Iskra
Something curled up and withered inside me the day my parents read the prenuptial agreement and encouraged me to sign it.
Papa said the Pakhan was being generous.
Mama couldn’t meet my eyes, but she said it was just a safety measure—standard practice for someone in his position.
She said it the way she said everything difficult: quickly, quietly, with the efficiency of a woman who had spent years not looking too closely at things.
Decades of cowardice that had left her spineless.
I read every clause.
Multiple times.
I had two choices, as far as I could see. I could spend my life trapped—a wife in name, a body in practice, watching my children grow up in a world I had no authority in. Or I could treat it as what it plainly was: a surrogacy programme with a payment schedule, and conduct myself accordingly.
The thought should have felt cold and strategic. Instead it left me hollow.
A sharp pang in my chest stole my breath when I reached the clause about birth bonuses.
The gap between a son and a daughter. One hundred thousand against twenty.
An eighty thousand dollar difference in what my body was worth depending on what it produced.
As though the value of a child—of my child—was determined before it took its first breath by something neither of us would have any say in.
Women held little to no value in the Bratva. I had always known that in the abstract. Now I had it in writing, notarised and legally binding.
The most telling clause was the fidelity one. He could touch anything that moved, in any city, on any night he chose. I was beholden to his cock alone for the duration of a marriage that only he had the right to end. My faithfulness was a contractual obligation. His was not mentioned.
I considered taking a copy to the priest. Standing before the cross in the cold quiet of the church and laying the pages at the lectern and watching Father Dmitri’s face.
But I knew, even as the thought formed, that it would change nothing.
The church stood in the shadow of the Dragunov compound.
The cathedral spire was visible from his gates.
God and the Bratva had long since reached an accommodation in this city, and women like me were not part of the negotiation.
There was nothing I could do to change the trajectory of my life.
I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling until it blurred.
When the tears came they came slowly at first, tracking sideways down my face and soaking into my hair.
Then I thought of the children—children I hadn’t had yet, children I hadn’t chosen to have, children who would be taken from me by Clause 10 the moment they stopped being useful to him—and something broke open.
I turned into my pillow and screamed until my throat ached.
It changed nothing.
I would be married in a matter of days.
The dress hung on the wardrobe door across from my bed.
Elaborate, expensive, chosen without my input.
It watched me day and night like a sentence already passed.
I hated it with a specificity that surprised me—the weight of the fabric, the structure of the bodice, the way it seemed designed to display rather than clothe.
And the ring.
Even the ring had an inscription on the inside of the band.
Property of Vadim.
Not his wife. Not his partner. Not even his bride.
His property.
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The call for dinner came. I sat up slowly, still somewhere far from myself. I didn’t bother to wash my face. Didn’t see the point.
Downstairs, my parents talked between themselves as though everything was entirely normal.
Ruslan watched me across the table—quick glances, carefully spaced, trying not to make it obvious.
I ate without tasting anything, moving the food around my plate and swallowing when it seemed appropriate, wondering distantly what I was eating for. What any of it was for.
“Iskra.” Ruslan’s voice was quiet but direct. “What’s wrong?”
“Ask them,” I said, and looked at my parents.
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough for Papa to find his fury.
“Get upstairs, you ungrateful brat,” he snapped.
“Gladly,” I said.
I pushed the chair back hard enough for it to scrape against the floorboards and walked out without looking at him.
Behind me, his voice rose—subordination, disgrace, how it would get me killed, how I didn’t understand what he had secured for this family.
The words followed me into the hallway and up the stairs and I let them wash past me like water.
I was halfway up when it settled over me, quiet and absolute.
My father knew. He had always known exactly what he was signing me into. He knew Vadim Dragunov’s mother had vanished after giving birth to two sons. He had read the proof in the contract. And he had sacrificed me anyway.
Day by day the fracture between us widened.
Ruslan still didn’t know the full truth of it.
Perhaps my parents’ shame kept them quiet—some last vestige of it, anyway.
I stayed quiet for a different reason. He was seventeen and angry on my behalf already.
If he knew what was actually in that document, he would do something irreversible, and I was not going to be the reason they buried my brother in the frozen ground outside this city.
So I said nothing.
And I carried it alone, the way Kozlov women apparently did.
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In the old days, the villagers and the bridal party would lament the end of a young woman’s life before she was married.
Melancholic songs of woe passed from woman to woman, mouth to mouth, a ritual mourning for the girl who was about to cease to exist. The loss of girlhood.
The passage into becoming something else entirely.
They used to take the bride to a bathhouse and bathe her like a corpse.
A symbol of dying as an unmarried girl and being reborn as a bride.
The funeral rite had always seemed morbid to me when I read about it.
Now, sitting in front of this mirror in a dress that weighed as much as a sentence, it seemed like the only honest tradition anyone had ever devised for an occasion like this.
They had understood something, those women.
They had looked at marriage clearly and called it what it was.
I wished someone had bathed me like a corpse this morning.
Instead Nina had arrived at seven with her case of tools and her reputation and her complete indifference to the inner life of her subjects.
“Nyet. No more tears,” she snapped, tilting my chin up with two fingers and dabbing more powder beneath my eyes with the focused displeasure of an artist whose canvas was misbehaving. “You will not ruin my creation.”
She set the powder down and reached for the ornate flower slide clips, piecing them together one by one with the deft efficiency of someone who had done this hundreds of times and intended to keep doing it for hundreds more.
