Chapter 34
Zoya
By evening, I’m wound so tight I could snap. I eat dinner with Roman in tense silence, pushing food around my plate while he watches me with those cold blue eyes that miss nothing. Katya hovers, refilling water glasses with the precision of someone defusing bombs.
When Roman finally dismisses us, we head upstairs, and I stand in front of the wardrobe, staring at the funeral dress hanging like a noose, while he takes a shower.
Black silk, elegant, demure. Everything Baron said to wear. Everything that will make me look like a mourning daughter instead of what I actually am—a woman about to claim a throne built on blood and broken men.
I pull it down and lay it on the bed, running my fingers over the fabric. Tomorrow this dress will be photographed, analysed, and discussed. Tomorrow, men will watch every micro-expression on my face as I read my father’s words. Tomorrow I will either become pakhan or become a corpse.
There’s no middle ground anymore.
The shower cuts off, and Roman emerges with steam curling around him, towel slung low, and I force myself to look away before he catches me staring.
“You’re thinking too loud,” he says, moving to stand next to me and stare at the dress. “You hate it?”
“I’m thinking about how I don’t know how to do this.” The words tumble out before I can stop them. “I know how to read. I know how to stand. I don’t know how to be a pakhan.”
“You don’t become a pakhan tomorrow. You survive tomorrow. Everything else comes after.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be true.”
I turn back to the dress. My hands are steady, but my pulse hammers in my throat where the pearls sit like a noose of their own.
“What if Nik doesn’t follow me?” I ask. “What if he stays in the church and calls my bluff right there in front of everyone?”
“Then he dies in front of witnesses, and we control the narrative. Either way, he doesn’t walk out of that church breathing.”
I nod slowly, letting that settle into my bones.
“Come to bed,” he says.
I turn to him, and he takes my face in his hands, thumbs stroking my cheekbones. His touch is gentle, which somehow terrifies me more than any threat ever could.
“Tomorrow you read those words, and you let them land,” he says quietly. “You don’t perform. You don’t try to convince anyone. You state the facts and let the room decide what to do with them. Your father chose you. Moscow concurs. That is all anyone needs to know.”
“And if they don’t believe it?”
“Then they’re fools, and fools die quickly in this world.” He kisses my forehead, then my mouth, slow and thorough. “You won’t be a fool tomorrow. You’ll be ruthless.”
When he pulls back, I see something shift in his expression—a hardness that reminds me he has been in the thick of this world for a long time.
He replaces the dress in the wardrobe after he helps me into bed and then crawls in beside me.
I settle into the darkness beside him, hyperaware of every point where our bodies touch.
His arm comes around my waist, careful of the marks on my back, and I lean into him because tomorrow I won’t have this—this quiet, this safety, this illusion that we are in a world where consequences don’t exist.
“Roman?” I whisper into the dark.
“Mm?”
“If I die tomorrow—”
“You won’t.”
“But if I do. I need you to know that giving me a choice mattered. That you listened when I asked for something impossible.”
His grip tightens, and I feel him press his face into my hair. “It’s not impossible, and you’re not dying tomorrow, Zoya. I won’t allow it.”
The arrogance should irritate me. Instead, it settles something fractured in my chest. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but my mind keeps circling back to the hairpin Katya gave me, hidden in the pocket of tomorrow’s dress.
To the bracelet on my wrist that will track my every move.
To the letter folded and waiting like a loaded gun.
I wake well after the sun has risen, my mind already racing through the sequence of events that will unfold in a few hours.
The bed beside me is cold—Roman’s already up, which means he’s been awake for a while.
Probably running through contingencies. Probably ensuring every detail is locked down so I don’t have the chance to fail.
I slip out of bed and move to the window. The sky is bruised grey, threatening rain. Fitting. Nothing about this day should be clean.
The house is quiet as I go downstairs. I find Roman in his office, already dressed in a black suit. He’s on the phone, speaking in Russian so quietly, I can’t really hear the context, but the tone is all business. He sees me and ends the call with a sharp word.
“You should be resting.”
“I can’t.” I move to the desk and lean against it, arms crossed. “I’ve been lying in bed for an hour, and all I can think about is how many ways this could go wrong.”
“Then stop thinking and start breathing.” He stands and pulls me into his space. “In a few hours, you’re going to read those words, Nik will be dead, and you will be pakhan.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.” His hand lands on the small of my back, and I notice he’s careful to avoid the marks. “The old men will fall in line because the alternative is chaos.”
“They are going to hate me. I don’t know what I’m doing. They’re probably going to try to take advantage of me.”
“I won’t let them.”
“You can’t be with me twenty-four seven, Roman. I am going to have to figure this out on my own.”
“True, but you will have support and the threat of a Voronov war if they even think about touching you.”
“A Voronov war,” I repeat, testing the words. “You realise that’s not actually comforting, right? That’s just trading one problem for another.”
He smirks. “It’s comforting to me.”
I shake my head, but I don’t pull away. Instead, I lean into him, letting his certainty settle over me like a coat. It’s not the same as feeling certain myself, but it’s close enough.
“We need to leave soon. I don’t want to be late. Eat. Shower. Prepare.”
I pull back to look at him properly. His jaw is set, his eyes sharp as broken glass. There’s a gun in a holster under his jacket—I can see the slight bulge if I know what to look for. And I do.
“You’re scared,” I say, and it’s not a question.
His expression doesn’t change. “I’m careful. There’s a difference.”
“Roman—”
“No.” He cuts me off with a look. “I’m not scared. But I am aware that a lot can go wrong, so I prepare for everything. That’s not fear. That’s strategy.”
