The most telling clause was the fidelity one. He could touch anything that moved, in any city, on any night he chose. I was beholden to his cock alone for the duration of a marriage that only he had the right to end. My faithfulness was a contractual obligation. His was not mentioned.
I considered taking a copy to the priest. Standing before the cross in the cold quiet of the church and laying the pages at the lectern and watching Father Dmitri’s face. But I knew, even as the thought formed, that it would change nothing. The church stood in the shadow of the Dragunov compound. The cathedral spire was visible from his gates. God and the Bratva had long since reached an accommodation in this city, and women like me were not part of the negotiation.
There was nothing I could do to change the trajectory of my life.
I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling until it blurred. When the tears came they came slowly at first, tracking sideways down my face and soaking into my hair. Then I thought of the children—children I hadn’t had yet, children I hadn’t chosen to have, children who would be taken from me by Clause 10 the moment they stopped being useful to him—and something broke open.
I turned into my pillow and screamed until my throat ached.
It changed nothing.
I would be married in a matter of days.
The dress hung on the wardrobe door across from my bed. Elaborate, expensive, chosen without my input. It watched me day and night like a sentence already passed. I hated it with a specificity that surprised me—the weight of the fabric, the structure of the bodice, the way it seemed designed to display rather than clothe.
And the ring.
Even the ring had an inscription on the inside of the band.
Property of Vadim.
Not his wife. Not his partner. Not even his bride.
His property.
??????
The call for dinner came. I sat up slowly, still somewhere far from myself. I didn’t bother to wash my face. Didn’t see the point.
Downstairs, my parents talked between themselves as though everything was entirely normal. Ruslan watched me across the table—quick glances, carefully spaced, trying not to make it obvious. I ate without tasting anything, moving the food around my plate and swallowing when it seemed appropriate, wondering distantly what I was eating for. What any of it was for.
“Iskra.” Ruslan’s voice was quiet but direct.“What’s wrong?”
“Ask them,” I said, and looked at my parents.
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for Papa to find his fury.
“Get upstairs, you ungrateful brat,” he snapped.
“Gladly,” I said.
I pushed the chair back hard enough for it to scrape against the floorboards and walked out without looking at him. Behind me, his voice rose—subordination, disgrace, how it would get me killed, how I didn’t understand what he had secured for this family. The words followed me into the hallway and up the stairs and I let them wash past me like water.
I was halfway up when it settled over me, quiet and absolute.
My father knew. He had always known exactly what he was signing me into. He knew Vadim Dragunov’s mother had vanished after giving birth to two sons. He had read the proof in the contract. And he had sacrificed me anyway.
Day by day the fracture between us widened.
Ruslan still didn’t know the full truth of it. Perhaps my parents’shame kept them quiet—some last vestige of it, anyway. I stayed quiet for a different reason. He was seventeen and angry on my behalf already. If he knew what was actually in that document, he would do something irreversible, and I was not going to be the reason they buried my brother in the frozen ground outside this city.
So I said nothing.
And I carried it alone, the way Kozlov women apparently did.
??????
In the old days, the villagers and the bridal party would lament the end of a young woman’s life before she was married. Melancholic songs of woe passed from woman to woman, mouth to mouth, a ritual mourning for the girl who was about to cease to exist. The loss of girlhood. The passage into becoming something else entirely.
