It was an obscene size. The kind of room that existed not for living in but for demonstrating that you could afford not to. The wide staircase rose from its centre and split at the top, one branch extending east, one west, dividing the house into two halves as neatly as a boundary drawn on a map.
Radovan led me west.
I followed, past gold-framed artwork hanging at measured intervals along the corridor walls. Classical, not modern. Portraits and landscapes in heavy frames—the kind of art that said old money and established authority rather than taste. The kind of art you inherited or bought to look as though you had.
He stopped at a set of double doors and opened them.
I stepped inside and forgot, briefly, to be unhappy.
The room was not white. After the stark pallor of the corridors the colour came as a physical shock—deep red panels set into the walls, rich and formal, each one framed in gold. The ceiling was cream with elaborate moulded cornices picked out in more gold, and at its centre hung a chandelier that caught the grey winter light coming through the tall windows and scattered it across every surface. Heavy curtains in deep red and gold flanked the windows, designed less for decoration than for keeping the cold on the correct side of the glass.
It was beautiful in the way that cages are sometimes beautiful.
I moved further into the room. A bed that could have slept four, a fireplace with a carved surround, furniture that matched in the way of things chosen by someone with money and no emotional investment in the outcome. I began opening doors.
A wardrobe. Deep enough to disappear into.
More storage beyond it.
Across the room—a bathroom. White marble, chrome fittings, a bathtub that sat on feet in the centre of the floor like something that expected to be admired.
Then I stopped.
One of the tall windows had a balcony. Narrow, wrought iron, overlooking what appeared to be the grounds—white lawn, white trees, white sky, the walls of the compound just visible at the far edge. Somewhere beyond them, Chernograd. Somewhere beyond Chernograd, a life I had been saving toward.
I stood at the glass for a moment.
Then I turned back to the room and remembered, with the clarity that arrives too late, that I had left everything at my parents’house. Every belonging I owned was sitting in my bedroom on the other side of the city, in a room that was no longer mine, in a house I had told myself I would never re-enter.
Practical problems for another hour.
“Where is the Pakhan’s bedroom?” I asked.
Radovan had remained by the doorway, hands clasped, expression neutral. He had the stillness of someone trained to occupy space without intruding on it.
“His rooms are on the east side of the stairs,” he said.
I let that settle.
West. I was east. The staircase split between us like a deliberate architecture of separation—which, given the man, it probably was. Separate wings. Separate lives. He had his half of the house and I had mine, and the only question was how often he intended to cross the distance between them and for what.
For now, it was enough.
“Thank you,” I said.
He reached for the door handles and drew both doors shut behind him. I waited for the sound of retreating footsteps.
Nothing.
He was still there. On the other side of the door, in the corridor, stationed. So thebykiwere not just for outside—they would remain with me inside the house as well. A shadow on each side of every door I closed.
I absorbed that and decided to be angry about it later.
I reached up and began to dismantle the veil, working the pins out one by one and laying them on the dressing table, the elaborate structure coming apart in pieces—the clips, the silk, the carefully constructed curls that Nina had spent an hour on this morning in a room that felt like several lifetimes ago.
The woman in the mirror looked tired.
She looked like someone who had survived the first day of a very long war.
