3. Katerina
KATERINA
My father doesn’t sit when I enter his study.
He stands near the window instead, both hands clasped behind his back while his shoulders remain squared with that military posture he’s always had.
His form is rigid, formal, like he’s addressing a room full of officers waiting on orders instead of addressing his only daughter.
The sight alone tightens something uneasy in my stomach.
The curtains are half drawn, letting in only a slice of late afternoon light.
It glints off the medals lining the wall around him.
Gold, silver, enamel, rows of valor earned through decades of service.
They’ve always dominated this room as silent witnesses to our conversations.
When I was younger, I used to trace their shapes with my eyes while he worked, imagining the stories behind each one.
Battles fought. Lives saved. Sacrifices made.
Now, they feel like they’re watching me like uncaring sentinels.
“Katerina,” he says without turning around. “Close the door.”
I do, the soft click echoing far too loudly in the quiet than it ever has before.
The room smells faintly of leather and the smoke from an old pipe—my father’s biggest vice.
This room is the same as it has always been.
Yet the further I step inside, the more I realize everything familiar suddenly feels wrong, like coming back to a childhood home after too much time spent away.
“I need you to listen to me carefully,” he continues, still facing the window.
I wait for him to turn around and address me. But he doesn’t. That’s when the unease deepens into something heavier in my gut.
My father has never been a man for theatrics.
He’s always been direct with me, blunt to the point of cruelty at times.
When he needs something, he says it plainly and expects results to follow with little opposition.
This preamble, this careful staging of whatever he’s about to say, makes my skin prickle.
It feels… rehearsed. As though he’s already decided how this conversation will end but isn’t sure how I’ll react to it.
Which is never a good sign.
“Okay,” I reply, though my voice comes out softer than I intend it to.
It wouldn’t be the first time my father has divulged state secrets to me.
With a background like his and the kind of position he holds inside the government, secrecy has always been part of our lives.
There have been countless problems he’s handled over the years that never made it anywhere near the public eye—foreign officials applying pressure behind closed doors, intelligence leaks quietly smothered, political figures whose scandals were buried long before they could ever see the light of day.
I grew up around that kind of tension, around half-finished sentences and late-night phone calls that stopped the moment I entered a room. It taught me how to listen for answers without asking questions and how to keep my mouth shut when it mattered.
Up until my mother’s death a few years ago, he used to confide in her when things spiraled beyond his control.
When threats of sanctions loomed and allies suddenly became liabilities, she was the only one he ever truly trusted with the full scope of his fears and was always there to talk him down from the proverbial ledge.
My mother had been brilliant in many ways with only a few people knowing firsthand.
She was a strategist by trade, lost to the confines of marriage far before she ever got the chance to shine on her own.
She was one who saw five steps ahead while everyone else was still arguing over the first move.
She was incredible with softening my father’s edges without dulling his resolve, grounding him when his ambition threatened to eclipse everything else.
After she died, that role was never filled. I have tried since then to fill her shoes but… well, there was and will never be a woman quite like Polina Borchin.
I move to the couch across from his desk and sit, folding my hands in my lap to keep them from fidgeting. From here, I can see framed photographs mixed in among the medals of my father in his uniform shaking hands with officials, smiling stiffly beside men whose names I’ve heard only on the news.
There are a few pictures of us too.
His expression isn’t as composed in those, almost gentle, but there’s a distance in his eyes that makes my chest ache in a way I don’t have a name for.
It’s the same look he wore at my mother’s funeral when he stood at the podium and thanked people for their condolences, controlled, dignified, untouched by visible grief.
The part of me that still wants his approval, that still believes he would never ask something of me without a good reason, always straightens instinctively under that gaze.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
“I need you to listen to me carefully,” he says calmly.
My fingers curl in my lap for a second before I force myself to relax. Whatever he’s about to say, I can already tell it won’t be a request. It will be an order.
“Okay,” I reply, though unease already coils in my chest.
