Elizabeth
The kitchen is the only room in the house that still feels like mine.
Flour dusts the air in a soft cloud, catching in the light that pushes through the small window over the sink. My hands move on instinct. Measure, sift, stir, while my mind drifts somewhere between the past week and a future I haven’t dared look at yet.
The bowl is heavy under my palm as I turn it, folding butter into sugar, sugar into eggs.
The rhythm calms me. There’s a comfort to baking that nothing else touches.
Ratios. Heat. Time. You do the work, and something changes.
Something transforms. The opposite of how it feels existing in this house.
The silence presses in, louder than any argument.
My father left early this morning. He didn’t say where he was going. He doesn’t say much at all to me now unless it’s sharp enough to cut.
You embarrassed me, Elizabeth. Leaving the wake so soon… people talk. They think you were ungrateful. He was to be your husband.
He hadn’t looked at me when he said it. Just stared past me, like I was another piece of furniture he regretted buying.
I scrape down the sides of the bowl with the spatula and focus on the pale, creamy mixture. It’s easier than thinking about the way his voice sounded. Not sad. Not grieving.
Accusing.
I could have told him the truth. That I left the wake because I couldn’t stand another second in that suffocating room, listening to strangers pretend Piotr was a good man. That every “he will be missed” made my stomach twist until I thought I’d be sick.
I could have told him that standing beside that coffin felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, and that I was already numb from the fall I’d taken years ago.
I could have told him that I didn’t leave because of Piotr.
I left because of the man standing across from me.
I see him again every time I close my eyes. The church. The candles. The coffin. And then his gaze, cutting through the space, pinning me in place like he’d been waiting his whole life to recognize something he found in me.
Diomid Agapov.
Piotr’s nephew.
And for one strange, disorienting heartbeat, I had felt seen.
I swallow, push the thought away, and reach for the flour. It poofs into the bowl in a soft white cloud. My wrist aches from whisking, but I don’t stop until the batter is smooth, glossy, obedient. At least something in this house listens to me.
I pour the batter into the tin and smooth it with the back of a spoon. Lemon and thyme cake. My grandmother’s recipe. Her handwriting lives on the dog-eared card propped against the flour jar, elegant little curls and precise notes.
A balm for the soul. Sharp and earthy, to remind us of who we are. Don’t open the oven too soon, let it rise.
“Let it rise,” I murmur under my breath, sliding the tin into the oven. “At least one of us should.”
The timer clicks as I set it. Twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes of busying myself to keep my mind quiet.
I’m rinsing the bowl when the knock comes.
Sharp. Decisive. Three quick raps that send a shiver through the quiet.
I freeze, hands submerged in warm, soapy water.
Froth clings to my fingers like pale gloves.
For a second, I tell myself I imagined it.
Nobody visits us without calling. Not anymore.
Not since my mother was murdered. Not since my father’s temper became something visitors had to step carefully around.
The knock comes again. Less patient.
I pull my hands from the water and wipe them on my apron. Foam clings to my wrist. My heart starts to climb, a slow, deliberate ascent that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with some old instinct that’s learned knocking means news, and news is never good.
Maybe it’s one of my father’s men. Maybe it’s a delivery. Maybe it’s—
I push the thought away before it can shape itself.
The hallway seems longer than it did this morning.
Each step echoes, the sound swallowed by the old wallpaper and the stern faces in their frames.
Ancestors stare down at me as I pass. Dark eyes, set mouths, thin-lipped women who probably never baked a cake in their lives.
Women who knew how to bow and nod and obey without poisoning anyone.
I rest my hand on the door handle and let myself take one slow breath. In. Out. Calm.
When I open the door, the world narrows.
He fills the doorway like he belongs there. Broader than I remembered, taller too, though that might be because there’s no incense haze, no distance, no coffin between us now. Just a threshold.
His suit is dark, tailored in the kind of fabric that whispers of money and power and a life lived in rooms my father no longer gets invited into.
His hair is neatly cut, his jaw shadowed with the beginning of stubble that makes him look a little less like a carved statue and a little more like a man who’s forgotten to sleep.
But it’s his eyes that hit me.
They’re the same as in the church. Sharp. Watching. Not in the way Piotr used to watch women like they were things to consume, but like I’m a problem he can’t stop turning over in his mind.
