Chapter Iskra
Iskra
If I was careful—quiet, patient, positioned near the right doors at the right times—I caught snippets. Fragments of conversation that told me more about the shape of this household than anyone intended me to know.
Over the past few days I had learned the names of everyone coming in and out of the house, and of those who remained. I filed them the way I had once filed case studies at university. Methodically. Without letting on.
Ruslan was his closest advisor—the one Vadim listened to, which made him the most important man in the building after Vadim himself.
Bogdan and Tikhon were the Pakhan’s byki, present and armed at all hours, rotating in and out with the quiet efficiency of men who had been doing this long enough to make it invisible.
Konstantin I already knew by reputation.
All of Chernograd knew Konstantin. The question I had turned over several times was why a man of his capability had never moved beyond krysha and torpedo—enforcer and killer, the positions he had held for years.
The answer, I suspected, was that he didn’t want to.
That he enjoyed the work too much to trade it for a captaincy and the politics that came with it.
Valentin. He dressed differently to the others—not as dark, lighter in colour if not in substance—but he was cut from the same cloth as the rest of them.
He moved through the house with the careful precision of someone who understood exactly what everything was worth.
I did wonder what his function was within the Bratva.
Grigori I knew through my father. The only captain the new Pakhan had retained from the old guard.
I hoped my father found that decision galling.
I had left my entire life and walked into this one so that Vadim Dragunov could consolidate his empire, and the least the universe could do was ensure Leonid Kozlov was irritated by at least one small element of the outcome.
The domestic staff didn’t speak to me beyond what was necessary.
The housekeeper gave instructions. The cook produced meals at appointed times.
The maids moved around me like I was furniture that hadn’t yet been assigned a room.
They followed my requests as long as those requests didn’t conflict with the Pakhan’s preferences, and the Pakhan’s preferences, it turned out, covered a significant amount of territory.
Spartak and Radovan—my shadows—had developed a specific expression for when I asked questions. Apprehensive was the right word for it. The expression of men caught between two sources of authority and acutely aware of which one had the longer reach.
I was surrounded by people at all hours and entirely alone.
Someone cleared their throat behind me.
I startled badly enough to take a step sideways.
Radovan. The elder of my two bodyguards, thirty-three years old, dark hair, blue eyes, the kind of face that gave nothing away as a matter of professional habit.
He was looking at me with the patience of a man who had been watching me loiter outside the Pakhan’s office door for longer than was advisable.
“Move along,” he said.
“How else am I supposed to learn anything?” I muttered, but shifted past the door.
I hesitated and glanced over my shoulder.
“I don’t suppose—”
“Everything gets reported to the Pakhan,” he said, cutting me off before I had finished forming the question.
“Mudak,” I hissed, but walked up the hallway. “I’m going for a walk and I don’t want you following me.”
I retrieved my coat, gloves and boots from my room, and by the time I reached the front door, Spartak was already there, waiting, his own coat on. Twenty-six years old. Clean-shaven. He had the slightly pained look of a man who had been assigned a duty he hadn’t anticipated.
“Keep your distance,” I said as he opened the door. “I’d like to pretend I have some privacy.”
He said nothing. He was good at that.
The cold hit me and I stopped on the step and breathed it in.
Clean air, properly cold, carrying the smell of frozen ground and pine from somewhere beyond the walls.
After days of white corridors and controlled interiors and the staleness of a house that ran on surveillance rather than warmth, it felt like the first honest thing I had encountered since arriving.
I had started with the balcony. The view of the grounds from there had pulled me downstairs and outside, and the walks had become the one part of the day I could call my own.
Around the perimeter of the house, along the garden paths, past the dormant flowerbeds and the walls of the compound just visible through the bare trees.
Exercise, yes. But also the only space where the ceiling wasn’t watching me.
The first day I had spent unpacking. Carefully, methodically—clothes hung, shoes arranged, accessories sorted.
