Chapter Ten
~ Iren ~
The click of the door shutting behind her was surgical, and I felt it slice the air between us before I’d even managed to put down my coffee.
Sasha stood dead center in the sitting room—deliberate, symmetrical, the way a model plants herself for a lighting check—and scanned the space as if auditioning the furniture for roles in her personal psychodrama.
She wore a sleeveless black dress so precisely tailored it looked glued to her spine, and her heels stabbed tiny, impossible wounds into the silk carpet with every step.
The only sound was the distant whine of the groundskeeper’s hedge trimmer outside and the hush of her own breathing, which was perfectly even, as if she’d been training for this moment since childhood.
She let her gaze rake me from top to toe—pausing just long enough at the bandaged cut on my face to imply I was already marked for deletion—then pulled her phone out and set it face down on the lacquered table between us. No eye contact yet.
That was intentional.
“Slept well, I hope,” she said, voice sugared over with the faintest accent—unplaceable, but expensive.
I didn’t bother answering. She wasn’t interested in my sleep schedule, and I wasn’t interested in the opening act. I did notice she didn’t ask how my face was doing. Or whether I’d enjoyed being a moving target last night.
She perched on the arm of the couch, one leg crossed over the other with mechanical precision. Her hands were naked—no jewelry except a thin, almost invisible platinum band on her right index finger—and she rested them in her lap, knuckles white.
“You know,” she began, speaking to the air just above my head, “Vadim collects beautiful things. Always has. Since before he had the money to buy them, really.”
“Is that so?” I said, not bothering to disguise the sarcasm.
She smiled, or did something in the same tax bracket as smiling.
“It is. But he gets bored easily. It’s not his fault; he just doesn’t believe anything is permanent.
He likes to own things for a while, display them, enjoy them.
And then—” She made a vague, upward-flicking gesture with her fingers, as if erasing a name from a whiteboard. “They’re replaced.”
I let the silence hang. It was better that way. She thrived on interruptions, needed them to feel in control of the tempo.
She went on, “Of course, sometimes he keeps things a little longer, especially if they come with… interesting attributes. But you should know you’re not the first.” Her eyes landed on me with all the warmth of a January sidewalk. “And certainly not the most impressive.”
“Impressive how?” I asked. “Is there a leaderboard, or do you all just do time trials?”
She blinked, slowly. “You think this is funny.”
I shrugged. “It’s the only thing that keeps me from screaming.”
She shifted, uncrossing her legs, then crossing them again.
“There were others before you. Boys. Men. Some even younger, which—honestly—would be a bit cliché if it weren’t so entirely predictable.
” She paused, letting that one settle in the cushions for a moment.
“They all thought they were special. None of them are here anymore.”
“Are you here as a warning, or just to offer the house tour?”
She smiled for real, then. It was not a smile I’d seen before. “I just think you should know your place in the history of the collection.”
She was waiting for a reaction. I offered her a full five seconds of blank, calm, non-response. She didn’t like that. The mask twitched, a tiny fault line at the corner of her eye.
“My father died for Vadim,” she said, letting the words drop cold.
“His blood, on the concrete, is the only reason Vadim ever got to be anything more than a street animal.” She looked away, out the window, as if reciting a piece of required scripture.
“The promise was simple. My father would lay down his life. Vadim would make sure his daughter had the life she deserved.”
“And what does that look like?” I asked. “House keys? A footman? Her own driver?”
She fixed me with a look so blank I almost missed the kill shot coming. “It means he will marry me. It means I will be his queen, not some passing fascination who crawled his way out of the gutter on a trail of ones and fives.”
There it was. No drama in the delivery. No rise in pitch or sharpening of teeth. Just the unassailable calm of a woman who had waited her whole life for the world to hand her a crown, and wasn’t about to let a street rat paw at it first.
I let the beat hang. I wasn’t rattled; I was calculating. In a room with Vadim, silence was leverage. With Sasha, it was an X-ray.
When I spoke, it was soft, almost polite. “You have one thing right,” I said. “Vadim owes your father. He takes it seriously—maybe more seriously than you even realize. But the promise he made wasn’t to marry you. The promise was to take care of you. And he’s been doing that.”
