My mind doesn’t settle. It keeps moving, circling the same thought over and over, threatening to wear me down through repetition alone.
I may have stood firm in that room. I may have insisted I stay. But now that I’m alone…it feels different. I sit on the edge of the bed, one hand instinctively drifting to my stomach.
The feeling there grounds me—and terrifies me at the same time.
When will Anton come for me?
The question doesn’t leave. It just changes shape.
Could it be today?
Tomorrow?
Is he already close enough that I’d never know until it’s too late?
My breathing tightens slightly, and I force myself to slow it down. Inhale. Exhale. Like I’ve been taught. Like I’ve learned to do when fear starts trying to take over my body before my mind can stop it.
My gaze drifts across the room. Eventually, it lands on the vanity.
The folder is still there.
Sergei Volodin’s folder.
I haven’t touched it since he left it with me before he died. I keep telling myself I’ll get to it, but I never do.
But now…I don’t have the luxury of avoiding anything anymore.
Not when everything is already closing in.
I stand slowly and cross the room. My fingers hesitate for only a second before they close around it. It’s heavier than I remember, or maybe it just feels that way now.
I sit back down on the bed with it in my lap.
For a moment, I just look at it.
Then I exhale and open it.
The folder is filled with paper, ink, signatures…yet it feels like something far more dangerous than any weapon I’ve held.
Financial records. Ownership certificates. Legal seals. Structures of companies I’ve only ever heard spoken about in passing, now laid out in precise, undeniable detail. Layer after layer of documentation that connects everything back to one point. One name. One line of inheritance.
Mine.
My breath catches slightly, but I keep reading.
Each page confirms it. In law. In structure. In cold, irreversible proof.
The Petrov empire still belongs to me.
I’ve always known it, but seeing it in front of me is freeing.
Anton may have taken power through force—through fear, through violence, through whatever control he’s managed to claw together—but none of it changes what sits here in black and white.
He never actually inherited it.
He never secured it.
He only occupied it.
