Her heels clicked behind me until I reached the door. I unlocked it and held it open. The stench rushed out immediately. She covered her mouth and nose but stepped inside without hesitation.
I watched her circle him.
Curiosity. Hatred. Disgust. Pity.
I didn’t need to look at Sergei to know what she was seeing — greying skin, bones protruding, eyes yellowed and jaundiced. He was clinging on with the stubbornness of a man who had run out of everything except the refusal to go. Hell was waiting. Why delay?
She never released the pendant once.
That was the moment I understood—if anyone ever harmed Runa, or any of our children, Iskra would obliterate them from the earth. Whatever she felt toward me was a fraction of what she carried for our daughter. An infinitesimal fraction.
I slipped the keys into my pocket and leaned against the wall.
She glanced around the room. Empty, except for my uncle curled on the floor. She raised her foot and placed her heel against his neck—precise, deliberate, the balance of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. She pressed down, cutting off his air supply, and somehow kept her balance throughout.
Sergei raised his hand weakly.
She moved with the grace of a ballerina—kicking his hand aside and stepping onto his arm instead.
I frowned.
Her skirt had fallen over his face.
I hadn’t left her any underwear to wear beneath that dress this morning.
“You,” she spat, stomping her heel into the palm of his hand.“You took my son.”
Her venom was sudden enough to raise my eyebrows—but as she spoke I heard the tightness underneath it. The grief that had been sitting there the entire time, contained until this room gave it somewhere to go.
Sergei screamed. I glanced at his hand. Blood. He couldn’t have much left to spare.
Her skirt billowed as she pressed her weight down onto his neck—bouncing, deliberate, the choking and gasping sounds filling the small room. I pressed my lips together, trying not to smile.
She went on to curse him.
Such creativity.
She stepped off and began to kick.
Ribs. Face. Legs.
I should have intervened. Instead I watched—the red silk and the glass heart and the heel finding its mark with the precision of a woman who had been waiting to vent months of frustration. Not toward a random person. Toward the person who caused the accident. In this room it didn’t matter that Sergei was blood.
Yet all I wanted was to take her into the next room and screw the life out of her.
People feared me for my reputation. For the wicked acts I had committed alongside my father. But here was a five foot nothing, sweet-looking blonde kicking the shit out of my uncle.
I had made several incorrect presumptions about Mrs Dragunova.
She was panting by the time I strode across the room and caught her wrist. When she didn’t stop I lifted her, dragging her back as she tried to land a few final kicks, her heels grazing the sealed floor.
“I’ll have to wash that blood away,” I murmured, glancing at Sergei.
He was curled into himself, clutching his hand, crying with the particular indignity of a man who had orchestrated the deaths of others and was now undone by a woman in a silk dress.
“Such a pity,” she said, her tone suggesting the opposite entirely.
She was begging for what came next without knowing it.
