Chapter 3 Inessa
INESSA
The fluorescent lights above the metal table burn my eyes.
Detective Zhukov asks the same questions for the fourth time, his pen scratching across yellow paper while I sit in this plastic chair that cuts into my spine.
My wedding dress clings to my skin, stiff with his blood.
The fabric pulls tight across my chest every time I breathe, reminding me of how I held him while he died on the pavement outside my studio like a common criminal.
"Tell me again about the vehicle that pulled up."
I press my palms flat against the cold surface.
"There were three black SUVs… I've told you this." I'm growing impatient and tired.
I want a drink and my sketch pencils to calm my nerves.
"How many shots did you hear?"
"I don’t know… A lot." My voice comes out flat.
I've said this so many times, the words have lost all meaning.
"And you're certain your father had no enemies?"
The question almost makes me laugh.
Batya had enemies everywhere—competitors who resented his success, former partners who felt cheated, rivals who wanted his connections.
But I can't say that to a detective whose notepad will become evidence, whose reports will be read by prosecutors and judges.
"My father was a businessman. He made tough decisions."
Zhukov's eyes narrow.
He knows I'm holding back, but he can't prove it.
After another hour of circling the same ground, he finally closes his notebook.
"We'll need you to come in again tomorrow. Don't leave the city."
I nod and sign the papers they put in front of me.
My signature looks wrong, shaky, nothing at all how I usually write my name.
But just hours after Batya's death, I think I'm doing fairly well, considering.
The taxi ride home is a blur of streetlights and empty roads.
St. Petersburg sleeps while I sit in the back seat, staring at my hands.
Batya's blood has dried under my fingernails.
I should have washed it off at the station, but I don't have the emotional energy to care.
So I pick at it and let tears burn my eyes again.
He's gone… Really gone.
I'm alone in this world now, and Yuri Gravitch is the shark in the water, drawn in by blood, circling and ready to consume me.
"Oh, Batya." I sigh softly and curl deeper into the taxi's leather cushion.
My apartment building looms dark overhead as the cab pulls up to a stop.
The doorman nods as I pass through the lobby.
He's probably heard the news already.
In St. Petersburg, word travels fast when someone important dies, and my father was an influential man.
The elevator climbs to the fifteenth floor while I lean against the mirrored wall.
My reflection stares back—pale skin, hollow eyes, dark hair tangled around my shoulders.
I look exactly how I feel, broken and empty and without hope in this world now.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
My business is strong, well built, but Yuri was right.
The vultures are only days away from swooping in for the kill, and I don't have a shred of muscle behind me anymore.
Batya's men would surely back me, but at what cost?
Would I end up being pushed around by them too, forced out of my own business?
I could call my mother, but she's been distant for years now.
I'm not sure I want to do that.
There is so much secrecy around what happened between her and my father that I'm not sure what to believe.
Yuri thinks she's a parasite.
She may well be.
My apartment door opens to reveal things just as I left them.
How can my coffee mug still sit on the kitchen counter where I left it when I headed in to work this morning?
Batya is dead.
How can my sketches remain scattered across my drafting table when everything I built is about to crumble?
It doesn't seem right.
Not when I strip off the gown of celebration and leave it in a heap on my bedroom floor.
Not when I take a shower so scalding hot that it burns my skin as I scrape the dried blood off my chest.
Not when I sob under the spray and pound the tile walls until my hands hurt.
It's not supposed to be this way.
Clean but still angry and crying, I dry off, slip into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, and move toward my drafting table, sinking into the chair.
My hands find a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil without conscious thought.
Lines appear on the page under my touch, though I'm not sure what I'm drawing.
A dress takes shape, something appropriate for grief.
Black silk, fitted bodice, modest neckline.
My fingers work automatically while my mind stays blank.
I can't think about tomorrow or next week or how I'll survive without Batya.
It's too painful to imagine life without him.