The silence stretches longer after that. He doesn’t move or speak. When he turns around, he simply does so to stare at me.
After another beat, I can’t take it anymore. “What’s going on?”
“This is… not an easy conversation,” he says.
His hesitation feels… strangely strategic. As if he’s laying groundwork and preparing the terrain for something I’m not going to like hearing. I’ve seen him do this with foreign officials and political rivals in order to soften the air before delivering brutal news.
I nod anyway, because that’s what I’ve always done. I was taught that obedience is not weakness when it serves a greater purpose. My father exhales slowly as if steadying himself, and for a fleeting second I think I see something like regret flicker across his face.
But it’s gone almost immediately.
“Katerina,” he begins again, familiar in a way that makes my throat tighten. “What I’m about to ask of you… will require sacrifice.”
My brows pull together. “Okay.”
“Have you heard the name Aleksandr Volkov before?”
My brows knit together further as the name settles between us. “I… don’t think so,” I say slowly. Not directly, at least. “Why?”
That isn’t entirely true.
I have heard the name before, just not in the way he’s asking.
Aleksandr Volkov is one of those names that floats through rooms carried on lowered voices and sidelong glances.
A name spoken carefully because saying it too loudly might invite the devil himself in to overhear whatever is being discussed.
He’s one of those men.
My father has crossed paths with him before, though never socially and certainly never by choice.
Men like Aleksandr Volkov exist on the fringes of my father’s world, brushing up against it in ways that are unavoidable but never acknowledged in public.
Criminal figures who operate beneath the surface of Russia, festering in the dark while pretending they serve some higher purpose.
A necessary evil, they call themselves. A phrase that has always made my skin crawl.
“They’re parasites,” my father has said more than once over the years. “A cancer beneath the surface of the country. They infect everything they touch and call it preservation. All for their own self-interests.”
I remember him pacing the living room late one night when I was younger, agitation sharp in his voice as he spoke about men like Volkov who claimed they stood against government corruption while quietly lining their own pockets from exploiting it.
Men who wrapped themselves in the language of order, loyalty, and patriotism to justify violence and greed.
They are scum, in my opinion.
So when he says the name now, standing so rigidly by the window, hands clasped behind his back like he’s bracing himself for an answer he doesn’t want to hear, something cold settles in my stomach.
“What about him?” I ask.
“He’s a threat,” my father says without hesitation. “One we’ve underestimated for too long.”
The way he says it sends a chill through me. This isn’t the casual disdain he’s always reserved for men like Volkov. This is something worse. What could have possibly happened?
I swallow. “What does this have to do with me?”
He turns fully then, finally facing me head-on. His gaze softens, the hard edge dulling just enough to feel almost kind. “Everything.”
I wait because there has to be more. There must be context or some explanation that will soon soothe me from my overthinking. Something that will make this cold fear in my chest feel like an overreaction. My fingers curl tightly together in my lap again, nails biting deep into my palms.
But what comes next is not what I braced for.
“I need you to marry him,” he finally says.
The room tilts. My ears ring.
Marry him?
He continues talking as though he hasn’t just completely turned my world upside down.
“You’ll live in his home. Learn his routines.
Who his associates are. What his vulnerabilities are.
You’ll report back quietly, and when the time is right, we’ll use what you’ve gathered to dismantle him from the inside out. ”
I stare at him—a long, heavy stare—while my heart pounds so violently, I’m convinced he must hear it. “What?”
His expression doesn’t change. It doesn’t even flicker. “I need you to gather intel on him while you’re living there, Katerina, under the guise of being his new wife.”
“You… want me to spy on him,” I say, the words feeling unreal on my tongue.
“I want you to help me protect this country,” he corrects, tone flat and maddeningly certain.
I shake my head slowly, trying to realign my thoughts. “You’re talking about marriage… About living with him. That’s not… that isn’t just intelligence gathering. You want me to pretend to be his wife. Isn’t that dangerous?”
“He won’t suspect you. You’re intelligent. I wouldn’t ask this of you if there were another way,” he says calmly.
