“Don’t make me bury you too.”
The words hit me squarely in the chest, knocking the air from my lungs in a way no threat from Nikolai or the Pact ever has.
Lena deals in truth. She does not bluff. She never has. She has buried enough of our family to know exactly what a warning like that costs and what it means for both of us when she says it out loud. She knows how quickly this life turns on its own, how loyalty rots and even love can be the one thing that buries you six feet under.
We were children when the first funerals started stacking up. Too young to understand why our parents stopped smiling, too young to grasp why guards replaced friends and why every goodbye carried the weight of finality.
Hurt became a constant companion long before either of us learned how to articulate it, draping itself over us until apathy felt like armor rather than absence. We learned early that caring too much was dangerous, that grief was not something you survived once but something you learned to carry quietly so it didn’t give your enemies a place to strike. Lena and I grew up inside that truth for a long, long time.
We are the only family either of us has left now. Losing her would not be just another wound I could cauterize and move past. It would be catastrophic, the kind of loss that would perhaps kill me.
The echo of her warning isn’t lost on me. I understand that whatever path I’m on now threatens not just my life or my empire but the last person who has ever truly known me and stayed anyway.
She says nothing more before slipping out into the hallway, the door closing softly behind her.
15
ALINA
It’s been over a week since that night with Sasha.
Already, it feels surreal.
When I try to hold onto it, the memory slips through my fingers. Sometimes, I catch myself wondering if I imagined all of it. The details blur at the edges, softened by time and disbelief, until it feels less like a memory and more like a dream I woke up from too quickly.
What feels real—suffocatingly so—is the silence that has followed since then.
Sasha hasn’t looked at me the same since.
In truth, he barely looks at me at all. When our paths cross in the halls, it’s like we’re strangers bound by proximity rather than two people who crossed a line that can never be erased. His words are clipped and professional, stripped of any warmth that might suggest the intimacy we once shared.
He’s gone back to treating me like a wandering spirit in his home. This place feels haunted again, not by ghosts of the past,but by the echo of what briefly existed between us and was then quickly buried.
Meals appear outside my door every few hours like clockwork.
I hear the quiet approach of footsteps, the soft pause just on the other side of the wood right before knocking. Lev’s presence is the easiest to recognize, but even he doesn’t linger long. The tray is set down, the footsteps retreat, and then silence settles back in thicker than before. I eat mechanically, if at all, the food tasting like nothing.
The distance Sasha has put between us feels like he’s cutting away an infected piece of tissue before it can spread.
For a week I’ve been trapped inside my own head, pacing the same mental corridors over and over again until I’ve gone nearly insane. I replay every look, every word, every touch until they lose meaning and then circle back again sharper than before.
The questions never stop.
What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? Was it a mistake, a weakness, a kindness he immediately regretted? Or did that come later?
The spiraling leaves me hollowed out and exhausted, caught between wanting answers and being terrified of what those answers might bring. I’m suffocating in the wake of it. Drowning with the need to talk to someone before I explode because staying trapped inside my own head is starting to feel dangerous.
But who is there?
Lev is the closest thing I have to a confidant, and that truth is both comforting and a little cruel. Sweet, awkward Lev, who brings my meals and pretends not to notice when I barely touchthem. Who clears his throat when our conversations veer too close to something personal.
I can see it in his eyes when I ask questions he can’t answer—questions about Sasha, about why the rules keep tightening instead of loosening, about whether any of this will ever end. He wants to help, I know he does, but he’s bound just as tightly as I am, only by loyalty instead of locked doors.
Every answer eventually circles back to the same refrain, delivered gently, like a mantra meant to soothe rather than inform.“He’s keeping you protected. That’s what matters.”
Protected from what? From whom? From my father? From the world? Or from himself?
I stop bothering after a while because I can tell when I’m nearing the edge of what Lev is allowed to say.
