Iskra
Sunday was the Lord’s day. Not this.
It felt sacrilegious—to come from the cold quiet of the church, the incense still in my hair, the priest’s words barely settled, and return home to the dread of their arrival. My parents had brought extra chairs in and extended the table out.
I watched from behind the curtains as the street filled with black cars.
Vadim Dragunov had bypassed the smotriny entirely.
The formal viewing, the pretence of mutual consideration, the fiction that I might have been given a choice—all of it skipped.
As though the decision was so foregone it hadn’t been worth the performance.
I supposed it hadn’t been.
I had caught a glimpse of him once. Galina’s wedding, six years ago.
I had been nineteen and trying not to stare at the group of men who had arrived and rearranged the atmosphere of the room simply by entering it.
Silent, watchful, coiled. I had noticed the way their byki shifted when the celebration grew loud—hands dropping to rest at their sides, eyes scanning, bodies orienting toward exits.
Ready. Always ready. Even at a wedding. Even surrounded by family.
I had been in awe then.
I was not nineteen anymore.
I knelt at the foot of my bed with my hands pressed together and prayed, though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was asking for. Deliverance seemed too much to hope for. Courage, perhaps. The ability to keep my face composed when I walked down those stairs.
Beneath the bed, behind the spare blankets my mother stored there, was the money I had been saving.
Slowly, carefully, over years. I counted it every Christmas when I added my work bonus in, watching the number grow toward something that felt like possibility.
A deposit. Distance. A life assembled quietly, without permission.
I was going nowhere now.
The door burst open.
My head snapped up.
Galina.
She was dressed for a different occasion entirely—something low-cut enough that even Mama had voiced disapproval at the neckline, which took some doing. She stood in my doorway and took in the sight of me on my knees and her expression curdled.
“Why are you praying?” she said. “You have the Pakhan.”
Before I could answer she scoffed, moved past me, and crossed to the window. She pushed the net curtain aside with one finger.
“Look at them,” she said. “Look at all of it.”
I didn’t need to look. I’d seen and heard it when they arrived. The sound of doors closing with that certain solid weight that expensive cars had.
“Borya has a ten-year-old second-hand car,” she continued, her voice pitching toward something that was half fury and half grief, though she would never have called it that.
“He can afford me nothing. I live like a peasant.” She turned from the window, and the sneer that came with it didn’t quite reach her eyes the way it usually did.
Underneath it was something rawer. “Papa always loved you more. He bought you a computer. He let you study. And now you get all this.” She gestured toward the window, toward the street, toward the black cars and what they represented. “It’s not fair.”
“Why don’t you marry him then, Galina?” I said, standing.
“Suka,” she snapped, and she came at me.
“That’s enough.” Ruslan stepped between us from the doorway, where he had apparently been long enough to read the room. He was quieter than I remembered him being even a year ago. Taller too.
Galina stopped. Something shifted in her face—the fury draining back behind her eyes, replaced by something more deliberate. She smiled.
“Or maybe you’ll end up with your throat slit once he’s done with you,” she said pleasantly, and walked past us both and down the stairs, her laughter trailing up behind her.
The silence she left was a specific kind. The kind that follows something said with the intention to lodge itself and stay.
I closed my eyes. Shook my head.
“She’s crazy, Ruslan.”
“You’ve only just noticed?” he asked, and the wryness in it almost made me smile. He looked me up and down properly then, and whatever he had been preparing to say next, he didn’t say it. His expression settled into something gentler.
“Too much?” I asked.
“Just perfect, starshaya sestra,” he murmured.
We shared a smile. It had been a long time since he’d called me big sister. I hadn’t realised until now how much I’d missed it.
I wore a simple white dress with a small floral print—it reminded me of the pale blossoms that were just beginning to bud at this time of year, the first tentative colour after a long winter.
It was a little more fitted than I remembered, but modest. It would please my father.
That had been the point when I chose it.
“Mama sent me to hurry you along,” Ruslan said, the lightness dropping slightly from his voice.
I swallowed. Stared at the open doorway.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned in close, the way he used to when he was small and I was the one doing the comforting.
“I am too,” he admitted.
It shouldn’t have helped. But it did. It made me feel less like I was the only one standing at the edge of something with no way back.
I was the big sister. I straightened my shoulders. Lifted my chin. Pushed my hair back from my face.
I was a Kozlova.
Whatever that was worth, it was all I had.
??
??
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We stopped in the hallway and I took a slow breath. Through the closed sitting room door I could hear men’s voices—talking, laughing, reminiscing with my father about the old days. The avtoriyet. The captain who had led others. Who had given orders and had them followed without question.
A criminal.
My father, the criminal.
“Don’t follow Papa’s path, Ruslan,” I whispered.
“I may not have a choice,” he said quietly.
I turned and gripped his shirt with both hands.
“What do you mean? Since when?” I shook him, but he didn’t budge. He was bigger than me now, and the realisation of that landed strangely—when had that happened?
“Papa told me yesterday,” he said. “He wants me to join the shestyorka.”
The probationary period. The bottom of the chain. An errand boy who ran and fetched and proved himself worthy of worse things to come.
“What did you say?”
