Iskra
When my mother cornered me in my bedroom, I wasn’t worried.
Then my father stepped in behind her.
I sat on the bed and bowed my head—just enough. Submissive enough not to give him a reason.
“We’ve just had a wonderful marriage offer,” Mama said, her smile too wide, too bright. “From the largest house in Chernograd.”
My head snapped up. My heart hit my ribs once, hard.
It couldn’t be.
My eyes flew to my father.
He crossed his arms and scowled, which told me everything. He wasn’t here to soften this. He was here to make sure I didn’t fight it.
I had wanted out of Chernograd for as long as I could remember. Away from the organisation my father worked in, away from the weight of what that name meant in this city. When he was relieved of his duties, I had thought it might bring some peace to our home.
It was quite the opposite. Everyone moved carefully now, including Ruslan. Eggshells underfoot in every room. My brother remained the apple of my parents’ eyes, untouched by the tension that had settled into the walls of this house like damp.
“The Dragunovs,” my father said, and the pride in his voice made me lower my gaze.
“The new Pakhan has chosen you, Iskra,” Mama said, her voice pitching high.
I laid my trembling hands in my lap and said nothing.
“Explain it to her, Vera. Her fancy modern thinking has no place in the Bratva.” Papa’s voice sharpened. “She must respect her husband.” A pause. “Respect the Bratva.”
My mother took my hands and crouched before me. Up close her eyes were a mixture of things that didn’t belong together—sorrow and concern and something that looked almost like relief. She squeezed my hands until they ached.
“My darling girl. You will never want for anything. Never struggle,” she said.
My father grunted behind her.
“Make sure she is presentable when they come. The old Pakhan is traditional,” he said, and then the door hinges groaned and his footsteps faded down the hallway, and he was gone without once meeting my eyes.
Mama sat beside me on the bed. She cupped my cheek and gently turned my face toward hers.
“You know what he is like,” she murmured.
I nodded. Still somewhere far away from myself.
The entire city knew what Vadim Dragunov was.
He had worked his way up through the ranks with vicious precision—the youngest Pakhan of this century, in any country.
His reputation preceded him into every room he had never entered.
He went through women like tissues. Used and discarded, one after the next, and none of them had mattered.
I would be expected to matter even less.
“I don’t want to marry him, Mama,” I whispered.
Her hand left my face.
She stood.
“You have no choice,” she said. Her voice was not unkind. That somehow made it worse.
The door clicked shut.
I sat staring at the middle distance, at nothing, at the particular quality of silence that follows something irreversible. There would be countless young women in this city who would give anything to marry into a house like the Dragunovs. The power. The money. The protection.
I was not one of them.
Heavy footsteps on the stairs. A quick knock, more courtesy than request, and then my brother pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“I just heard,” Ruslan said, catching his breath.
I stood and hugged him. He was at that awkward stage of seventeen where he didn’t quite know what to do with his arms, but he held me anyway and patted my back in a steady, uncertain rhythm.
My family was damaged in the distinct ways that families in this world tended to be. But Ruslan was still innocent. He didn’t carry what Galina and I carried. Not yet.
The thought of Galina made me wince. She had been furious when Papa allowed me to go to university—every freedom granted to me read to her as a restriction placed on her, as though my small escapes were somehow my fault.
And now this? Being chosen by the most powerful man in Chernograd whilst she was already locked into her own marriage to a man barely worth the surname?
She was going to be unbearable.
“Galina is going to lose it,” Ruslan murmured, stepping back. “Her little munchkin husband won’t be any better.”
I laughed despite myself and slapped his arm.
“You’re terrible,” I said. Then the amusement fell away and left nothing behind it. “What am I to do?”
He pulled a grimace. “You know Papa once he’s made his mind up.”
I did. I knew all too well.
But I also knew that if my name had been put forward, it was his doing.
He had handed me over before I even knew I was for sale.
“Papa said they are coming this weekend. He was on the phone—” Ruslan stopped himself.
I glanced up at him.
“It’s all right. Tell me,” I said, bracing myself.
“He was talking about signing papers. An official engagement.”
The air left my lungs.
So soon.
Three days. That was all I had. Three days between the girl I was this morning and whatever I was supposed to become after they left.
Signing what? My name to a man I had never spoken to. My life to a house I wanted nothing to do with. My future to a decision made in a room I hadn’t been invited into, by men who had never once thought to ask.
I stepped back until my knees hit the edge of the bed and sat down heavily.
I pressed my fingers to my temples, then dragged them across my eyes, trying to push the tension back somewhere manageable. It didn’t work. It never worked. It was the kind of pressure that lived behind the bone, unreachable.
This was the thing about being a daughter in this world. You were never free. The university had felt like freedom—small, regional, close enough for my father to watch—but it wasn’t. It had only ever been a longer leash. And now he was pulling it back in.
I was trapped.
Cornered by everyone who was supposed to love me.
The thought of becoming the Pakhan’s wife turned my stomach. Vadim Dragunov didn’t want a wife. The whole city knew what he wanted. Something obedient and quiet. Something he could set aside when he was finished with it.
“It might not be that bad,” Ruslan murmured.
I looked at my brother—his young face, still hopeful in the way that only boys in this world got to stay hopeful—and I laughed.
The sound was empty and wretched, and we both knew it.
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Dinner was an uncomfortable affair.
The kitchen was warm at least, the windows fogged with steam from the stove, the smell of dill, black bread and the particular closeness of a family that had run out of things to say to one another.
Mama fussed over Ruslan. Papa glowered at the middle distance.
The hearty soup was warming, but it was the tea and sweets that comforted me—the small, reliable things.
The porcelain cup that had always been mine.
The sugar that dissolved before you could watch it go.
“Iskra. Do not shame the Kozlov name,” Papa said, pushing his bowl aside and reaching for his cigarettes.
“Yes, Papa,” I said, and took a sip of tea.
He lit up and leaned back, and I watched the smoke curl toward the ceiling and hang there in the lamplight. Some of the tension loosened from his shoulders. He almost smiled. As though the worst of it was already behind him. As though he had solved something difficult and could rest now.
Would he even care if his beloved Pakhan killed me?
It wasn’t an idle thought. No one knew what had happened to Vadim Dragunov’s mother. No one dared to speculate about Lev Dragunov—not aloud, not in this city, not where the walls had ears that reported back. The Dragunov women simply ceased to exist at some point and no one asked why.
Vadim was around ten years my senior. His brother close to Galina’s age. I did the arithmetic I didn’t want to do—how long before I became another quiet disappearance? Another name that stopped being spoken? I would give him his heir and then what? Would I be set aside, or would I simply be erased?
Mama sat across the table as if everything was entirely normal.
As if her daughter wasn’t being sold to a criminal over soup and cigarette smoke.
She cut Ruslan’s bread for him and asked about his marks and laughed at something he said, and the performance of it made my chest ache in a way I couldn’t name.
When Ruslan started talking about school in earnest, the attention shifted and the pressure on me lifted by degrees. I finished my tea quietly. Then I stood and began to clear the table, moving between the kitchen and the dining room until there was nothing left to carry.
I stayed in the kitchen after that.
The water ran hot over my hands. The steam rose. Outside the small window above the sink, Chernograd was dark and going about its business—the city that had always belonged to men like the Dragunovs, that had never once allowed our women to shine. Women like me.
I let the tears come where no one could see them.