That same strange sensation rolls over my skin, like he strips away every layer of politeness and finds the person underneath I thought I’d buried with my mother.
For a second, I forget how to speak.
Then the training kicks in. Good daughters don’t stand and gape. Good Bratva women don’t let powerful men see them unsettled.
“Mr. Agapov.” My voice sounds almost steady. “My father isn’t home. You’ll have to come back later.”
One of Diomid’s brows twitches, just enough to show he hears the dismissal under the politeness. His gaze flicks past my shoulder, into the shadowed hallway beyond, then settles back on my face.
“I’m aware your father isn’t home,” he says quietly. His accent is cleaner than my father’s, smoother. Educated. “His car isn’t outside.”
My fingers curl against the wood of the door. “Then why…?”
“I did come to speak with him,” he says. “But it seems I’ve found you instead.”
The way he says it sends a small, involuntary ripple down my spine. As if finding me was what he wanted all along, even if he didn’t know it.
Heat flickers low in my stomach, shocking in its intensity. Completely, utterly inappropriate. I squeeze my fist until it hurts.
This is Piotr’s nephew. His blood. His world.
And mine, whispers something traitorous inside me.
I straighten my shoulders, careful to keep the door between us like a shield, my body angled so he sees less of the inside of the house and more of my refusal.
“As I said,” I repeat, quieter, “you’ll have to come back when my father is here.”
Most men would accept that. At least pretend to. Diomid doesn’t move. His gaze doesn’t waver. He studies me for a moment that stretches too long, the silence between us filling with all the things I won’t say.
“I won’t keep you,” he says eventually. “I just need to ask some questions. Business. Contracts. Agreements. I thought he might have left word with you.”
“No.” I shake my head. “He didn’t.”
He hums, a thoughtful sound that does nothing to help steady the flutter under my ribs. The air smells faintly of car exhaust and something sharper, cleaner. His cologne, maybe, threaded with cold air and the barest hint of leather.
“What about you?” he asks.
The question catches me off guard. “What about me?”
“Do you have questions?” His gaze flickers, just once, toward my left hand. The naked ring finger. “Some people find themselves… unmoored, after a death like this. After an engagement ends so suddenly.”
The words are neutral. On the surface, they’re nothing but polite concern. But underneath, they slice.
He saw me at the coffin. He saw the way I didn’t cry. He saw the way my lips touched the icon and not the man. He saw the ring too, a glittering piece of Piotr’s ego on my hand.
Now he sees its absence.
The panic that tries to rise this time isn’t the wild, choking kind I used to feel in Piotr’s presence. It’s narrower, targeted, like a knife turned inward.
He knows.
No. He suspects.
There’s a difference. A thin one. Dangerous.
He can’t prove anything. No one can.
“I’m fine,” I say. The lie tastes like ash on my tongue, dry and clingy. “I’m… adjusting. But I don’t have questions. The engagement was only a week. There wasn’t much to end and I expect nothing from his estate.”
He had it with him that day in my fathers office.
Slid it onto my finger while my hands trembled with what I knew was about to happen, though he assumed it was nerves and excitement.
I’d left the room on my fathers orders to fetch a new bottle of vodka to toast with, taking my time on purpose, and when I’d returned the tea was already gone.
I thanked whatever was looking down on me, hoping it was my grandmother. Or my mother. Hoping that they had had a hand in this too so I didn’t have to shoulder the weight of it alone. Accepting that I would.
Something flashes across Diomid’s face.
“A week,” he repeats softly. “Long enough for most women to become very attached to a diamond like the one on your finger at the funeral.”
That ring had felt heavy on my hand, an iron shackle disguised as a promise. I’d stared at it that first night until my vision blurred, trying to imagine what my life would look like with it always there.
Then I’d thought about my mother.
My body moves before my mind catches up.
“Wait here,” I say, taking a step back.
I don’t know why I’m doing this until I’m halfway down the hall, the old runner muffling my footsteps. The house feels different with him standing in the doorway behind me, less like a tomb, more like a held breath. My heart beats too loudly in my ears.
In my bedroom, the light is softer, filtered through thin voile. I cross to my dresser. The ring sits on the shelf of the mirror where I left it after yesterday the funeral, unable to bear the weight of it any longer.
It looks wrong here. Too bright. Too clean. Like a lie set in bright gold.