Diomid
The incense hangs thick enough to taste, sweet and suffocating, swirling through the vaulted arches of the church.
Candles tremble along the walls, flickering against the gold of the icons, making saints blink in and out of shadow.
I stand at the front like duty demands, even though it feels like a lie.
I might be family by blood, but not by loyalty.
I’m just a nephew to a man whose presence poisoned more rooms than his death ever will.
Piotr lies in his casket, hands folded, face arranged into peace he never earned.
The mortician has smoothed away the lines that made him him.
The sneer, the temper, the sharp twist of cruelty around his mouth.
Death disguises monsters. Makes them look harmless.
Almost holy. I wonder what he’d think of that, this soft mask he’ll wear in the ground.
I don’t mourn him. I’m not capable of it. But I can’t ignore the truth humming beneath my ribs.
He shouldn’t be dead.
Not like this. Not so quietly. Piotr had a constitution built from spite and vodka, a man who survived four stabbings and a car bomb no one was meant to walk away from.
Yet in the last months, I watched him wilt.
Slur. Forget. Shake. Until finally, with a gasp that seemed to strangle and twist him, he collapsed.
The decline was too precise. Too… engineered.
The thought circles in the back of my mind, restless, unfinished, like an equation missing the one symbol that will make the answer fall into place.
A door opens behind me, its echo rolling through the silence.
I don’t turn at first. Funerals pull attention like gravity, people drift inward, shadows gathering near the coffin.
But then the shift in the room changes, subtle but unmistakable.
The air tightens. Conversations falter. Even the priest seems to pause between breaths.
I glance back.
Lukan Ashomicht steps inside, shoulders squared beneath the weight of reputation and ruin, his jaw set in a line that used to intimidate far more than it does now. But he isn’t what catches my eye.
It’s the young woman beside him.
His daughter.
Elizabeth.
I’ve heard her name a hundred times in my uncle’s voice.
Spoken with greed, with certainty, with the smugness of a man who believed the world owed him a bride less than half his age.
He liked to talk about her. Liked to imagine she was already his.
He never elaborated on what he did to secure her.
Men like him only brag about the spoils, never the cost.
But the young woman in the doorway is nothing like the fantasy he painted.
Her face is pale under the candlelight, but her eyes are steady, her spine is straight.
She stands beside her father because she has to, but she holds herself apart.
It’s as if she’s learned that staying close to men like Lukan and Piotr only leads to burial plots and broken promises.
There is something in the stillness of her, something deliberate, as if she’s building a fortress out of quiet.
And suddenly the prickle at the base of my skull sharpens.
I’ve seen that look before. Not grief. Not innocence.
Resolve.
They walk forward. The room watches them. Lukan bows his head as the priest murmurs another verse, but Elizabeth’s gaze moves cleanly, cutting across icons, chandeliers, mourners, never staying anywhere for long.
Certainly not on Piotr.
Her expression doesn’t waver when her eyes skim the coffin. I know what fear looks like. I know what disgust looks like. I know what grief does to a face, how it breaks people open against their will.
She shows none of it. She’s unreadable in a way that has nothing to do with shock and everything to do with control.
And that’s when something in me shifts.
Because Piotr told me once, after too much vodka, when he enjoyed sounding like a king, that Yelena had agreed before she died. He said it as if the woman’s death was an inconvenience rather than something he’d caused, which I’m almost certain he did.
I used to wonder how Yelena really died. Used to wonder why Lukan broke so quickly after. The puzzle twists again, the pieces rearranging themselves into a pattern I can almost see.
Elizabeth steps forward when the priest calls the family for the last kiss.
She moves like a woman walking toward her execution, but there’s no fear in her steps.
Only certainty. The candlelight slides across her cheek, catching the glossy dark sweep of her hair.
Her engagement ring sparkles almost obscenely.
Her black dress brushes the stone floor with a soft sigh, and for a moment, the church doesn’t feel cold anymore. It feels tense. Expectant.
She stops at the coffin. Places her fingertips on the edge.
A girl promised to a man like my uncle should look devastated, or at least conflicted. Hell, I’d even take relief. She should be trembling, or angry, or something.
But Elizabeth is none of those things. She’s composed and collected. Almost peaceful in her grace.
She leans in and touches her lips to the icon lying on Piotr’s chest. It isn’t a kiss of grief. It’s ceremony. A gesture emptied of emotion.
Beneath the incense, I smell something faint on her skin when she straightens, earthy and rich. A scent I recognize from childhood gardens and women’s kitchens, from remedies whispered down through generations.
My uncle carried that scent on his breath in his final weeks.
The puzzle clicks harder, a soft, inaudible snap in the back of my mind.
Elizabeth steps back. She turns. And for a single breath, her eyes meet mine.
It hits like heat through frost.
There’s no guilt in her gaze. No apology. No plea for understanding.
Only awareness. A flash of recognition without familiarity and a quiet, steady yes to a question I haven’t voiced.
Then she looks away, walking back to her father with the poise of someone who’s already survived the worst thing a man can do to a woman.
And suddenly the church feels too small.
A woman who can stand at the coffin of the man who meant to claim her, a man who may have destroyed her mother, and offer him nothing but silence… That woman isn’t fragile.
She’s sharp. Focused. Dangerous in ways men overlook until it’s far too late.
A feeling washes over me so strong I almost rock on my feet.
I want to know the shape of the truth she’s carrying. I want to know the story she’ll never tell out loud. I want to know why Piotr’s death feels less like decay and more like the end of a long, careful plan.
The priest lowers the casket lid with a thud that echoes through the chamber. People cross themselves; some begin to weep. The candles flicker. The incense swirls.
But my attention never leaves her.
Lukan leads her toward the exit. She walks with her chin high, shoulders squared, her breath even despite the weight of a dozen gazes pressing against her.
She doesn’t look back.
But I do.
And I know, down in the part of me that never lies, that something began here. Something old, inevitable, and sharp-edged.