When she finished they sat like a crown at the centre of my curls, precise and elaborate and entirely not mine.
Her reputation was the best in Chernograd. I could see why.
She arranged the veil next, draping it so that it fell perfectly over my hair — light as breath, which was almost insulting given what the rest of me was carrying.
The dress was another matter. The weight of all the pearls and beadwork pulled at my shoulders and compressed my ribs and made every breath a small, deliberate act.
I had been wearing it for forty minutes and already felt like I was being slowly pressed into the ground.
I stared at the woman in the mirror.
She was immaculate. Vadim Dragunov’s bride, assembled by expert hands—the veil, the crown, the painted face, the careful architecture of a woman being presented. She looked exactly as a bride was supposed to look.
Underneath the powder and the pearls and the precise line of Nina’s work, she was dying. Quietly and without ceremony, which was perhaps more honest than the songs would have been anyway.
“You’re marrying such a handsome man,” Nina said, stepping back to assess her work with her hands on her hips. “Why so glum?”
I shrugged. The dress resisted even that small movement, the beadwork stiff and unyielding.
“Ah.” She nodded sagely. “You will miss your parents, da?”
I didn’t answer.
I looked down at my hand resting in my lap. The pale yellow diamond caught the light from the dresser mirror and threw it back at me, cold and brilliant and enormous.
Property of Vadim.
After today there would be no after. No version of this day that I came out of unchanged. From this morning forward I would be owned—documented, contracted, inscribed—by Vadim Dragunov.
The woman in the mirror looked back at me and said nothing.
She already knew.
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People kept touching my dress. Reaching out to finger the beadwork, the pearls, the veil, offering congratulations in bright voices that filled the room and bounced off the walls and meant nothing.
I nodded. I smiled when smiling seemed required.
Nina was gone, her job complete, her fee no doubt already collected.
In her place had come everyone else—neighbours, cousins, women from the parish who had no particular connection to me but had found their way into my bedroom regardless, because a Dragunov bride was worth witnessing.
I had never felt so alone in a full room in my life.
Ruslan pushed through them.
He looked so handsome it almost undid me. His blonde hair smoothed to one side, the black suit making him look older than seventeen had any right to. He had dressed carefully. For me, I realised. He had wanted to do this properly.
“Everyone out of my sister’s room,” he said, and his voice had a quiet authority in it that I hadn’t heard before. Not a boy’s voice. “We leave for the church soon.”
They grumbled, exchanged glances, but they went. The room emptied in stages until it was just the two of us standing in the space that had been mine for twenty-five years and already felt like someone else’s memory.
“You look beautiful, sestra,” he murmured.
I looked at him for a long moment. Took him in. The set of his jaw, the careful hair, the way he was holding himself together for my benefit when I could see clearly that he was barely managing it.
“Ruslan.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I won’t be coming back to this house. After today, I won’t step through that door again.”
He went very still.
“Mama and Papa know what they’ve done. I won’t pretend otherwise and I won’t make it easy for them by reappearing at their table as though nothing happened.” I stood slowly, the dress rising around me. “I think it’s better if you forget you had a sister.”
“Iskra—” He stepped back as though I’d struck him. “No. I won’t—”
“It’s the only way I’ll survive,” I whispered.
His face crumpled for just a second before he caught it.
I reached up and kissed his cheek. Held my lips there a moment longer than I meant to, memorising the distinct warmth of him, this boy who had stood between me and the worst of this family his whole life without ever being asked to.
“I love you, brat,” I said against his cheek. “More than you know. But you must forget me. Live your life. Don’t trust a soul in that world Papa is pushing you toward. Not a single one.”
I made myself pull back before he could say anything else. Before I lost my nerve entirely.
I lifted the front of the dress with both hands and walked out of the room without looking back.
Down the stairs, past the cluster of people in the hallway who parted for me with small sounds of admiration, past my mother who reached out and whom I did not stop for, past my father standing straight-backed and proud in the doorway of the sitting room, past Galina whose expression I didn’t trouble myself to read.
I didn’t stop until I reached the car he had sent. Long, black, idling at the kerb like a hearse that hadn’t quite committed to the metaphor.
It took some doing to get the dress inside.
I gathered the layers and pushed and manoeuvred until I was seated and the fabric was roughly contained and the door could close.
The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror with an expression that suggested he had been given very specific instructions about this morning that did not include me getting in unaccompanied.
“Drive,” I said.
He didn’t move.
Behind me I could hear footsteps on the path. Voices. My father’s among them.
“Now.”
The engine turned over. The car pulled away from the kerb with smooth, expensive quietness.
In the rearview mirror I watched my parents standing on the pavement, my mother’s hand half-raised and my father’s jaw working on something he hadn’t managed to say in time.
They could make their own way to the church.
They knew where it was. Everyone in Chernograd knew where it was—the cathedral that rose above the rooftops in the shadow of the Dragunov compound, as though God and the Bratva had agreed to share the skyline.
I turned away from the mirror.
The streets moved past the windows. The salted pavements, the stone facades, the grey winter light falling flat and even across a city I had spent my whole life trying to leave.
I had imagined leaving so many times. In none of those versions did I leave like this—dressed in pearls and someone else’s ownership, heading toward the thing I had been saving against.
I breathed through the constraints of the dress as best I could and watched my Chernograd disappear behind me. The only Chernograd I would know now was the Pakhan’s. His city, run by his law.
I did not let myself look for Ruslan in the mirror.
I didn’t trust what I would do if I saw his face.