Epilogue
Dearest solnyshka,
This letter will likely find you too late if your insolent cousin actually listened to me for once…
I am sorry, sorry for what grief your mother caused and the ramifications that my dear daughter thought she was intelligent enough to outrun. For the way the Antonovs abandoned you, leaving you to fight battles no five-year-old should have to face alone.
The truth is I was scared. Scared this world would break you before you had your chance to shine.
And for that, I am sorry, solnishka, for the pain and trauma my choice to keep your mother’s side of the family away from you has caused.
The Antonovs are in disarray, and you have learned by now that the only way for you to claim the pakhana crown destined to be yours since birth was my brutal fall at your hand.
I am proud though, granddaughter mine, for the independent and fierce young woman you have become.
We may have stayed away, allowed you your chance to live, to love, and to have that freedom you so dearly struggled to find.
Even if you never felt our presence, Nikolai, Ilya, Tatiana and I were never truly able to let you go, let you live your life completely alone.
We watched, waiting from the shadows, from London, and from that god-awful desk in Moscow your cousin, Nikolai, refuses to rid his office of.
Burn that for me, will you? It may truly be my last wish on this Earth, ridding him of that monstrosity.
It was my ingenious idea to plant treason among that infamous Guilda Sanguis Venenati, framing the Yateses and what hopefully led them to their fall from grace in society’s eyes.
Your brother helped with that one. Kellan Mikhail turned into a fine young man.
Hold him close solnyshka, for his demons are never truly far behind and the time is coming for when he will falter in that steadfast stoicism he carries.
I fear for that boy and what his choices will make him become.
Take the Antonov crown, your aristocratic titles. Burn the old ways into ash as you rise from who your ill-fated adoptive family forced you to be.
Marry that man in your life, the one who met you at four-years-old, who never truly allowed the hurts of this life to reach you. The man I know you refuse to allow yourself to fall fully for. The one who likely carried you from the tomb of the devil, better known as The Labyrinth now.
Marry him and raise your children the way I should have done with you—with both pride and fault.
Please put him out of his misery, if not for him, for your cousins since the man is unable to have polite conversation without mentioning your name at least once.
Truly oblivious that his pinning is pushing Kolya to kill him one of these days.
My time in this world has come to an end.
One fitting of the queen, matriarch and pakhana of the Antonov Bratva deserved.
So do not cry for me, solnyshka, I have lived and loved.
I have set the final pieces on my board in motion.
My legacy will live—in you, in Nikolai, in your half-brother who proved more loyal than most of our full-blooded family.
In this letter, bearing Kolya’s desire to follow orders once, you will find a key and my last living will.
Congratulations, solnyshka, you are now the sole crowned heir to the Antonov Bratva, a queen among men and a force this world has not seen in millennia since the old gods walked this world.
Take this letter and the knowledge you now hold and travel to your homeland.
Clean our house, get your soldiers in order.
Surround yourself with the heirs you can trust.
War is coming. To your Guilda, to the powers of the underworld crime families, even to the upper echelon of society who pretend their hands are clean of the blood that now stains yours.
Gather your family, marry the Volkovitch son, find who you trust and then do this old bag of bones proud one final time.
Show this world what happens when they force a woman to hide, to feign meekness when she was born a Queen.
And you remember, solnyshka. You bow to no man. No country. No laws. And no goddamn King who attempts to take your crown off those gorgeous obsidian locks your adoptive family made you hide.
Lyubov’ navsegda,
Katarina Antonova-Dragomir