Part of me wants to argue, to scream that this is insane.
That he’s asking me to legally tie myself to a man who has always been whispered to have the power to dismantle the entire government if he so chose.
Asking me to walk willingly into a predator’s den under the guise of domesticity sounds not only reckless, but impossible.
I open my mouth to say exactly that, but nothing comes out.
All I can feel is the rush of blood in my ears and the icy clamp of fear around my heart as the dawning realization that he’s not asking at all settles over me.
Duty, patriotism, purpose… All are virtues my father heavily values.
They are the pillars my father has built his entire life around, ideals he taught me to admire, respect, and prioritize above comfort and fear.
Above even myself. I’ve heard them woven into bedtime stories, into speeches at state dinners, into quiet lectures meant to mold me into something worthy of the Borchin name.
And now he’s telling me the role I will be forced to play for the greater good.
“You’re the only one I trust with this,” he adds. The softness in his voice is almost worse than the command itself.
I swallow hard.
“What if something goes wrong?” I ask, the question slipping out before I can stop it. My hands curl in my lap, nails pressing into my palms hard enough to hurt. “What if he realizes what I’m doing?”
My father doesn’t hesitate. He never does. Not when the stakes are this high.
“Katerina,” he says, crossing the room at last. His steps are unhurried, like he knows exactly where this conversation is headed.
He stops in front of me and lowers himself to eye level, placing a hand over mine.
His grip is firm. “You were raised for this. I trust you will be exactly what this country needs.”
I look up at him, searching his face for doubt, for hesitation, for… something that tells me this is too much to ask of a daughter.
But there’s nothing.
He smiles and for a moment, he looks like the man I used to know.
The one who used to kneel beside my bed at night and ask me what I learned that day at school.
Who listened to my answers with patient pride and praised my grades, my discipline, my composure during tests and competitions and situations that would have made other children crumble.
This man who would always tell me again and again that I was exceptional. That I was built to handle more, that I had a mind sharper than most adults’ and a backbone that could carry what others could not.
That same warmth flickers now in his eyes, softening the steel beneath. It’s disarming, dangerously so. For a moment, I want to reach for that memory like a lifeline and anchor myself to it so I don’t drown under the weight of what he’s asking.
“You understand what needs to be done,” he continues softly. “You always have.”
The certainty in his voice slides under my skin like a hook catching on a fish’s mouth.
“But marriage is…” My voice trails off before I can stop myself. I take a breath and force the rest of my thoughts out. “Marriage is permanent. Won’t I be caught up in everything when he’s arrested? If I’m legally bound to him, I’ll be labeled at the very least complicit.”
His fingers tighten around mine, grounding and suffocating all at once.
“Only on paper. You won’t be alone in this.
You’ll be protected every step of the way.
Once this is over, the marriage will be annulled.
We’ll cite his criminal activities, frame it as your being completely unaware of what he was doing in the shadows.
” His thumb brushes the back of my hand, a soothing gesture.
“You’ll be the victim in the eyes of the law, Katerina.
A young woman deceived by a dangerous man who showered you with enough love to help you turn a blind eye to who he really was. ”
My breath leaves me in a long, shaky exhale.
Of course he has a plan. Of course he’s prepared for every angle, every consequence, before it can all unravel. He’s always been a strategist, just like my mother. He wouldn’t put me in danger without an exit or safeguards.
He never would.
I nod slowly, the motion small but steady as his confidence settles over me like a weighted blanket, pressing down the last of my doubts.
“Okay,” I say quietly. “I’ll marry him.”
Relief floods his face.
“Good, I’ll get everything ready. I have full confidence that you will help me dismantle him piece by piece. You won’t just be helping me, Katerina. You will be helping the entire country.”
I give him a shaky smile and say nothing else.
I’m not sure which part of me agrees. The dutiful daughter? The patriot he raised?
Or the woman who still thinks the man smiling at her is incapable of leading her into ruin?