“He was talking about signing papers. An official engagement.”
The air left my lungs.
So soon.
Three days. That was all I had. Three days between the girl I was this morning and whatever I was supposed to become after they left.
Signing what? My name to a man I had never spoken to. My life to a house I wanted nothing to do with. My future to a decision made in a room I hadn’t been invited into, by men who had never once thought to ask.
I stepped back until my knees hit the edge of the bed and sat down heavily.
I pressed my fingers to my temples, then dragged them across my eyes, trying to push the tension back somewhere manageable. It didn’t work. It never worked. It was the kind of pressure that lived behind the bone, unreachable.
This was the thing about being a daughter in this world. You were never free. The university had felt like freedom—small, regional, close enough for my father to watch—but it wasn’t. It had only ever been a longer leash. And now he was pulling it back in.
I was trapped.
Cornered by everyone who was supposed to love me.
The thought of becoming the Pakhan’s wife turned my stomach. Vadim Dragunov didn’t want a wife. The whole city knew what he wanted. Something obedient and quiet. Something he could set aside when he was finished with it.
“It might not be that bad,” Ruslan murmured.
I looked at my brother—his young face, still hopeful in the way that only boys in this world got to stay hopeful—and I laughed.
The sound was empty and wretched, and we both knew it.
??????
Dinner was an uncomfortable affair.
The kitchen was warm at least, the windows fogged with steam from the stove, the smell of dill, black bread and the particular closeness of a family that had run out of things to say to one another. Mama fussed over Ruslan. Papa glowered at the middle distance. The hearty soup was warming, but it was the tea and sweets that comforted me—the small, reliable things. The porcelain cup that had always been mine. The sugar that dissolved before you could watch it go.
“Iskra. Do not shame the Kozlov name,” Papa said, pushing his bowl aside and reaching for his cigarettes.
“Yes, Papa,” I said, and took a sip of tea.
He lit up and leaned back, and I watched the smoke curl toward the ceiling and hang there in the lamplight. Some of the tension loosened from his shoulders. He almost smiled. As though the worst of it was already behind him. As though he had solved something difficult and could rest now.
Would he even care if his beloved Pakhan killed me?
It wasn’t an idle thought. No one knew what had happened to Vadim Dragunov’s mother. No one dared to speculate about Lev Dragunov—not aloud, not in this city, not where the walls had ears that reported back. The Dragunov women simply ceased to exist at some point and no one asked why.
Vadim was around ten years my senior. His brother close to Galina’s age. I did the arithmetic I didn’t want to do—how long before I became another quiet disappearance? Another name that stopped being spoken? I would give him his heir and then what? Would I be set aside, or would I simply be erased?
Mama sat across the table as if everything was entirely normal. As if her daughter wasn’t being sold to a criminal over soup and cigarette smoke. She cut Ruslan’s bread for him and asked about his marks and laughed at something he said, and the performance of it made my chest ache in a way I couldn’t name.
When Ruslan started talking about school in earnest, the attention shifted and the pressure on me lifted by degrees. I finished my tea quietly. Then I stood and began to clear the table, moving between the kitchen and the dining room until there was nothing left to carry.
I stayed in the kitchen after that.
The water ran hot over my hands. The steam rose. Outside the small window above the sink, Chernograd was dark and going about its business—the city that had always belonged to men like the Dragunovs, that had never once allowed our women to shine. Women like me.
I let the tears come where no one could see them.
Chapter 3
Vadim
