Chapter Nine - Karmia
I wake to stiffness that feels bone-deep, every muscle aching as though I’ve been twisted into some unnatural shape all night. The sheets are smooth, soft, expensive… but they might as well be stone.
My wedding dress clings to me, wrinkled and heavy, the lace biting into my skin where I slept in it. My arms are sore from being curled tight around myself, as though I could shrink small enough to vanish into the mattress.
The absurdity of it gnaws at me. Married, but left alone.
A bride in silk and lace, untouched, discarded like a mannequin after a window display.
I lift my hand, and the ring catches the morning light.
A band of metal, too heavy for its size, gleams against my swollen knuckle.
I stare at it in bitter disbelief, thumb brushing the edge as if it might flake away like paint.
It doesn’t. It stays cold, real, indelible.
He bound me, but didn’t want me. Not as a wife. Not even as a body beside him. His absence presses harder than his touch ever could. It says more clearly than words: I am a possession, shelved in plain view, to be used when it suits him and ignored when it doesn’t.
My throat tightens, a sting rising fast and sharp. I clamp down hard, pressing the feeling back. I won’t cry. Not for him, not for this. If I let myself sob now, I’ll never stop.
A knock breaks through the silence. It’s soft, hesitant, followed by the creak of the door.
A maid steps inside, head bowed, hands clasped neatly in front of her.
She doesn’t say much, only gestures for me to follow.
Her eyes flicker briefly to mine, but she looks away quickly, as though staring too long is dangerous.
I rise stiffly, the dress dragging heavy across the carpet.
My feet carry me down another set of grand hallways, sunlight spilling through tall windows, chandeliers glittering overhead.
Everything is opulent, perfect, and none of it belongs to me.
I feel like an intruder paraded through a museum where every painting and vase is older, stronger, more valuable than I will ever be.
The dining hall is cavernous. A long table stretches the length of the room, polished so bright I see my reflection swimming in the wood.
Platters wait, silver domes pulled back to reveal food I once would have only seen in magazines: fruits glowing like jewels, pastries delicate as lace, meats seared to perfection.
I sit where I’m told. Servants move around me silently, their eyes flicking up, then down, as if I am something strange, an animal dressed in silk, paraded for observation.
The rich food turns to ash in my mouth. I chew, I swallow, but every bite sticks in my throat.
Hunger should have made me ravenous. Instead, dread curdles everything.
Just when I think I might retreat back to the bedroom, another maid enters. She doesn’t bow or shuffle like the others. She moves briskly, clipboard in hand, her voice clipped and efficient.
“The boss requires you in his office,” she says.
The words hit harder than a slap. My stomach curls tight, dread coiling low and sharp. I rise slowly, palms pressed to the table to steady myself. Lace scratches my arms as I straighten. My legs feel heavy, but I force them to move.
If I falter, they’ll smell it. If I cry, he’ll see it.
So I steel myself. Chin high. Shoulders back. I walk toward whatever waits.
The office feels like stepping into the lair of a predator.
Dark wood gleams under muted light, leather chairs line the walls, and the massive desk dominates the space, a fortress of polished oak that keeps him elevated, unreachable.
The air carries smoke and the faint tang of iron, both lingering marks of the man who rules here.
Rostya sits behind that desk, perfectly at ease, his presence filling the room more than the furniture ever could. His eyes fix on me the moment I enter, cool and merciless, and the silence stretches just long enough to remind me who commands it.
“You will work for me now.” His voice is flat, stripped of ceremony. No introduction, no preamble. Just the strike of law laid bare. “The skills you used to crawl into my system will be bent toward repairing it. You will undo the damage. Hunt the trail. Close the breach.”
It isn’t a request. It lands like a sentence, heavy and sharp, the menace tucked into every word.
Outrage pricks under my skin. He stole my freedom, my future, my name—and now even my work? Rage curls tight in my chest, begging for release. But fire here will cost me more than pride. I force it down, tasting blood where I bite my tongue.
Still, the sarcasm slips, sharp and brittle. “Didn’t exactly plan on a nine-to-five after my wedding night,” I mutter, eyes fixed on the desk so I don’t have to meet his.
The silence that follows is taut, dangerous. Then another voice enters the space. Softer, sharper.
“You’ll find it’s less nine-to-five, more twenty-four-seven.”
My gaze shifts. A man stands near the corner, leaner, younger, his presence quieter but no less dangerous. The resemblance is there—sharp eyes, controlled movements—but where Rostya radiates dominance, his brother hums with precision. If Rostya is the hammer, Miron is the scalpel.
Rostya doesn’t glance at him. His decree is already carved in stone. “You will work with him.” His eyes pin me again, leaving no doubt who holds the leash. “Together, you will expose whoever used you as their mask. When you succeed, you will ensure no one touches my empire again.”
I stand stiff under his gaze, the weight of chains I can’t see pressing heavy across my shoulders. Bound in every way that matters—by name, by law, by work.
A prisoner, a wife, a weapon. All at once.
The days begin to smear together, one bleeding into the next until I lose track of time. Morning and night blur into the same pale glow of monitors, the same lines of cascading code, the same cold burn of concentration that knots my shoulders and reddens my eyes.
The chains at my wrists are gone, but it hardly matters—another kind of restraint holds me now. Not iron. Obligation. A leash dressed as purpose.