I can only put pencil to paper and watch the lines blur together until the sketch pad is a blur of charcoal and shadows and my hands are darkened.
I'm lost in the monotony of it all when the front door explodes inward.
The sound tears through my apartment, wood splintering against the wall.
I drop my pencil and spin around as men flood into my living room.
Three of them, all dressed in dark suits, all carrying guns.
They spread out across my space without saying a word to me, but they don't look aggressive.
After the day I've had, I'm not sure my nervous system even knows how to respond anymore.
Then he enters.
Yuri Gravitch fills my doorway, his massive frame obscuring the light from the hallway.
Silver threads through his dark hair, and tattoos crawl up his neck from beneath his collar.
He surveys my living room with dark eyes that miss nothing.
Until his gaze settles on me, and I feel pinned in place.
"Inessa."
I force myself to stand, my legs unsteady beneath me.
"What are you doing here?" I snap, unconsciously hugging my arms over my belly.
I'm sitting here worrying about how Batya's enemies will lean on me in the coming days and his ally is the first to break down my door.
It's shameful.
He nods at his men, who put their guns away, and uses his foot to kick the door closed behind him.
Though the latch is now busted and I'll have to call the super before I can sleep.
"We need to talk," he growls, but I have nothing else to talk to him about.
He gave me until midnight to answer his ridiculously absurd proposal, and I didn't even need a second.
I'm not marrying him.
He's a beast of a man, an entitled bully.
"Get out of my home."
One of his men—a scarred giant with hands the size of dinner plates—takes a step toward me.
Yuri holds up a finger, stopping him without looking away from my face.
"You had your chance to call me back." He speaks to me like he's my father.
He's fucking old enough to be my father.
Dominic was my age. Yuri is out of line.
"You chose not to."
"I was at a police station."
"For five hours?" He moves deeper into my apartment, but his eyes stay locked on me.
"You had time to think. Time to make the right decision."
I back up until my legs hit the drafting table, and my hand finds it, bracing me.
"There is no decision. Dominic is dead. I can't marry a corpse. And I won't marry you."
"Yes. My son is dead." The words come out flat, emotionless.
If he feels grief, it doesn't show on his face. "Which changes our arrangement."
"There is no arrangement anymore."
He stops three feet away from me, close enough that I can smell the tobacco smoke clinging to his coat, the expensive cologne that doesn't quite mask the scent.
Up close, he's even more imposing.
His face is all hard angles—sharp cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, eyes that have seen too much blood.
He's a handsome man, probably where Dominic got his good looks, but looks aren't everything.
At least with Dominic, we had a sliver of a chance that there would be something in common between us.
With Yuri, I'd have nothing.
I'd be a prisoner, a sex slave, and if I was lucky, he'd let me work.
"You're wrong." He reaches into his coat and pulls out a manila envelope.
"The contracts your father signed are still binding. The alliance between our families still stands."
"The alliance was between Dominic and me."
"The alliance was between the Gravitch family and the Mirov family."
He drops the envelope onto my drafting table, scattering my funeral dress sketches.
"Your father made certain of that in the fine print."
I grab the envelope with shaking hands and pull out the papers inside.
Legal documents, thick with clauses and subclauses written in the dense language that lawyers use to hide their true meaning.
But the relevant sections are highlighted in yellow, impossible to miss.
The marriage arrangement isn't between Dominic and me, specifically.
It's between the heir of the Gravitch family and the heir of the Mirov family.
If one heir dies, the other steps in to fulfill the contract.
"This can't be legal," I mumble as my eyes pore over the pages.
"Your father's signature says otherwise."
Yuri takes another drag from his cigarette. "As does yours."
My signature is there at the bottom, right next to Batya's.
I remember signing this document three months ago, barely reading it because I trusted my father to handle the details.
I was so focused on the wedding arrangements, on the dress fittings and venue bookings, that I never bothered to understand what I was actually agreeing to.
"I won't marry you," I snap, and I throw the papers down on the table, making more of the sketches fly off to the floor below.
