Elizabeth #2
I pick it up between my thumb and forefinger. Cold metal, smooth and unforgiving. The diamond catches the light and throws it back in a hard, prismatic flash.
You were going to belong to him, I think. The man who killed my mother. The man I killed slowly, carefully, with doses measured in my grandmother’s handwriting.
It feels like something unfinished, still tying me to a ghost.
I close my fingers around it and head back down the hall.
Diomid is where I left him, patient as a statue, one hand in his pocket, the other resting lightly against the doorframe. He looks up when he hears my steps, amber eyes catching on the tight set of my mouth, the closed line of my fist.
The space between us seems smaller now. The outside world is a blur at his back, the inside of the house a shadow behind me. We’re standing on the threshold of something I’m not ready to try to understand.
I hold out my hand.
“This was your uncle’s,” I say. “I don’t think it’s right for me to keep it.”
For a heartbeat, he doesn’t move. Then his gaze drops to my hand. His fingers brush mine as he takes the ring, a whisper of contact that shouldn’t matter but sends a little electric shock dancing along my skin.
His hand is warm. Steady. Real.
He turns the ring between his fingers, studying it with a little furrow between his brows, as if the metal might confess something I won’t.
“Most women don’t give something like this back,” he says quietly. “Especially not in this world. They fight for it. Claim it as payment. Compensation.”
I think of the tiny notes in my grandmother’s margins. The careful dosages. The pressed flowers. Remedies for everything except what to do with the ring of the man your father gave you to.
“I didn’t earn it,” I say. “It was never really mine.”
His gaze lifts, pins me again. “You were engaged to a powerful man. That alone is something.”
“I agreed because my father asked me to,” I reply. “Because it was expected. Because it was easier to say yes than to start a war over a wedding. But that doesn’t mean it belonged on my hand.”
His mouth twists, not quite a smile. “So you were being dutiful.”
“Isn’t that what good Bratva daughters do?” I ask, the sarcasm dripping from the words before I can think to control it.
The answer hangs between us, more honest than anything I’ve said out loud in months.
His eyes narrow slightly, studying my face. I feel stripped bare under that look, as if he’s reading layers of me like pages, flipping through until he finds the line that doesn’t match.
“And did you love him?” he asks.
The question lands soft but heavy.
For a moment, the house feels full of ghosts. My mother’s laugh, the smell of herbs, the rasp of Piotr’s voice when he told me he’d be a kind husband if I didn’t make him be something else.
I could lie. Good daughters lie all the time. They say what eases their fathers’ pride, their uncles’ tempers, their world’s thick, choking traditions.
But there’s something in Diomid’s gaze that makes lying feel pointless.
“No,” I say simply. “I didn’t love him.”
There’s no tremor in my voice. No sorrow. Just fact.
Something changes in his eyes. It’s small, but it’s there. A flicker of satisfaction, or maybe confirmation.
The silence stretches, taut as a wire. I’m painfully aware of how close we’re standing, of the way his shoulders fill the doorway, of how my heart won’t slow down no matter how hard I tell it to.
He rolls the ring once more between his fingers, then closes his hand around it.
“Thank you,” he says. Two words, polite enough. But his gaze doesn’t match the civility. It feels like a promise. Or a warning.
I realize, suddenly, that I’m not afraid of him in the way I should be.
I should be terrified. This is a man who lived in Piotr’s shadow and walked away unsinged. A man whose eyes missed nothing at the funeral. A man who stands in my doorway now holding the ring that symbolised my cage.
Instead, the coldness in my chest tangles with something else, something that makes my skin feel too tight. Attraction is too small a word. It’s not a crush, not a silly flutter. It’s recognition with teeth and claws and determination.
I push it down until it settles somewhere deep and molten, where I pray it will cool down into placid civility and I can ignore it.
“I—” My voice comes out too thin. I clear my throat. “I should get back to the kitchen. The cake…”
The timer chooses that moment to beep, shrill and insistent down the hall. The sound jerks me back into myself, into this house, into the reality where people are killers or killed.
“Of course,” he says. “I’ll speak to your father another time.”
He steps back, out onto the step, the cold air rushing in to fill the space where his body was. I feel it on my beneath the knit of my sweater, a sudden chill that raises goosebumps.
He doesn’t put the ring in his pocket. He keeps it in his hand, like a marker.
“Good afternoon, Elizabeth,” he says.
My name in his mouth does something awful to my chest. I nod, because I can’t trust my voice, and close the door gently.
My breath comes out in a rush. On the other side, his footsteps recede, measured and unhurried, each one taking him further away and somehow lodging him deeper under my skin.
The timer keeps beeping. I push off the door and walk back to the kitchen.
The lemon cake has risen beautifully, golden and domed, the air rich with sugar and citrus. I pull it from the oven and set it on the cooling rack. Steam curls up, coating the window, blurring the world outside into vague shapes.
I pick up the lemon I zested earlier and turn it in my hand, pressing my thumb into the rind until the juice bursts through, sharp and clean under my nails.
Piotr is dead. His ring is gone. His nephew walked up to my home and looked at me like he could see the dark, crooked path that led from my grandmother’s diary to a man gasping his last breath.
I should feel free.
Instead, as the scent of warm lemon fills the room, I realize with a slow, sinking certainty that I’ve only traded one kind of danger for another.
I killed the man who killed my mother and wanted to own me.
And now I’ve caught the attention of the man who might know the truth without me ever whispering a word.