Chapter 19 - Yakov
I’ve never been inside the Volkov estate.
Driving through the reinforced iron gates of a compound my family considers a mortal enemy doesn’t make me nervous.
Men like me don’t get nervous. But as I steer us up the winding driveway, I’m checking everything anyway—how many guards they’ve got, what weapons they’re packing and the positions they’re holding, the sightlines from the upper windows, how many cars are parked and whether any of them are running, and more importantly, how fast I could get us back through that gate if this goes wrong.
Raya doesn’t wait for me when we pull up. She’s out of the car before I’ve even cut the engine, and I follow her through the massive front doors.
We walk straight into a wall of noise. It isn’t chaos.
It’s warmth. The distinction hits me like a physical punch to the chest, so violent it almost takes my breath away.
This is what a family sounds like when they are genuinely glad someone is home.
Three separate conversations are happening simultaneously, a toddler’s laugh cutting through the din, someone shouting playfully from a kitchen down the hall.
The second Raya steps across the threshold, she is swallowed by it.
Two kids hit her at knee-height with the momentum of small missiles, and she instantly drops to her knees, laughing a real, unfiltered sound as she wraps both arms around them.
A younger woman, who must be her sister Sofie, blindsides her from the left, throwing an arm around her neck and talking at a deafening volume directly into her ear.
In a matter of seconds, the rigid, survival-mode tension that has lived in Raya’s shoulders since the day I took her simply evaporates.
I step back against the foyer wall, and I watch her. I also need to find a wall because the Volkov brothers are positioned all around the space, clearly assessing the new element. Not hostile. Just watching. I understand it; I’d do the same thing.
Sofie, who still hasn’t let go of Raya, chooses this exact moment to look over her shoulder directly at me. Her eyes go wide. She turns back to Raya and says, at a volume that she clearly believes is a whisper but absolutely is not:
“Oh my god, Raya. He’s hot! He has a twin, right? Identical?”
“Sofie,” Raya says, mortified and trying desperately not to show it.
“What? I’m only asking—”
“Please don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird. I’m making an observation. There’s another one of him somewhere in the world. That’s a lot—”
“Sofie.”
“Fine. Fine.” Sofie straightens up and gives me a look of frank appraisal that she does not attempt to disguise. Then she gives me a slow nod, apparently satisfied with what she sees, and goes back to whatever she was saying to her sister.
I look at the ceiling for a moment, running a hand over my jaw, before looking back at the room and Raya.
I thought I knew how she moved. I thought I knew her silences, her rhythms, the way she tilts her chin when she’s defiance incarnate.
But this version of her—Raya in her own world, lit up from the inside by a fierce, unconditional love—is something I have never seen; seeing her shine like this is easily the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.
A profound, suffocating grief settles deep in my bones.
I think about the house I grew up in and how my father systematically tried to dismantle any trace of warmth between his children.
He built separate walls, enforced separate hierarchies, and locked all of us, not only Yaroslav and me, in basements and crawlspaces, to ensure we never learned to lean on each other.
Alek thought he was forging solitary weapons.
He thought a throne built on terror was absolute.
But looking at the Volkov clan, the undeniable truth is plain as day.
My father was dead wrong. Fear doesn’t inspire loyalty.
It inspires compliance, and compliance fractures the second the threat leaves the room.
This is what keeps an empire standing. This raw, chaotic, unyielding safety is what binds people together.
For the first time in my life, I feel a wave of pity for the little boy I used to be—the kid who had to lie in the dark with his twin, inventing imaginary monsters to survive the real one downstairs. We never had a home. We had a garrison.
I understand why Selene refused to come back to our bloodline—why she chose this. Why she is fiercely, lethally loyal to Simon and this family—she tasted the light, and there was no way in hell she was ever going to crawl back into our father’s darkness.
“Yakov.”
Her soft voice breaks through my internal thoughts. I look up to see Selene standing in front of me. She left the kitchen while Raya was distracted by Sofie, and she’s looking at me with those identical gray eyes we inherited from a mother who didn’t survive our father’s house.
She steps forward and wraps her arms tightly around my waist, and my left arm clamps around her shoulders. I hold on to my sister for longer than is dignified, burying my face in her hair as the memory of our shared past presses in on us.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter into her hair, my voice rough and cracked. “For all of it. For how long it took me to act.”