I sit for hours at the long desk they’ve given me, monitors stacked two high, wires curling across the floor like veins.
Accounts. Proxies. Ghost trails that vanish only to flicker alive again somewhere else.
I trace them, click by click, thread by thread, pulling at knots until the system begins to unravel under my hands.
It’s what I’ve always done, what I’m good at.
The worst part is how much I feel it—how the old thrill claws up through the fear, how the rhythm sinks into me, familiar and damning.
He doesn’t hover, but he’s always there. Rostya’s shadow falls across my work when I least expect it. The creak of the office door, the measured strike of his shoes on stone. He doesn’t say much, never wastes words, but when he does speak, it’s surgical.
A question that cuts straight through my progress to remind me he knows exactly how to unsettle me. A critique that lands not like frustration, but like a blade pressed carefully to skin just enough pressure to make me bleed if I shift the wrong way.
His cruelty is never careless. That, I’m beginning to understand. It’s a weapon he unsheathes only when it serves him, when it cuts deepest. Recklessness would almost be easier; it would mean he lost control. But he never does. That’s what makes him unbearable.
Miron is different. Where his brother looms, Miron drifts. Quieter, sharper, a presence that slides in close without warning. Sometimes he leans near, pointing out a string of code I’ve missed, murmuring something dry and cutting that makes me grit my teeth.
Sometimes—rarely—he listens. When my frustration boils over and I mutter curses under my breath, he doesn’t scold or sneer. He just lets the words hang, maybe even lets a ghost of a smile touch his mouth.
It’s nothing. Less than nothing. To a heart starved for any kindness, even that feels like a spark. Fragile. Tentative. Dangerous.
I tell myself not to trust it. Not to trust him, but when he lingers a second longer, when his voice lowers enough that it feels like something private, I can’t stop the small relief that slips through.
The longer I sit here, the more I hate what I’m becoming.
The truth is, I’m good at this. Too good.
My fingers fall into rhythm, my eyes adjust to the blur of code, my mind sharpens in ways I can’t stop.
The deeper I dig, the more threads I pull, the more the system bends to me again, just as it always has.
Even as resentment seethes in me, even as I curse the chains tying me here, discovery still sparks.
The click when a firewall gives, the rush when a hidden account emerges, the satisfaction of seeing patterns where others saw only noise.
The thrill I thought was buried rises again, fierce and undeniable.
Every success binds me deeper. Every breakthrough pulls me tighter into their world. I hate myself for it, but the truth presses hard in my chest: part of me still craves this. And that craving is the cruelest chain of all.
The first threads didn’t look like much—numbers trickling across the screen, transfers so small they could’ve been shrugged off as noise. Noise doesn’t repeat. Noise doesn’t loop. I lean closer, fingers flying over the keys, and the rhythm starts to take shape.
Accounts shifting like shells in a con game. Encrypted bursts of text flashing across servers before dissolving into nothing. The kind of movements designed to confuse anyone stupid enough to stop after one layer.
I don’t stop. I dig, unravel, pull. Hours stretch long, my eyes raw, the air around me stale from too much time spent breathing in wires and screens.
The map builds itself, slow and brutal, until I can’t deny what’s staring back at me.
Volkov.
The name spikes in my chest, cold and hard. The rival syndicate, the one whispered about in Bratva corridors, known for carving up enemies and burning the scraps. I sit back, pulse hammering, the cursor blinking on my screen like a heartbeat mocking me.
I wasn’t chosen for my skill. I was bait.
The realization hits like a blade slipping between ribs.
Someone—faceless, untouchable—picked me up like a piece off a board and threw me at Rostya, disposable, meant to wound him and nothing more.
I can still hear the click of the door the night they dragged me out of my apartment.
I thought I’d been hunted. No, I was delivered.
My fists clench, nails biting into my palms. Rage burns hot, making my skin prickle. Rage at them, the unseen puppeteers who turned me into their weapon. Rage at myself, for not seeing it, for believing I could stay anonymous in a world that feeds on blood and names.
Beneath the rage—fear. If they used me once, they can use me again. If Rostya decides I’m no longer useful, I’ll be nothing but collateral.
Later, in the council room, the elders sit in their velvet chairs, smoke curling from their cigars. I’m tucked near the edge, silent, pretending my eyes are glued to the files spread in front of me. But I steal glances. Always at him.
Rostya doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. Every word is deliberate, as if he’s thought ten moves ahead before opening his mouth. The men across from him listen like schoolboys waiting for permission to breathe. Even the silence bends toward him, heavy, inevitable.
It terrifies me, that sharpness, but my brain won’t stop mapping it, won’t stop tracing the precision of his control. I hate that I can see the brilliance behind the cruelty. I hate worse that my eyes keep finding him, that my stomach knots when his gaze slices past me.
That night, back in the gilded cage he calls my room, I sit on the bed too soft to sleep in and turn the ring on my finger. It gleams in the lamplight, mocking, cold. I press my thumb against it hard, imagining the metal bending, breaking, snapping away.
It doesn’t. It never does.
Each day I get closer to untangling the threads, closer to the truth that should free me. Each day, I fall deeper into his orbit, whether I want to or not.
I can feel the line blurring. Between hate and something sharper, something I don’t dare name. And that blur terrifies me more than the Volkovs ever could.