10. Sasha
SASHA
B y morning, the storm has passed.
The hills beyond the estate lie under a sky the color of dirty snow, pale and bruised, streaked through with low clouds that refuse to fully disperse. The sun fights its way through in thin, watery rays that do nothing to warm the air.
The estate feels different in the light. Quieter. Muted, as if someone has turned the volume down on the world. The guards move more slowly, doors close with softer sounds. Even the dogs are restless in a subdued way, pacing the perimeters without barking, sensing that something has shifted.
I stand at the window of my study with a cup of coffee, cooling forgotten in my hand, and replay the night again.
And again.
And again.
Her voice comes back first, sharp with panic, frayed at the edges. The way her hands shook when she wrapped them around herself, fingers digging into her skin as if she could anchor herself by sheer force of will.
Then there is the moment I can’t dislodge no matter how many times I replay it. The moment she stopped fighting me, resistance ebbing from her muscles in fragile increments, drained out of her slowly until she’d leaned into me and allowed me to hold her close and put her to bed without fuss.
She’d trusted me like I was… safe.
The thought makes my grip tighten around the porcelain mug.
It makes no sense.
She knows what I’ve done. She knows who I am— what I am. She looked me in the eyes and confirmed I’d killed her mother, spat the words at me like poison, a curse meant to burn its way into my skin.
And still, somewhere between the storm upsetting her and her sobbing against my chest, her body had trusted mine on instinct. Trusted the man who destroyed her life more completely than her father, all while leaving me to hold her together when everything else was falling apart around her.
I should have left her there.
That is the truth I keep circling inside me.
I should have let her drown in her grief, forced her to endure it alone until it sharpened her into a person who would do anything to survive.
That is how it works. That is how it has always works.
Pain either destroys you or it tempers you into something harder, colder, and more dangerous than your enemies could ever understand.
That is how it happened to me.
But… instead, I held her until her breathing slowed. Until the violent tremors in her body faded into something softer. Until her heartbeat steadied against my chest, no longer racing like it was trying to outrun memory itself.
Now daylight crawls across the floor of my study in pale stripes, catching on the edge of the desk, the legs of the chair, the map on the wall that charts my empire and its bloodshed. The memory of her weight against me sits on my skin like a bruise, tender and persistent and impossible to ignore.
I take a sip of coffee and barely taste it.
What do I do now?
There’s a knock at the door.
It’s one sharp rap with no waiting afterward, no polite pause for permission to come in before the door is already swinging open. I don’t bother to answer, anyway.
Only one man walks into this room without it.
Roman steps inside and closes the door behind him.
My second. My right hand. He’s been at my side long enough to read the shifts in my mood better than most people read the weather.
Sometimes even better than my own sister.
He knows when to speak, when to wait, and when to bring bad news without dressing it up.
It seems this is one of those times.
His gaze flicks briefly over the desk, taking in the piles of unfinished paperwork, the untouched coffee, the faint indentation left by my body in the chair from before I got up to pace.
He doesn’t comment on any of it but I catch the assessment all the same.
There’s a manila folder tucked beneath his arm.
It’s thick, which means it’s sensitive enough to be a matter that doesn't fit neatly into email or encrypted messages.
One brow lifts as he looks at me.
“You’re up early,” he says mildly. Then, after a beat, “Or did you never sleep?”
I ignore the question.
Instead, I nod toward the folder. “What is it?”
Roman steps closer to the desk and drops the folder onto it with a soft but deliberate thud. “Malyshko’s second called. There is a Pact meeting in an hour.”
I don’t react outwardly, but something tightens beneath my ribs. It isn’t anticipation, exactly, but close to it.
Roman continues, his tone careful. “From what I gathered, a decision has already been made regarding the most recent bombing. He wants you there to discuss what our next steps will be.”
I nearly sigh.
It isn’t unheard of for Nikolai to make decisions without consulting the rest of us.
He has never pretended he cares for our opinions otherwise.
His authority within the Iron Pact is absolute on paper, and most of the time, the rest of us are content enough to let him exercise it.
Especially when the outcomes don’t touch us directly.
But this does.
Both bombings happened in my territory. That alone should have guaranteed me more than an after-the-fact summons.
Over the years, all four families have come to an understanding that any change affecting the stability of our districts would be decided collectively. It was less about fairness and more about respect. When one of us is blindsided, the rest feel the tremor eventually.
Nikolai doesn’t technically need our approval. He never has. But there is a difference between leadership and disregard, and this feels dangerously close to the latter.
I straighten slightly, moving closer to my desk to grab the folder and open it. “What kind of decision?”
Roman exhales through his nose. “Details were thin. In my opinion, that alone is concerning.”
I hum quietly. “I agree.”
Nikolai never shows his full hand unless he’s already decided how the game will end.
Roman studies me for a moment longer than usual. Then he says finally, “You should know… that according to what I gathered from Malyshko’s second, Volkov and Kuznetsov have already been briefed.”
My eyes narrow.
Icing me out, then?
That seals it.
If Volkov and Kuznetsov were consulted before this meeting—or worse, brought in early enough to shape the outcome of it—then whatever Nikolai plans to present today is already decided and most likely not something I’m going to want to hear.
This meeting will be nothing more than theater, a formality meant to give the illusion of consensus while quietly sidelining me.
Or, and this thought is far less palatable, they were involved from the beginning and I was deliberately excluded.
Either way, the message is unmistakable. Nikolai is dissatisfied.
Not with the bombings themselves—those are merely the catalyst—but with how I’ve handled the aftermath. With how I’ve handled Alina and how I’ve allowed Viktor Morozov’s mess to bleed into my territory without immediately severing the limb.
Whether Nikolai knows the full extent of Viktor’s involvement is irrelevant.
He doesn’t need proof to smell rot. A man like him understands patterns.
Two bombings, same district, same political family hovering just beneath the surface of it.
A daughter suddenly transferred into my custody under the polite fiction of “protection” doesn’t register as coincidence to someone with his instincts.
Nikolai is young, but he is not na?ve. There is a reason he succeeded where so many heirs before him failed.
A man who can overthrow his own father who held power with iron certainty for decades and do it swiftly the way he did without the city erupting into complete chaos is not someone to underestimate.
That kind of coup doesn’t happen on bravado alone.
It requires intellect. Planning. Loyalty so absolute that men are willing to burn bridges, bloodlines, and traditions without hesitation.
It is that loyalty that makes him dangerous. His loyalists don’t just obey him. They believe in him. And belief in our world is far more lethal than fear.
If a civil war were to fracture the Iron Pact, Nikolai would not be fighting alone. He would have an army convinced they were saving the future by destroying the present. That is not the kind of battle anyone survives unscarred. It is certainly not one I want to find myself in the middle of.
And yet…
The irritation burns hot and sharp beneath my restraint.
I have held my position far longer than he has held his crown.
I earned my seat at this table through blood and discipline, through years of consolidating power when Nikolai was still a boy watching from his father’s shadows.
I remember the day he was brought home from the hospital, red-faced and screaming, oblivious to the empire he would one day inherit and dismantle with his own hands.
To have a man nearly half my age orchestrating moves against me from behind closed doors is more than insulting.
It is infuriating.
I keep my expression neutral as Roman watches me, but inside, the pieces are already shifting into place. Nikolai may be testing me, probing for weakness or for attachment, for hesitation.
He will find none. But what he will also find is that I am not so easily pushed aside.
“Prepare the car,” I tell Roman, flipping the folder closed.