9. Rowan #2
Ivan sets the pen down at last. The gesture draws my attention against my will.
His hands look steadier than they did three days ago.
The nails are clean, the knuckles faintly scarred beneath the polish of age.
Those same hands that signed tuition forms for Sofia’s schools have also ordered men tortured.
Ones that once rested on my shoulder when I was tired and bruised and too proud to admit I was hungry.
Hands that made me.
“Tell me exactly what you expect to find,” he says.
I need to see the bodies of the assassins to take my mind off the spiraling it's been cycling through over the past few days.
Moscow politsiya have already run ballistics, prints, digital traces, but nothing has come back so far.
Something tells me they missed a detail the night we rushed Ivan to the hospital.
There had been too much chaos, too much adrenaline rushing through me for me to think straight enough to gather any intel while at the scene.
I hesitate before answering. “I’m not sure yet.”
For a beat, I think he’ll reprimand me. Not harshly.
Ivan rarely wastes anger when a strong hand of discipline will do the job better.
He studies me, weighing whether this desire to cross-examine what has already been documented is useful or something getting in the way of the grand plan he is already in the midst of enacting.
“I see,” he finally says. He looks down at the document in front of him again. “This fixation on the ambush is understandable, but do not let it narrow your view. There are more important things to focus on at the moment.”
Perhaps he means nothing by it. It is close to one of those principles he has repeated over the years that he still considers the bedrock beneath everything he built.
Don’t allow yourself to become too fixated on the smaller details when the bigger picture is what matters.
But lately, every familiar phrase has begun to sound different to my ears, as if they are warning signs pointing to something that is slowly becoming disastrously wrong.
“Yes, Pakhan.” I murmur. “As I said, I won’t be gone for more than two hours.”
He nods briefly. “Inform me if there are any changes to what has already been documented.”
“I will.”
The halls are quiet as I step out of Ivan’s office. No one stops me to question where I’m going as I move through the estate. That is the advantage of being the Pahkan’s blade. No one asks the knife where it’s being pointed until it’s already pressed up against a soft pressure point.
Staff glance at me as I pass, but they do not speak.
A junior guard near the end of the west corridor straightens when he spots me.
One of the maids nearly drops the folded linens in her arms before recovering and flattening herself against the wall so I can continue without adjusting my path.
I don’t acknowledge either of them, though not out of cruelty.
It’s habit, the world narrowing focus so completely that the world beyond my task becomes nothing more than background noise.
My mind is already on the morgue, anyway.
Before leaving, I check in with Sofia’s guards one last time. They are stationed outside the library exactly where I left them hours before.
The older one, Maks, has the watchful calm that most of our seasoned soldiers do, having spent enough time around these halls to know better than to slack off once boredom rears its ugly head.
The younger one, Petrov, still carries too much eagerness in his shoulders.
He wants to be useful, that much is obvious.
Though a trait like that in a man sometimes makes him almost as dangerous as incompetence does if not honed properly.
“Status?” I ask when approaching.
Maks straightens. “At the desk in the lefthand corner of the room.”
My brow raises. Still? When I left over two hours ago, that’s exactly where she’d been too. “What is she doing?”
Petrov clears his throat. “Reading and taking notes, it seems.”
“What kind of notes?”
Maks speaks again. “Couldn’t see clearly. The books she took from the shelves are mostly political titles. She does have her personal laptop with her. Petrov retrieved it about an hour ago when she requested it.”
A headache begins to form behind my right eye.
Though it surprises me in a vague sense, it doesn’t strike me as odd entirely.
Sofia does not sit idly the way normal people do when bored.
In fact, I don’t believe there is a bone in her entire body capable of resting.
She tends to scratch at curiosities until something starts unraveling.
To her, every withheld answer becomes another piece to uncover.
Whatever she’s invested in has clearly absorbed her.
And while there’s a good chance it will continue until I come back, something in the back of my mind nags at me.
I’ve seen that focus on her face too often now, and with her I can never quite trust that false sense of security that her time occupied internally would usually give me if she were anyone else.
She may be innocently doing as her guards have said, trying to take back some kind of control through her studies since leaving it all behind in Italy, but there’s always an underlying current when it comes to her. One I never quite know how to predict.
Sofia is most dangerous when she blends into the background.
I push the library doors open without knocking. The room is large and dim, lit by the late morning light filtering through tall windows and the low gold glow of lamps between shelves. Books line every surface, the old leather spines arranged neatly in rows that seem to stretch on forever.
These shelves hold more than simply literature.
There are family records here, translated legal texts, political memoirs with annotations in Ivan’s handwriting, biographies of dead rulers whose failures he studied with the same attention other men give scripture.
All histories of men who made the same mistakes under different flags, and he called them legacies that he refuses to repeat.
Sofia has pulled out a few volumes and scattered them across the long reading table in front of her.
She sits in a high-backed leather chair with her back partly to the window.
Her hair is pinned messily at the top of her head, pale strands slipping loose around her temples.
Both sleeves are shoved up to her wrists as she writes something in a notebook, pen moving quickly across the page.
Her lips are pressed together in concentration, brows slightly drawn together.
She looks absurdly young for a moment.
Then she looks up the second I enter, pen still poised over the page, and the illusion dies. Those eyes are too alert, far too aware of the fact that I am here for a reason.
“What?” she asks.
My hand tightens around the side of the door closest to me. “I’m leaving the estate for a few hours. You are to stay here until I return.”
“I heard you the first four times you said as much this morning.”
I feel the muscle beneath my eye begin to twitch slightly. “Then hear it a fifth time.”
Her mouth tightens. “Where are you going?”
“No.”
Her eyes narrow. “That isn’t an answer.”
I allow a small smirk to tug at my lips before I can stop it. “Yet it is my favorite one to give you.”