Chapter Iskra
Iskra
My anger kept the heartbreak at bay. The moment I felt the sadness begin to creep up on me I latched onto the fury—years of it, accumulated and reliable, the only currency I had left.
A simple glance at Galina’s smug face across the cathedral was enough to keep the tears from coming.
She had wanted this for me. Not the marriage—the humiliation of it.
The proof that Papa’s favouritism had delivered me somewhere worse than where it had delivered her.
I was mid-thought about exactly what I wanted to do about that when Vadim’s hand closed around my forearm.
He frogmarched me toward the door with the brisk efficiency of a man removing an inconvenience.
I grabbed the front of my dress with my free hand and hauled it up before it took my feet out from under me.
Beneath us, the remaining glass shards cracked and scattered—a sound that was still, even now, deeply satisfying.
The cold hit my face as we came through the doors.
“Have you finished with your temper tantrum?” he asked.
“Da,” I said.
I meant: for now.
“I’m giving you a one-off pass.” His fingers bit into my arm without quite becoming a grip that would bruise. A message, precisely calibrated. “You are associated with the Dragunovs now. You will act accordingly.”
“Da,” I said, and put every shade of sullenness I had into the single syllable.
One of his men had the car door open before we reached it.
Vadim folded himself inside and moved without looking at me, making space the way you make space for luggage.
I gathered the dress in armfuls and manoeuvred myself in after him, the fabric compressing around me in the confined space until I was wedged against the door with approximately half the skirt on my lap and the rest doing whatever it wanted.
He had his phone out before the door closed. Tapping. Reading. Entirely elsewhere.
I looked out of the window and let the city move past.
It didn’t take long. Chernograd thinned at the edges—the stone facades giving way to wider roads, higher walls, the quiet of land that had been purchased and cleared and made purposeful.
I had heard about his home the way everyone in Chernograd had heard about it.
An old mansion, bought and extended and reinforced until it had become something that occupied its own category between residence and fortress.
The gates appeared first. Iron, tall as the walls they were set into, and the walls were considerable. They opened inward as we approached, smoothly and without hesitation, and the car continued through.
Then I saw the house.
I had expected imposing. I had not expected this.
The entrance was a great white dome—not the grey stone of the city or the gold of the cathedral but white, pale and clean against the winter sky, tall enough to encompass several floors, supported by pillars that rose from a wide circular forecourt.
The rest of the house extended on either side of it, long and symmetrical and elegantly proportioned, the windows tall and regular, the stonework immaculate.
Snow had settled along every horizontal surface and across the grounds beyond, and the effect of it—the white of the building against the white of the snow against the flat white winter sky—was of something that had no edges. Something that went on.
I had been saving against a deposit on a flat.
A second car pulled in behind us. I recognised the driver—the man who had taken me from my parents’ house this morning. Beside him, Radovan, who had carried my dress in the cathedral like a choirboy and who was now looking resolutely forward.
“They are your byki,” Vadim said.
I turned. He had lowered his phone and was watching me with the expression he seemed to reserve for things he was assessing rather than speaking to.
“Radovan and Spartak,” he continued. “Where you go, they go.”
I looked back at the house. At the dome. At the pillars.
Where you go, they go. Guards dressed as protection. A gilded cage dressed as a manor house.
Both cars stopped at the foot of the entrance steps.
One of his men opened my door and offered a hand I didn’t need but took anyway, because the dress made independent exits impractical.
Vadim was already out, already moving, phone back at his ear, speaking rapidly to someone in the clipped shorthand of a man for whom this moment had already been processed and filed.
“Show her to her room, Radovan,” he said without turning, and was gone through the doors before I had finished gathering my skirt.
I stood on the steps in my wedding dress in the cold and watched him disappear.
Radovan appeared at a respectful distance, patient and expressionless.
I exhaled slowly. A reprieve. A room to myself, a door I could presumably close, a few hours before whatever came next arrived to collect me.
I looked up at the dome above the entrance. At the pillars. At the white that went on in every direction with no visible boundary.
I wondered how long the reprieve would last.
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The house was not a house. It was a statement.
Everything had its place and everything knew it.
The walls were pristine white, the floors dark mahogany polished to such a depth that the white of the walls lived in them too, reflected back in long clean lines that made the corridors feel endless.
No clutter. No softness. Nothing that hadn’t been chosen deliberately and positioned with precision.
I paused at the threshold of the open-plan living room.
It was an obscene size. The kind of room that existed not for living in but for demonstrating that you could afford not to. The wide staircase rose from its centre and split at the top, one branch extending east, one west, dividing the house into two halves as neatly as a boundary drawn on a map.
Radovan led me west.
I followed, past gold-framed artwork hanging at measured intervals along the corridor walls.
Classical, not modern. Portraits and landscapes in heavy frames—the kind of art that said old money and established authority rather than taste.
The kind of art you inherited or bought to look as though you had.
He stopped at a set of double doors and opened them.
I stepped inside and forgot, briefly, to be unhappy.
The room was not white. After the stark pallor of the corridors the colour came as a physical shock—deep red panels set into the walls, rich and formal, each one framed in gold.
The ceiling was cream with elaborate moulded cornices picked out in more gold, and at its centre hung a chandelier that caught the grey winter light coming through the tall windows and scattered it across every surface.
Heavy curtains in deep red and gold flanked the windows, designed less for decoration than for keeping the cold on the correct side of the glass.
It was beautiful in the way that cages are sometimes beautiful.
I moved further into the room. A bed that could have slept four, a fireplace with a carved surround, furniture that matched in the way of things chosen by someone with money and no emotional investment in the outcome. I began opening doors.
A wardrobe. Deep enough to disappear into.
More storage beyond it.
Across the room—a bathroom. White marble, chrome fittings, a bathtub that sat on feet in the centre of the floor like something that expected to be admired.
Then I stopped.
One of the tall windows had a balcony. Narrow, wrought iron, overlooking what appeared to be the grounds—white lawn, white trees, white sky, the walls of the compound just visible at the far edge. Somewhere beyond them, Chernograd. Somewhere beyond Chernograd, a life I had been saving toward.
I stood at the glass for a moment.
Then I turned back to the room and remembered, with the clarity that arrives too late, that I had left everything at my parents’ house.
Every belonging I owned was sitting in my bedroom on the other side of the city, in a room that was no longer mine, in a house I had told myself I would never re-enter.
Practical problems for another hour.
“Where is the Pakhan’s bedroom?” I asked.
Radovan had remained by the doorway, hands clasped, expression neutral. He had the stillness of someone trained to occupy space without intruding on it.
“His rooms are on the east side of the stairs,” he said.
I let that settle.
West. I was east. The staircase split between us like a deliberate architecture of separation—which, given the man, it probably was.
Separate wings. Separate lives. He had his half of the house and I had mine, and the only question was how often he intended to cross the distance between them and for what.
For now, it was enough.
“Thank you,” I said.
He reached for the door handles and drew both doors shut behind him. I waited for the sound of retreating footsteps.
Nothing.
He was still there. On the other side of the door, in the corridor, stationed. So the byki were not just for outside—they would remain with me inside the house as well. A shadow on each side of every door I closed.
I absorbed that and decided to be angry about it later.
I reached up and began to dismantle the veil, working the pins out one by one and laying them on the dressing table, the elaborate structure coming apart in pieces—the clips, the silk, the carefully constructed curls that Nina had spent an hour on this morning in a room that felt like several lifetimes ago.
The woman in the mirror looked tired.
She looked like someone who had survived the first day of a very long war.