Selene squeezes me tighter. “You’re here now, Yakov,” she whispers fiercely. “You brought Raya back whole. That’s enough.”
I let her go, stepping back as she wipes her eyes, but before the heavy silence can settle over us again, a frantic pair of voices cuts straight through the noise of the foyer.
“Uncle Yakov! Look, it’s Uncle Yakov!”
Selene and Simon’s twins—Arron and Solenne—come barreling out of the living room like a two-piece demolition crew.
They collide with my shins, their small arms wrapping tightly around my legs.
I freeze, my body instantly rigid. I am a man trained to react to sudden impacts with violence, but these are tiny hands clutching at my jeans, small faces looking up at me with zero fear.
They have the Volkov hair, but looking down into their wide eyes, I see our mother’s features staring back at me.
Solenne detaches from my leg and stands directly in front of me with her hands on her hips.
“Did Raya go on vacation with you?” she demands.
“Yes,” I smile.
She squints up at me. “Why did she go without telling us?”
“She needed a break.”
This is apparently a satisfactory answer, because she moves on immediately. “Can you do voices?”
I look down at her. “Which voices?”
“For the stories. Raya always does the voices. Aunt Sofie tried, but she can’t do the monster one right—it sounds like her normal voice but louder, and Aunt Anka said she wasn’t allowed to do the scary one anymore because Tomas cried for twenty minutes.
” She fixes me with her most serious look. “Can you do a monster voice?”
I think about Yaroslav and me in the dark of our childhood bedroom. “I can do a monster voice,” I tell her.
Her face breaks into a wide grin. “Good. You can do stories tonight then. Raya does them best, but you’ll do.”
Arron lets out a high-pitched cheer, jumping up and down. “Yes! We can show you the treehouse tomorrow, too!”
“Go on, run along, you two ozornyaki,” I say, the old Russian word for little mischief-makers slipping out before I can stop it. “Go back to your aunt before she comes looking for you.”
They don’t need to be told twice. They let go of my legs, cheer again, and sprint right back into the chaos of the house, nearly taking out one of Matvei’s guards on the way.
Raya looks across the room at me over the kids’ heads with an expression I cannot fully read—somewhere between amusement and something softer—and I look back at her, tucking that expression away into a corner of my mind to think about later.
I look back at my sister’s face and think about all the years in that house; it’s a miracle that we survived them. I don’t say it out loud; we both know it, the way people who share the same scars do.
Matvei walks in quietly, his expression an unreadable block of granite.
He doesn’t need to perform his authority; the entire room automatically orients toward him the second his boots hit the floor.
He catches my eye across the crowded room and gives me a solitary, heavy nod.
I nod back. The terms of our alliance are sealed in that one look.
I keep to my wall for the rest of the afternoon, intentionally stepping back. I don’t force myself into her space. I don’t demand her attention. This is her moment to heal from the trauma I dragged her into, and she deserves every single second of it.
I watch how everyone in this room drifts toward her without realizing it.
A brother catches her eye from across the room and visibly settles.
A child detaches from someone else and finds its way back to her legs.
She’s here, and the room reorganizes itself around the fact of her.
She holds the emotional weight of this entire empire on her shoulders, and she makes it look as effortless as breathing.
She belongs here in the light. Safe and fiercely protected.
As the sun begins to dip, throwing long shadows across the foyer, she ends up briefly alone near the hallway.
She’s holding a glass of water, staring out of the window with that quiet, processing look I’ve come to know intimately.
I leave my wall and cross the polished floor, my boots heavy against the wood.
“You alright?” I ask softly, halting a step away from her.
Raya looks up, her dark eyes wide as they search my face.
For a split second, the protective Volkov armor slips, and I see the same electric heat we generated in that bedroom last night flashing across her features.
She looks at my mouth, her breathing hitching, before she forcefully locks her expression back down.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Do you need anything?”
She holds my gaze for one more breathless second, her fingers tightening around her glass. “No,” she says. “I’m good.”
She means it. She is back where she belongs.
I give her a tight nod and step backward into the shadows.
I watch her for the rest of the night, my left hand curled into a fist inside my pocket, fully aware that while I have successfully traded my family name to keep her safe, the cold reality of what I never had is going to haunt me long after the lights go out.