“Pozhaluysta,” I whispered. I wasn’t above begging. Not here, not in front of all of them.
“Pakhan.” The advisor’s voice was measured, careful.“Perhaps this isn’t the time—to play.”
A beat of silence.
His fingers loosened. Then, slower, they slid down to my pulse point and rested there—deliberate, unhurried, as though he were simply curious what fear felt like from the inside.
“You look better in person,” he murmured.
“Let me help,” my brother said from behind me, and I didn’t need to see his face to know what was on it.
“Ruslan.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. I glanced between them—my seventeen-year-old brother squaring up to a man who had people killed for inconveniencing him, and the Pakhan looking back at him with the idle interest of someone deciding whether a thing was worth the effort.
“I’m fine,” I said. I scooped the plate from the table and turned to go.
His hand moved to my leg.
Fingers curling, sliding upward—slow and entirely deliberate—higher.
I took everything I was holding and walked out of the room.
His laughter followed me down the hallway, rich and unhurried, as though the whole evening had gone exactly as he intended.
All the while my bare leg itched as though he had infected me with something incurable. I shuddered as I set the dishes on the countertop.
I worked alongside my mother in silence. When she leaned in and kissed my cheek I felt something loosen slightly in my chest — not hope exactly, but the memory of it.
“Everything will work out, darling,” she said.
She was lying. We both knew it. But she said it the way she said everything — with such practised certainty that for a moment I almost let myself believe it. Almost stepped into the soft, make-believe world she had built and maintained for decades, the one where Kozlov women were protected rather than traded.
I didn’t step in.
But I stood at the threshold a little longer than I should have.
Chapter 5
Vadim
Iskra wasn’t cold like her sister or completely timid like her mother. She was somewhere in the middle—flashes of defiance that caved too easily, like a door that hadn’t been properly fitted to its frame. Pressured enough in the right place and it would give.
The old photograph hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was thicker and longer than it had appeared, sun-kissed even in the tail end of winter. Her body had filled out since it was taken. And those hips were built for exactly what I required.
I glanced at my father. He was deep in conversation with my uncle and Leonid, entirely in his element—the patriarch among patriots, all of them congratulating themselves on an arrangement that served everyone except the girl in the kitchen.
He’d been right about one thing. The Kozlovs had remained loyal for decades, through transitions that had broken other families entirely. That counted for something in this world, even if it counted for nothing in hers.
The brother was a defiant little shit, though. If I was to be stuck with a wife, she ought to come from a family that understood the vor without needing it explained. A boy who squared up at a dinner table was either brave or stupid, and at seventeen the difference was largely academic.
She returned from the kitchen carrying a tray of desserts. My eyes settled on her again—specifically on the parts of her that her modest dress was doing its best to conceal. Supple. The kind of figure that suggested her body had more sense than her mouth. She set the tray on the table and began to arrange the plates, and I let myself consider, briefly and without sentiment, all the uses I intended to put her to.
Her brother materialised at her elbow before she could finish and took over the distribution of plates, shooting a look at me that he had no business having the nerve for.
“The kid’s got balls,” Konstantin muttered beside me.
“Takes after me,” Ruslan added cheerfully, already helping himself to a substantial slab of honey cake.
“You should consider your slowing metabolism,” I said.