He looked at me with an expression that was older than seventeen had any right to be.
“What can anyone say to Papa?”
I pressed my lips together and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He was right.
“No wonder they call it the black city,” I muttered. “It’s cursed.”
Or perhaps it was my family that was cursed—tethered to the Dragunovs by my father’s choices, generation by generation, until none of us could remember what it had felt like before.
“The positions here are full. Papa said they’d send me up north.” Ruslan straightened his collar where I’d gripped it. “We can talk about it later. I didn’t want you going in there with more to carry.”
My mind was still turning it over as we walked through the door.
I didn’t look at any of them when I entered. I kept my eyes down and let Ruslan guide me to the empty seat beside my mother. He moved to stand behind my chair and rested his hand on my shoulder—steady, quiet, present.
“My word, Leonid. She is more beautiful than I remember.”
I glanced up. Lev Dragunov, the old Pakhan, was smiling at me with what appeared to be genuine warmth.
I smiled back. It was automatic and entirely false.
Beside him sat a slightly younger version of himself—the brother, Sergei, with the same faded blue eyes and the same quality of a man who had once been formidable and knew it.
Then there was the Pakhan.
He was older than I remembered from Galina’s wedding. Larger. And much, much colder—the kind of cold that wasn’t absence of warmth but presence of something else entirely. Something that assessed and calculated and found everything around it either useful or irrelevant.
I could understand, objectively, why women found him attractive.
The dark hair, the jaw, the authority that sat on him like a second skin.
I could see all of it and feel none of it, because his pale blue eyes had dropped to my chest the moment I sat down and showed no interest in travelling further.
Of course they had.
The man was a well-known whore and apparently saw no reason to conceal it at his own engagement dinner.
I looked past him. The advisor—Ruslan, sharing my brother’s name in a coincidence that felt vaguely absurd—gave me a polite nod.
Beside him, Konstantin. I had perhaps misjudged his age; he looked older than I had assumed.
Similar colouring to his brother, similar stillness.
He didn’t smile or nod. He looked away, as though I were a piece of furniture that had been moved into a room and didn’t quite fit.
“Thank you,” my father said, with a pride that made my stomach turn.
I glanced at Galina and Borya. Both of them wore the expression of people attending a funeral in which they had complicated feelings about the deceased.
Nothing new there.
Ruslan’s hand tightened briefly on my shoulder, then he moved to his seat and the meal began.
Everyone ate with appetite. My parents performed the perfect hosts—my mother refilling glasses before they were empty, my father laughing too loudly at the right moments.
I managed part of a dumpling and some broth.
I didn’t look up, but I felt his eyes moving over me like a hand that hadn’t touched yet but was deciding whether to.
The room seemed to contract with every minute that passed.
His presence had a quality to it—a dark gravity that drew the air toward him and gave none of it back.
When my mother rose to fetch the tea and desserts, I stood to clear the table. Something to do with my hands. Something to look at other than him.
My father took the heavier platters. I worked around the table methodically, collecting dishes, keeping my eyes on the task. When I reached for the Pakhan’s plate, his hand closed around my wrist.
I stared at his fingers.
They circled my wrist with complete ease, the way you’d hold something you weren’t worried about breaking. Large and unhurried. One twist. That was all it would take.
“Why the rush, Iskra?” he drawled.
“She’s barely looked at you all evening, brat,” Konstantin said, not quite to me and not quite to him. “Perhaps she had someone else on her mind.”
My hands began to tremble.
His grip tightened and I dropped the plate. The spoon cracked against the fine porcelain and the sound rang out across the table like a small alarm.
“Pozhaluysta,” I whispered. I wasn’t above begging. Not here, not in front of all of them.
“Pakhan.” The advisor’s voice was measured, careful. “Perhaps this isn’t the time—to play.”
A beat of silence.
His fingers loosened. Then, slower, they slid down to my pulse point and rested there—deliberate, unhurried, as though he were simply curious what fear felt like from the inside.
“You look better in person,” he murmured.
“Let me help,” my brother said from behind me, and I didn’t need to see his face to know what was on it.
“Ruslan.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. I glanced between them—my seventeen-year-old brother squaring up to a man who had people killed for inconveniencing him, and the Pakhan looking back at him with the idle interest of someone deciding whether a thing was worth the effort.
“I’m fine,” I said. I scooped the plate from the table and turned to go.
His hand moved to my leg.
Fingers curling, sliding upward—slow and entirely deliberate—higher.
I took everything I was holding and walked out of the room.
His laughter followed me down the hallway, rich and unhurried, as though the whole evening had gone exactly as he intended.
All the while my bare leg itched as though he had infected me with something incurable. I shuddered as I set the dishes on the countertop.
I worked alongside my mother in silence. When she leaned in and kissed my cheek I felt something loosen slightly in my chest — not hope exactly, but the memory of it.
“Everything will work out, darling,” she said.
She was lying. We both knew it. But she said it the way she said everything — with such practised certainty that for a moment I almost let myself believe it.
Almost stepped into the soft, make-believe world she had built and maintained for decades, the one where Kozlov women were protected rather than traded.
I didn’t step in.
But I stood at the threshold a little longer than I should have.