I nod, accepting it because strategy is the only thing between me and a coffin.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll shower. Then coffee. Then prepare.”
“Good girl.” He kisses my temple, a brief brand, then releases me.
I take the stairs two at a time. Steam and peppermint clear my head in the en-suite.
I keep the spray off the raised cuts across my back, soap everywhere else, and then dry off carefully.
Clothes next: silk underwear, black seam stockings, the slip that makes the funeral dress fall like water.
I clasp the tennis bracelet. The weight feels heavier than it should.
I feel for the hairpin inside the inner pocket where my fingers can find it blind. Still there.
The pearls I removed for my shower are last. I fasten the cool strand and breathe once, twice, until my pulse stops thudding at my throat.
Slipping back downstairs, I’m greeted with a full English breakfast, and I realise how hungry I am after picking at food for days.
I wrap a napkin around my front like a child, thinking I should’ve waited to dress, but didn’t know I’d be ravenous when confronted with perfectly cooked sausages, slightly burnt on the outside, scrambled eggs, streaky bacon, enough toast to build a fort and baked beans, neatly placed in a ramekin on the side.
Roman enters with a snicker at my bib, but he schools his face into a more neutral expression when I fire him a vicious glare.
We don’t say much as we eat. There is little to say. Even though Mikhail isn’t truly gone, he is gone from my life, and I will mourn that.
Twenty minutes later, back upstairs, Katya appears with a strip of black net in one hand, a compact in the other. “Face.”
I sit on the stool while she brushes powder over my skin and tames my mouth with a soft berry that looks like grief and control. She pins a discreet veil into my hair. My reflection looks like a girl who will cry for her father and cut a man with a sentence. I hold her gaze in the mirror.
“Left. Paper high. If I push, you move,” she reminds me.
“Left. Paper high,” I repeat. “If he reaches, thumb, twist, knee.”
Her mouth quirks. “Umnitsa.”
Roman moves into the room and takes me in from pearls to heels, his mouth crooks a fraction. “Perfect.”
“Liar,” I say. But the word lands like steadiness.
Katya flicks the veil, satisfied, and steps back.
Roman’s gaze trails over me, precise as a scalpel.
He lifts my wrist, checks the clasp on the tracker, then the tiny weight of the hairpin pocket with a press of two fingers that says he knows where I hid it without me telling him. Of course he does.
“Ten minutes,” he says.
I nod and stand. The dress moves like water. Death silk. I grip the envelope in its plain sleeve, tucked into the inner pocket of my black cashmere knee-length coat, where I can find it with one sweep.
In the vestibule, Andrei meets us in black, expression blank. “Route’s clear. Decoys out. Everyone is in place.”
“Good,” Roman says. He offers his arm. I take it.
The air outside bites. Mist smears the hedges.
The ghost car idles, windows dull with condensation.
We slide in. Roman sits beside me, a wall of heat.
Andrei takes the front with the driver. Katya travels in a separate car.
The gates open. The world narrows to damp tarmac, red brake lights, grey sky.
I breathe. Four in. Six out. I press my tongue to the back of my teeth, so I don’t grind them to dust.
“You read,” Roman murmurs, voice for me alone. “Let your voice wobble. Let them think they’re deciding. They’ll already have decided by the time you finish.”
“And if I choke?” I ask, barely more than breath.
“Then you pause. Silence is a blade. Use it.” His thumb strokes once over my pulse. “If your hands shake, let them. It reads as grief, not weakness.”
I let that be enough. The car glides through London, the city grey and on pause, like the city itself is holding its breath for the show.
We turn onto a street lined with trees dripping with rain. The church rises out of the mist, brick and onion domes, the gilt crosses dull in this light. The bell is silent. It feels like a held note.
The car rolls past the front and carries on to the block Roman marked last night. We stop. Doors click. Roman’s hand finds mine for the briefest squeeze, more command than comfort. “Paper high,” he reminds me.
“Left,” I echo. “If you bark, I move.”
“Good girl.”
I swallow the way that lands and step out. Damp air beads on the veil. My heels bite the pavement in a rhythm I make myself keep steady.
Inside the courtyard, incense leaks under the doors with the warmth. Two of Roman’s men are bored gargoyles by the porch. One dips his head, eyes on some invisible point over my head. We pass him like angels and knives.
The vestibule swallows us. Candles flicker before icons. A woman in a headscarf crosses herself, glances away. My pearls feel like ice.
“Here,” Andrei murmurs, opening the inner door.
The nave is packed. Men in black, women in hats, old pakhans and gold-threaded vestments.
Candle smoke hangs low. The choir murmurs an old hymn that turns the air heavy.
At the front, my father’s coffin sits beneath an icon of St. Nicholas, a spray of white lilies already browning at the edges.
The sight punches me under the ribs. He’s not in there, but he is gone.
Eyes drag over me as I enter—the weight of pedigree, curiosity, knives wrapped in silk. I feel Roman a step to my right, solid, heat radiating through wool. Katya ghosts two paces behind on my left. Andrei drifts to my front, then edges off, a shadow among shadows.
Nik stands near the first row on the right, a black suit over a blacker mood, chin tipped as if the space belongs to him by divine writ.
He’s ringed by his men, Alexey among them, face smoothed to priest-quiet.
Nik’s gaze catches mine. It skims down and back up, cold appraisal, then a thin smile that says he thinks the next breath he takes will be one of victory, even as he sees me with Roman. It’s a flash of anger that chills me.
I let my mouth soften to grief. I let the veil hide what it cannot.
We take the pew on the left, front row, just as planned. The choir stills. The service begins.