My father grunted behind her.
“Make sure she is presentable when they come. The old Pakhan is traditional,” he said, and then the door hinges groaned and his footsteps faded down the hallway, and he was gone without once meeting my eyes.
Mama sat beside me on the bed. She cupped my cheek and gently turned my face toward hers.
“You know what he is like,” she murmured.
I nodded. Still somewhere far away from myself.
The entire city knew what Vadim Dragunov was. He had worked his way up through the ranks with vicious precision—the youngest Pakhan of this century, in any country. His reputation preceded him into every room he had never entered. He went through women like tissues. Used and discarded, one after the next, and none of them had mattered.
I would be expected to matter even less.
“I don’t want to marry him, Mama,” I whispered.
Her hand left my face.
She stood.
“You have no choice,” she said. Her voice was not unkind. That somehow made it worse.
The door clicked shut.
I sat staring at the middle distance, at nothing, at the particular quality of silence that follows something irreversible. There would be countless young women in this city who would give anything to marry into a house like the Dragunovs. The power. The money. The protection.
I was not one of them.
Heavy footsteps on the stairs. A quick knock, more courtesy than request, and then my brother pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“I just heard,” Ruslan said, catching his breath.
I stood and hugged him. He was at that awkward stage of seventeen where he didn’t quite know what to do with his arms, but he held me anyway and patted my back in a steady, uncertain rhythm.
My family was damaged in the distinct ways that families in this world tended to be. But Ruslan was still innocent. He didn’t carry what Galina and I carried. Not yet.
The thought of Galina made me wince. She had been furious when Papa allowed me to go to university—every freedom granted to me read to her as a restriction placed on her, as though my small escapes were somehow my fault. And now this? Being chosen by the most powerful man in Chernograd whilst she was already locked into her own marriage to a man barely worth the surname?
She was going to be unbearable.
“Galina is going to lose it,” Ruslan murmured, stepping back.“Her little munchkin husband won’t be any better.”
I laughed despite myself and slapped his arm.
“You’re terrible,” I said. Then the amusement fell away and left nothing behind it.“What am I to do?”
He pulled a grimace.“You know Papa once he’s made his mind up.”
I did. I knew all too well.
But I also knew that if my name had been put forward, it was his doing.
He had handed me over before I even knew I was for sale.
“Papa said they are coming this weekend. He was on the phone—” Ruslan stopped himself.
I glanced up at him.
“It’s all right. Tell me,” I said, bracing myself.
