I wince instinctively.
Did.
Past tense.
Oh, God.
Everything clicks into place with a sickening clarity—the hidden portrait, the dust, the way it was shoved out of sight instead of honored like the rest of the ones lining this house. The quiet sadness I thought I imagined earlier when we first met. The way his gaze hardened when I pressed him about love. The reason he looked at me like I was a ghost he couldn’t quite shake.
Loss.
The kind that doesn’t fade. It calcifies.
I fall into step beside him, suddenly unsure of my footing. “I’m… I’m sorry.”
He stops.
Not abruptly, but enough that I nearly walk into him. He turns his head slightly, not fully facing me, his expression unreadable from this angle. For a moment, I think he might dismiss me, wave it off with indifference or irritation.
Instead, he exhales. “Don’t be. You didn’t kill her.”
The words aren’t said with any cruelness behind him. They’re worse, said in a detached way that suggests he’s said them to himself a thousand times over until it finally one day clicked.
I swallow. “What happened to her?”
His jaw tightens just enough to notice. “She was executed.”
“By whom?” I ask.
This time, when he turns to me, there is no mask left in place. No polite curiosity or amused detachment. Nikolai Malyshko finallylooks at me the way a man looks at a wound he never allowed to heal.
His eyes are dark, so dark they seem to swallow the light between us. Whatever lives there is old and bitter, buried under layers of control so practiced, they might as well be bone. It isn’t rage I see. It’s something colder, learned a long time ago that fury burns itself out but memory does not.
“By the man I took this position from,” he answers.
The sentence is almost conversational.
A chill crawls down my spine like ice tracing every vertebra. My stomach twists as the implications unfold all at once. His predecessor. The former leader of the Iron Pact. The man he overthrew.
His wife was executed, not by enemies across the table but by the one sharing his surname.
Nikolai turns away before I can find my voice again, already moving down the aisle. His steps are unhurried. “Sasha is waiting for you.”
I blink, still stunned so completely, the words don’t register at first. “What?”
“He’s come with your father,” he replies.
My heart slams violently against my ribs. I stumble to follow him, dread flooding my veins so fast, it makes my hands shake. The corridor opens up ahead, the shelves thinning as we near the exit of the library.
“You said you would think about my offer,” I manage.
“I did,” he replies, glancing back at me at last. Amusement has returned to his expression once again. “Then you delivered me an even better one without realizing it.”
My throat goes dry. “What does that mean?”
He slows just enough to allow me to catch up again. “It means that tonight, everyone will be forced to show their hand.”
Guards are already waiting near the doors beyond, standing at ease but watching me with a focus that makes my skin prickle. Somewhere beyond them, Sasha is standing in the same house, waiting for me.
