older than I remembered from Galina’s wedding. Larger. And much, much colder—the kind of cold that wasn’t absence of warmth but presence of something else entirely. Something that assessed and calculated and found everything around it either useful or irrelevant.
I could understand, objectively, why women found him attractive. The dark hair, the jaw, the authority that sat on him like a second skin. I could see all of it and feel none of it, because his pale blue eyes had dropped to my chest the moment I sat down and showed no interest in travelling further.
Of course they had.
The man was a well-known whore and apparently saw no reason to conceal it at his own engagement dinner.
I looked past him. The advisor—Ruslan, sharing my brother’s name in a coincidence that felt vaguely absurd—gave me a polite nod. Beside him, Konstantin. I had perhaps misjudged his age; he looked older than I had assumed. Similar colouring to his brother, similar stillness. He didn’t smile or nod. He looked away, as though I were a piece of furniture that had been moved into a room and didn’t quite fit.
“Thank you,” my father said, with a pride that made my stomach turn.
I glanced at Galina and Borya. Both of them wore the expression of people attending a funeral in which they had complicated feelings about the deceased.
Nothing new there.
Ruslan’s hand tightened briefly on my shoulder, then he moved to his seat and the meal began.
Everyone ate with appetite. My parents performed the perfect hosts—my mother refilling glasses before they were empty, my father laughing too loudly at the right moments. I managed part of a dumpling and some broth. I didn’t look up, but I felt his eyes moving over me like a hand that hadn’t touched yet but was deciding whether to. The room seemed to contract with every minute that passed. His presence had a quality to it—a dark gravity that drew the air toward him and gave none of it back.
When my mother rose to fetch the tea and desserts, I stood to clear the table. Something to do with my hands. Something to look at other than him.
My father took the heavier platters. I worked around the table methodically, collecting dishes, keeping my eyes on the task. When I reached for the Pakhan’s plate, his hand closed around my wrist.
I stared at his fingers.
They circled my wrist with complete ease, the way you’d hold something you weren’t worried about breaking. Large and unhurried. One twist. That was all it would take.
“Why the rush, Iskra?” he drawled.
“She’s barely looked at you all evening,brat,” Konstantin said, not quite to me and not quite to him.“Perhaps she had someone else on her mind.”
My hands began to tremble.
His grip tightened and I dropped the plate. The spoon cracked against the fine porcelain and the sound rang out across the table like a small alarm.
