“Mama and Papa know what they’ve done. I won’t pretend otherwise and I won’t make it easy for them by reappearing at their table as though nothing happened.” I stood slowly, the dress rising around me.“I think it’s better if you forget you had a sister.”
“Iskra—” He stepped back as though I’d struck him.“No. I won’t—”
“It’s the only way I’ll survive,” I whispered.
His face crumpled for just a second before he caught it.
I reached up and kissed his cheek. Held my lips there a moment longer than I meant to, memorising the distinct warmth of him, this boy who had stood between me and the worst of this family his whole life without ever being asked to.
“I love you,brat,” I said against his cheek.“More than you know. But you must forget me. Live your life. Don’t trust a soul in that world Papa is pushing you toward. Not a single one.”
I made myself pull back before he could say anything else. Before I lost my nerve entirely.
I lifted the front of the dress with both hands and walked out of the room without looking back. Down the stairs, past the cluster of people in the hallway who parted for me with small sounds of admiration, past my mother who reached out and whom I did not stop for, past my father standing straight-backed and proud in the doorway of the sitting room, past Galina whose expression I didn’t trouble myself to read.
I didn’t stop until I reached the car he had sent. Long, black, idling at the kerb like a hearse that hadn’t quite committed to the metaphor.
It took some doing to get the dress inside. I gathered the layers and pushed and manoeuvred until I was seated and the fabric was roughly contained and the door could close. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror with an expression that suggested he had been given very specific instructions about this morning that did not include me getting in unaccompanied.
“Drive,” I said.
He didn’t move.
Behind me I could hear footsteps on the path. Voices. My father’s among them.
“Now.”
The engine turned over. The car pulled away from the kerb with smooth, expensive quietness.
In the rearview mirror I watched my parents standing on the pavement, my mother’s hand half-raised and my father’s jaw working on something he hadn’t managed to say in time. They could make their own way to the church. They knew where it was. Everyone in Chernograd knew where it was—the cathedral that rose above the rooftops in the shadow of the Dragunov compound, as though God and the Bratva had agreed to share the skyline.
I turned away from the mirror.
The streets moved past the windows. The salted pavements, the stone facades, the grey winter light falling flat and even across a city I had spent my whole life trying to leave. I had imagined leaving so many times. In none of those versions did I leave like this—dressed in pearls and someone else’s ownership, heading toward the thing I had been saving against.
I breathed through the constraints of the dress as best I could and watched my Chernograd disappear behind me. The only Chernograd I would know now was the Pakhan’s. His city, run by his law.
I did not let myself look for Ruslan in the mirror.
I didn’t trust what I would do if I saw his face.
Chapter 7
Vadim
The cathedral was cold in the way that old stone is always cold—not the cold of neglect but the cold of permanence, the kind that lives in walls three feet thick and outlasts every human event conducted before them. The candles did nothing to touch it. Hundreds of them, tall and thin, burning in iron stands and along the iconostasis in trembling rows, their light catching the gold leaf of the icon screen and throwing it back warm and ancient across the nave. The flat faces of the saints watched from every surface. They had seen everything in this building, and their expressions had never changed.
I had been married in my mind already. The contract was signed. The lawyer had filed. The arrangements were made. This was the performance—the part my father required, the part the vor recognised, the part that would be spoken of by the men who needed to know that the Dragunov line was secured.
I glanced at my watch. She was due in thirty minutes.
Father Dmitri was at the Holy Table, adjusting something with the focused concentration of a man trying to appear busy. I crossed the nave toward him, my footsteps loud on the stone floor, and watched him freeze before I reached him. His hands disappeared beneath his outer cassock. The pectoral cross swung as he straightened hiskamilavka.
“Batyushka,” I said. The same tone I used with my men. Respectful. Final.
He cleared his throat.
“Is everything to your liking, Mr Dragunov?”
