Chapter Six - Rostya
The council room reeks of smoke and power. Heavy curtains blot out the night, trapping the haze of cigars beneath the high ceiling. Polished wood gleams under dim light, the table a dark mirror ringed with men who pretend to be equals but know better.
Vodka sits in cut-glass tumblers, sharp scent cutting through the musk, but none of it is touched. Not yet.
The air thickens when I step through the doors.
Silence settles like ash. No word spoken, no chair shifts, but I feel it.
The room bends, eyes tilting toward me, suspicion sharp as knives.
The breach hangs over us like blood on the floor, unseen but stinking, and every gaze says the same thing: if my walls can be breached, so can theirs.
I take my seat. I don’t need to clear my throat, don’t need to announce myself. Attention is already mine.
“Is the empire compromised?” The question comes soft from the far end, but its edge is meant to cut.
Another follows, cloaked in diplomacy. “Could someone inside be… feeding the enemy?”
The smoke twists upward, veiling the pause I allow before answering. Calm. Clipped. I don’t rush. My words are deliberate, the way a knife slides into a sheath.
“The culprit has been caught,” I say, voice steady, low enough that men must lean forward to catch every syllable. “The interrogation will strip truth from them soon enough. There is no compromise. Only delay.”
No one breathes for a beat. Then the scrape of a chair leg breaks the silence, and the council shifts, restless but cautious. My tone carries what my words don’t: doubt me and you’ll learn the cost.
Still, one pair of eyes lingers. Narrowed. Testing.
I let mine find him. I don’t blink. I don’t speak. The silence stretches, heavier with each second, until the weight of it presses like a hand at his throat. He lasts longer than most—ten seconds, maybe twelve—before his gaze falters, sliding down to the table.
I sip my vodka at last. The burn cuts sharp down my throat, and the room exhales as if permission has been given.
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. The inevitability of me is louder than shouting, and they all hear it.
The talk of business dwindles the way a storm drags itself out, leaving behind heavy air. Ledgers closed, agreements nodded through, the elders settle deeper in their chairs. Cigars glow, vodka pours. The smoke thickens until the chandeliers blur, and with it comes the inevitable shift.
Business gives way to politics, and politics to the matter they consider just as vital: bloodlines, marriages, the weaving of names into chains stronger than steel.
One of the elders leans forward, his voice slow, oily with familiarity. “It has been long expected,” he says, tapping ash into a silver tray, “that your betrothal to the Sokolov girl be finalized. A union of such weight would steady the empire in the eyes of those who watch us.”
The words scrape against me. I’ve heard them before, over years that bleed into each other, each repetition wearing thinner at the thread of my patience.
To them she is an asset, a seal pressed into wax.
To me, she’s a set of shackles, her name a chain, her family a prison.
An alliance forged not from loyalty but from obligation, another hand reaching to control what I’ve built with my own blood.
My irritation sharpens into something cold, brittle. Enough.
I don’t wait for him to finish the sentence. My voice cuts through the smoke, steel splitting air. “I already have a fiancée.”
The lie falls heavy, solid, carrying itself as truth.
The silence that follows stretches, taut as wire.
Cigar smoke drifts in the stillness, unbroken, until one of them clears his throat and quickly looks down.
Another shifts uncomfortably, pouring vodka, though his glass is already full.
Their gazes slide between each other, measuring not the words themselves but the certainty in them.
Certainty is power here. Certainty is proof, and I give them only that.
I don’t elaborate. I don’t offer explanations, no name, no detail for them to pick apart. I leave them the edge of my conviction, nothing else. It’s enough. They know pressing further means stepping into a place they don’t belong.
Their silence is consent, reluctant but binding.
I push back my chair, the scrape loud against the wood, deliberate. Rising to my feet ends the matter, ends the conversation on my terms. The vodka remains unfinished, the smoke still curling above the table as I turn from them.
They can whisper when I leave. They can speculate, wonder, scramble to piece meaning together. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’ve set the ground, shifted the balance.
When I close the doors behind me, the silence they’re left with will remind them: I am not theirs to bind.
The doors thud shut behind me, the council room sealed in its haze of smoke and whispers. Out here, the air is cleaner, sharper, the echo of my footsteps striking against the marble floor.