The money from under the bed at my parents’ house had survived the transfer in the toe of a boot with a sock stuffed inside it.
It sat there now, in my wardrobe, in the same hiding place it had always occupied. A different house. The same instinct.
I had the monthly stipend too, per Clause 3.
Eight thousand dollars, first day of each calendar month, conditional on compliance.
I had no intention of spending it. Every dollar—or rouble, depending on how Valentin chose to disperse it—would go into the boot alongside the rest. Quietly. Without announcement.
If this arrangement didn't work out then I needed a contingency plan.
How low I’d fallen, anticipating his money.
I walked a little faster.
Spartak would appreciate the exercise.
When I went back inside, I noticed Bogdan standing in front of Vadim’s door. Radovan was a dirty little snitch.
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Mealtimes were lonely events and the only time I truly missed my family—the memory of them, at least, if not the reality.
Ruslan more than anyone else. The silence of the dining room was broken only by the occasional shift of a byki behind me, the quiet movement of people paid to be present without being noticed.
The beef stroganoff was rich and perfectly seasoned. My appetite was absent regardless.
I drank more of the red wine than I should have.
But I needed something—warmth, numbness, the illusion of company—and the wine was what was available.
I could understand, sitting alone at a table set for one in a room built for twenty, how people arrived at dependency.
How the bottle became the only reliable guest.
When I had finished eating what little I managed, I sat for a while longer, turning the glass slowly, staring out at the dark beyond the tall windows.
The grounds were invisible at this hour—just black, and the faint reflection of the candlelight on the glass, and my own face looking back at me with an expression I didn’t particularly want to examine.
I wondered what my family were doing. Whether Ruslan was at the dinner table in my absence, whether the space I had left was simply closed over or whether anyone had noticed the shape of it. Whether my mother had said my name today.
I thought about going to bed.
That was when the flutter arrived—low in my stomach, a slow coil of nerves that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Four nights. He hadn’t come near me in four nights.
We passed occasionally in the corridors—him moving with purpose toward somewhere that wasn’t where I was, his eyes finding me for a moment before moving on—but no words.
No contact. Just the eyes, and the certain quality of attention behind them that suggested the matter had been deferred rather than forgotten.
I drained my glass and stood.
Spartak pulled my chair back before I had fully risen. A maid appeared at the table to clear. Radovan fell into step behind me as I left the room and followed me up the stairs with the quiet persistence of a man who had been told not to lose sight of me and intended to keep his position.
When I reached my room I opened the door and slammed it shut behind me in one movement, directly into his face.
His soft chuckle made me smile.
Asshole.
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The city lights sparkled beyond the confines of his home, beckoning from the other side of the glass. Life outside the cage. The Black City going about its business without me, indifferent and luminous and entirely out of reach.
Compliance.
That was what he wanted. What the contract required. What everyone in this house was waiting for me to arrive at, as though it were only a matter of time and the correct application of pressure.
I closed the curtain.
My door opened.
It felt as though I had called the devil by thinking of him.
Vadim stepped inside and closed the door behind him with the quiet deliberateness of a man who had decided something and was no longer in any hurry about it.
He was still in his suit—jacket on, shirt buttoned—and he looked exactly as he always looked.
Larger than the room suggested he should be. Colder than the temperature warranted.
His eyes found me and didn’t move.
The silence held for long enough to be intentional.
“It won’t end well for you if you snoop around my business,” he said.
“I was curious.”
“There is a saying about curious cats,” he said, and began to walk toward me.
The light moved across him as he came—the lamp on the bedside table catching the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, making him appear larger and darker with each step. The room, which had felt like mine for four days, was rearranging itself around him the way rooms did.
“But since you appear to need my attention,” he said, reaching up to slip his jacket from his shoulders, “why don’t you get out of your clothes so we can get down to business.” He tossed the jacket toward the nearest chair without looking at it. “I’ve got four days to make up for.”
I stood frozen at the window.
His hands moved to his shirt buttons.
He had come to collect.