She opened her mouth, but I kept going, because I needed to land it before she could marshal her next offensive.
“The thing about debts,” I said, “even ones paid in blood, is they have a ceiling. Eventually, the house is paid for. The bills stop coming. You don’t get to keep living here on the interest. At a certain point, you’re not a debt anymore.
You’re just a guest who’s been here so long you think you own the place. ”
It was the gentleness, not the sharpness, that finally broke her. I saw it happen, the way you see a window flex and shatter before the glass actually falls. Her eyes narrowed. Her shoulders tensed. For the first time, her voice came up a half-octave.
“You—” She had to choke it back to keep from spitting.
“You are nothing. A nobody from nowhere who took his clothes off for tips. You have no right to speak about what I am owed. No right to even breathe the same air as Vadim, let alone—” Her hand flailed, and the platinum band flashed in the light.
“You will be gone in a month. He will see through you. He always does.”
I looked at her, and felt something so close to pity that I wanted to laugh.
“You might want to keep your voice down,” I said, mildly. “The walls are thinner than you think, and I’m pretty sure at least two people in this house are paid to record everything you say.”
She stood so abruptly the phone on the table skittered across the surface. Her dress did not so much as wrinkle. She stormed to the door and yanked it open, then paused just long enough to shoot me a look that would have flash-fried a lesser species.
She didn’t slam it, not quite, but it was close.
The silence after was richer than the coffee I’d been drinking, and several times more bitter. I heard the hedge trimmer again, the distant sound of Lin directing staff in the corridor, and the barely-audible tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer.
The sitting room smelled faintly of Sasha’s perfume, a high-grade floral designed to be noticed in small doses and weaponized in large ones.
The sunlight through the tall windows caught the edges of the furniture in sharp relief, everything too crisp, too clean, like the room had been disinfected of any trace of actual human history.
I closed my eyes, exhaled a long, slow breath, and checked the tremor in my hands. Steady.
For now.
But the pulse under my wrist was a rabbit’s: all speed, no destination.
The sting wasn’t in what she’d said. The sting was in the accuracy.
The power imbalance was real. Vadim’s world was real.
I was nineteen, and last week I’d been pouring vodka down my throat to numb the pain in my knees, and now I was a fixture in a house built on the bones of men whose names I couldn’t even pronounce.
Sasha was wrong about a lot of things, but she wasn’t wrong about this. A house full of permanent things did not have space for temporary guests.
I let the thought live for a minute, then killed it with another swallow of coffee. The cup was empty. The room was empty. I rolled my shoulders, and listened to the echo of her heels still bouncing down the hallway, each step a little more unsteady than the last.
I smiled.
I’d seen enough of the world to know that the more someone insists they own something, the more terrified they are of losing it. But I’d also seen enough to know that sometimes, the thing being lost is you.
When I opened my eyes, Yuri was already there—arms crossed, shoulder against the door frame, like he’d been teleported in by the quiet.
He was wearing a suit so clean it looked fresh out of the bag, and his expression was set to default: total emotional lockdown, but with an edge today.
Maybe it was the corners of his mouth. Maybe it was the way he didn’t blink.
He slow-clapped. Three perfectly spaced, utterly unhurried claps.
I just stared at him.
Yuri didn’t say anything for a second, letting the performance hang in the air like the residue of a gunshot. Finally, he said, “I wasn’t here, then I was.”
“Do you want me to ask how long you were standing there?”
He shook his head. “No.”
I tried to decide if I was being surveilled or stalked. There was probably a difference, but I didn’t care enough to parse it. “You see the whole show?” I asked.
His mouth twitched, a muscle movement so small it had to be intentional. “Enough.”
He pushed off the frame, came a little further into the room.
Stopped two steps from me, which was either a courtesy or a warning.
“I have tried for two years to move Sasha out of this house,” he said, voice as dry as the empty vodka bottles in the bin behind the club.
“Vadim will not hear it. The promise he made to her father sits in him like a splinter. He refuses to let anyone take it out.”
I chewed on that. “So you thought you’d let me poke it with a stick.”
Yuri’s eyes almost crinkled. “You have a way of finding the tender spots.”
“Why haven’t you just told him?” I asked. “Vadim. If you think it’s the right move, why not just say it?”