The corridor stretches long and shadowed, portraits of long-dead men glaring down as though measuring my worth against theirs.
Inside, I was the wolf, untouchable in my chair, every gaze bending beneath mine. Out here, I’m only a man walking briskly, jaw tight, the mask of control pressed harder against my face than I’d like to admit.
Ivan’s stride falls in behind mine, measured, confident, the way it always does. He doesn’t speak right away, lets the silence drag until it feels deliberate. When his voice comes, it cuts through like a blade meant to test the skin, not kill.
“Since when,” he asks, tone edged with wry amusement, “do you have a fiancée?”
I don’t break stride. My steps stay steady, boots thudding a clean rhythm down the hall. My hands remain loose at my sides, though the urge to clench them itches beneath my skin.
“Find someone suitable to play the role,” I say flatly.
Ivan’s brow arches as I glance at him from the corner of my eye. His amusement lingers, but unease coils beneath it, a flicker in his gaze that betrays the weight of what just happened.
“That’s it?” he presses, voice lowering. “No explanation, no warning? Just conjure a phantom bride to throw at the wolves?”
My jaw flexes, but my tone stays clipped. “The Sokolovs will not have me tethered. Not their daughter. Not their leash. If I say I already have a fiancée, then I already have one. The rest is logistics.”
He huffs a quiet laugh, but there’s no real humor in it. His eyes study me the way only Ivan dares, cataloging the sharpness in my tone, the finality. “You’ve forced yourself into a corner,” he mutters. “The elders will want proof. A meeting. A name. You’ve given them no choice but to demand it.”
I stop in the corridor, turning just enough to face him. The chandeliers overhead cast fractured light across my shoulders, shadowing my face. My voice is lower now, rough with steel. “Then we’ll give them one. On my terms. Not theirs.”
For a moment, neither of us moves. The silence presses in, heavier than the smoke I left behind. Ivan tilts his head, measuring, the faintest trace of a smile ghosting his mouth. Not mocking, but knowing.
“You already have a plan,” he says softly.
My silence answers him.
He’s right, of course. The lie wasn’t made in desperation. It was weaponized, as every word I speak before the council is. They’ll expect her. They’ll demand her. I’ll deliver. It won’t be the girl they had in mind, not the one they want to leash me with, but someone else. Someone I choose.
Ivan reads it in the set of my jaw, the calm in my stride when I turn and begin walking again. He knows the clock started ticking the second the words left my mouth. He knows I’ll move mountains—or burn them—to ensure the lie becomes truth before the council presses its hand.
“Dark plan,” he says under his breath, keeping pace at my side. “Should I be worried?”
“You?” I glance at him, a thin shadow of a smile tugging at my lips. “Always.”
The echo of our footsteps carries us farther down the hall, the portraits watching, silent witnesses to a truth I don’t speak aloud: the Bratva believes the fiancée is real now. So she will be. Whether she wants to or not.
***
The monitors throw pale blue light across the room, cold and clinical, painting my hands white as I fold them on the desk.
A dozen feeds loop through—entrances, back corridors, the warehouse yard—each a river of motion I can watch and still.
The vodka sits untouched, a dark promise in a crystal glass, the surface unbroken. I don’t drink to think. Not yet.
The hum of the servers under the floor is a steady pulse, the kind that keeps men awake and machines honest. It fills the silence between my thoughts, steady and indifferent. I watch the screens until the images start to feel like flesh.
On one feed, small and boxed, she moves. Karmia, they called her. The hacker. The girl who pried a hole into my world.
She paces at first, the cadence nervous and defiant both—bare feet, hoodie draped like armor, the marks of zip ties faint and angry on her wrists.
At times she sits, jaw clenched, eyes tracking the door as if expecting the next blade to slip in.
Other moments, she simply stares at the concrete wall, the same blind courage I’ve seen in other men when they decide to die on their feet rather than kneel.
It fascinates me. It annoys me. It wakes an angle of curiosity I keep locked away.
I replay her face in my head the way others turn prized knives over their palms. The first time Ivan pulled the blindfold from her, she should have been small and broken, an animal come to heel.
Instead she gave me that stubborn silence, the tight set of her mouth.
She looked at me like a thing that had been wronged and decided, in spite of everything, not to plead.
Dangerous, yes. Interesting, yes.