"Then you'll lose everything." He moves to the window and looks out at the city below.
"Your showrooms, your warehouses, your employees, your brand name. All of it will be gone within a week."
"You can't just take my business."
"I don't need to take it." He turns back to me, his dark eyes reflecting the city lights.
"Your competitors will do that for me. Without protection, without backing, you're nothing but a target."
I know he's right.
Fashion is a brutal industry even for those with power behind them.
For a young woman alone, it's a death sentence.
The vultures are probably already gathering, ready to pick apart my contracts and steal my designs.
"You have three days." Yuri's eyes darken to an inky color that threatens to consume me.
He's a terrifying man, and when he wants something—just like my father and every other man in this business—he takes it. "We'll marry on Thursday."
"I need more time—"
"Time is what you don't have."
He nods to his men, and they move toward the door.
"Thursday, or you can explain to your employees why they're all unemployed."
He's almost to the door when I find my voice again.
"Why? Why would you want to marry someone who hates you?"
He pauses in my doorway, and for a moment, his expression shifts, revealing something I can't quite read.
"Love isn't necessary in business."
When he turns, I pick up a pen from my table and launch it in that direction, but it falls short as he steps out the door.
"I'd rather die than marry you!" I screech, but the door closes behind them, leaving me alone in my apartment.
The smell of cigarette smoke lingers in the air, foreign and invasive in my carefully controlled space.
I sink back into my chair and stare at the legal documents scattered across my table.
Three days.
I pick up my phone with trembling hands and dial Alina's number.
She answers on the second ring, her voice thick with sleep.
"Inessa? What time is it? When did you get home? I'm sorry they wouldn't let me stay and wait for you."
"He was here." The words tumble out before I can stop them.
"Yuri Gravitch was here. In my apartment."
"What?" I hear rustling as she sits up in bed. "What did he want?"
"He wants to marry me. In three days."
The line goes quiet.
Then, "What the hell are you talking about?"
I tell her everything—the contract, the legal language, the ultimatum.
My voice breaks twice, but I force myself to keep talking.
Alina listens without interrupting, though I can hear her breathing getting faster.
"That bastard," she finally says. "He can't just force you into marriage."
"The contracts, though… I will lose my business, Alina. I can't… I've already lost Batya. What else should I let them take?"
My heart is tearing right down the middle.
I'm desperate to find a way out of this, but what can I do, give up the only thing I have left?
Just so I don't have to marry a man twice my age?
And then what?
Where would I go?
Who would take me in?
I'd have no way of supporting myself.
"Contracts can be broken. We'll hire lawyers, fight this in court—"
"With what money? And how long would that take?" I scoff and rub my face. "By the time we get a ruling, my company will be stripped bare."
"So, what are you saying?"
I close my eyes and lean back in my chair.
"I'm saying I might not have a choice."
"There's always a choice."
"Is there? I can marry him and keep everything I've built, or I can run and lose it all. Those are my options."
"You'd be married to a criminal," she protests weakly.
I know. It's something I considered a lot before I agreed to the arrangement with Dominic.
But my father was a criminal. And what does that make me?
"I was going to marry his son."
"Dominic wasn't—" Alina stops herself.
We both know what Dominic was.
Young, reckless, probably no different from his father.
"Inessa—"
"I have to go." I hang up before she can argue with me any more.
The apartment falls silent again.
I gather up the contract papers and stack them neatly, then push them to one corner of my table.
My funeral dress sketches lie scattered on the floor, the charcoal lines smudged from where they were jostled.
I don't know what I'm going to do, but I have to do something.
Marrying Yuri Gravitch sounds as appealing as drinking acid, but I might not have a choice.
When the sun rises, I will call my mother and ask her what she thinks.
I have nowhere else to turn, anyway, and she may have a solution I don’t see.
Otherwise, in three days, I will be back in a wedding dress, and this time, it will have to be at gunpoint or I won't go through with it.