Then she left.
I slanted my head and watched her go.
She couldn’t quite manage the full storm-off.
Not with the carrot still up her ass.
Chapter 18
Iskra
It was the same every morning. The rustle of him gathering his clothes in the dark. The soft thud of his shoes. Then the click of my bedroom door as it snapped shut behind him, and the silence that followed—the kind that was somehow louder than his presence had been.
I had seen his bedroom exactly once, on the first day I arrived, when I needed something to wear and Radovan had pointed me east with the expression of a man who had not been briefed on this specific scenario.
The days had begun to move strangely. Too slow inside the house, too fast when I measured them against what I was losing. My life had contracted to the dimensions of this estate—the garden perimeter, the west wing, the kitchen when I was feeling reckless, and the Pakhan with his cock on a schedule that was his to set and mine to accommodate.
Fine.
I was getting something out of it. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise at this hour of the morning, alone in the dark with pillows shoved under my hips.
But the shine of novelty was beginning to dim. And when it dimmed the prenuptial agreement came back into focus—all eleven clauses of it, clear and legally binding.
What was at stake. What was for sale.
One son.
That was all I needed to give him. One male child and the clause structure shifted in my favour—enough money to go somewhere, to start something, to become a person again rather than a function. He could try to prevent the divorce if he decided he wanted to keep me, but I had been thinking about that particular problem for weeks and I had the beginning of a contingency in place.
There were possibilities. I just couldn’t see all of them yet.
For now I couldn’t predict the Pakhan or the future, so I lay in the dark with the pillows doing their job and waited for his fastest sperm to reach one of my eggs.
I reached for my phone to play music that would help me get back to sleep.
Something on the nightstand caught the light.
I turned my phone torch on.
Three cards. Fanned out neatly on the polished surface as though they had been placed there deliberately—which of course they had. Nothing in this house happened without deliberation.
Platinum. Gold. Black.
Mrs I Dragunov.
Credit cards. Three of them, in a name I was still getting used to.
I picked up the black one and turned it over.
This wasn’t in the agreement.
With a sigh, I put it back.
I turned the torch off and tapped the screen to find my playlist. The soft instrumental music began to play. I tucked my phone beneath my pillow and closed my eyes.
I didn’t allow my thoughts to rest on my family.
I was here in this bed because of them.
