Chapter 31 MISHKA — Sint-Baafsplein Boarding School, Ghent, 1422
The black king rolls off the board and hits the floor with a sound that echoes through the empty common room.
I’m reaching down to pick it up when the door slams open and my sister walks through wearing a jacket that swallows her whole, black wool hanging past her wrists, and her face is wrong in a way I’ve never seen before.
“We need to leave.” Russian, no hello, no explanation. “Now. Get your passport.”
Pieter looks at me from across the chessboard board and I look at Anya and the scattered pieces sit between us from where my elbow knocked them, reaching for the fallen king. Nothing about this moment makes sense except the fear radiating off my sister in waves I can feel from three meters away.
“What’s going on?”
“Mishka. Now.”
She grabs my arm and pulls me up from the chair. Her hand is shaking so hard I can feel it through my sweater.
“Is it Roman?” I keep my voice low because Pieter is still watching, and he doesn’t know anything about my life except that I’m good at math and bad at making friends. “Did something happen with the—”
“Roman killed her.”
The words come out flat and dead, and they don’t connect to anything in my brain, just sounds in the air that could mean.
Because Roman is my sister’s husband, Roman is the man who pays for this school, Roman is the reason I have guards and escape routes and a phone that connects directly to someone named Luka, whom I’ve never met.
“Killed who?”
“Mama.” Her voice cracks on the word, and her grip on my arm tightens until it hurts.
“He signed the authorization. She was a test subject for a drug, and I saw his signature, Mishka. I saw the intake form with her photograph and her name and his handwriting at the bottom, and she was conscious for most of it, she was awake while it—”
“That doesn’t—”
The door explodes. Wood flies. Cold air rushes in, and suddenly the room is full of men with guns. They don’t look at me at all, don’t look at anything except—
Except her.
And behind them comes a man I’ve never seen before.
Tall. Huge. He fills the doorway. Stubble. Blood on his collar. And eyes that lock onto Anya like nothing else exists.
And something about the way he’s looking at her makes my skin crawl because it’s desperate and focused. He looks at her like a wolf looks at a rabbit. No. Worse. Like a starving man looking at bread.
This is Roman.
This is the man my sister married.
This is the man who killed our mother.
“Out.” His voice addresses Pieter, flat and cold and not a request, but his eyes never leave Anya’s face. “Now.”
Pieter runs so fast he knocks over his chair, and I don’t blame him because I want to run too, want to turn and sprint for the fire exit at the back of the building. But I can’t move because I’m watching my sister stand perfectly still while this man walks toward her.
She stays.
She stands her ground and faces him, and her whole body is shaking, but she doesn’t back away, doesn’t do anything except breathe the same air as the man who just broke down a door to get to her.
“You need to leave.” Her voice shakes, but she doesn’t move. “I’m not going back with you. I’m not fucking going anywhere with you.”
Roman walks toward her.
Slow.
His boots leave wet prints on the floor, and his eyes never leave her face. His expression never changes, and something is building in the space between them that I can feel even from where I’m standing, something thick and heavy and wrong.
“You killed my mother.” Anya’s voice cracks, but she still doesn’t run. “I have the proof. Your signature—”
“I know what I signed.”
He stops an arm’s length from her, and the room goes so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears, can hear the snow falling outside through the broken door, can hear my sister’s breathing coming fast and shallow and terrified.
He just stands there with blood drying on his collar.
“Then you know why I’m never coming back.”
“You’re my wife.”
“I’m the daughter of the woman you murdered.”
“Both things are true.”
His hand comes up, and Anya flinches. He touches her jaw, tilts her chin up, and forces her to look at him.
“You’re still coming home.”
“I hate you.” Her voice breaks on the words, but she’s leaning into his hand, I can see it. I don’t understand what I’m watching, don’t understand how she can hate him and want him at the same time, don’t understand why she’s not screaming for me to run. “I fucking hate you.”
“I know.” His thumb moves across her cheek in a slow stroke, and Anya’s whole body shudders. Bile rises in my throat. “And I’m still not letting you go. I told you I wasn’t leaving you. I fucking meant it.”
“You killed my mother.”
“Yes.” He says it softly, almost gently, and his other hand comes up to cup her face, and she’s crying now, tears running down her cheeks. “And I’m still not letting you go. Walk out with me, or I’ll carry you. Your choice, solnyshko.”
She spits in his face.
For a second, nobody moves.
The spit runs down his cheek, and Roman doesn’t wipe it away.
“Blyad, Anya.” He says it quietly, almost to himself, almost tender. “You’re going to make this difficult.”
“I’m going to make this impossible.”
“No.” His hand moves from her face to her hair, and his arm wraps around her waist, and suddenly she’s fighting, really fighting, not just pushing but clawing and kicking and screaming words in Russian that Mama would have slapped her for.
Roman takes every hit without flinching, takes the scratches and the kicks and the fists against his chest like they’re nothing, and when he lifts her off the ground, she’s still fighting, but her hands are gripping his shirt instead of pushing him away.
“You’re going to come home and hate me for as long as you need to, and I’m going to keep you safe whether you want me to or not, because that’s what I fucking promised.”
I lunge forward without thinking.
I just move, some stupid idea that forty-seven kilos of a fourteen-year-old is enough to stop a man who just broke down a door without slowing down.
Something hits my chest before I get anywhere close, an arm, one of the men stepping between me and Roman, and suddenly I’m on the floor with my lungs empty and my vision sparking and the taste of copper in my mouth from where I bit my tongue.
“MISHKA!”
Anya’s voice, screaming my name, and I push myself up on my elbows and see her over Roman’s shoulder because he’s carrying her now, actually carrying her like she weighs nothing.
Roman pauses and looks back at me on the floor.
And for a moment, his eyes aren’t on Anya anymore, and they’re just as terrifying as I thought they would be, flat and cold. When he speaks, his voice is different, harder, the voice of a man giving orders.
“Kolya.” One of the men steps forward. “Take the boy somewhere safe. Not Moscow. Somewhere Vadim can’t reach. Keep him there until I send word.”
“Da, boss.”
“If anything happens to him—” Roman’s jaw tightens, and the fresh scratches on his face pull with the movement. “If he gets so much as a fucking bruise, I’ll put you in the ground next to whoever caused it. Ponyal?”
“Ponyal.”
And something changes.
Anya stops fighting. Her face changes. She heard it too. The order to keep me safe.
Roman is taking her.
But Roman is also protecting me.
“Mishka.” Her voice is hoarse from screaming, but it’s steadier now, and she’s looking at me with those eyes that I’ve seen before, the ones she gets when she’s solving a problem that has more than one answer. “Go with Kolya. Don’t fight. Do you understand?”
I don’t understand.
I don’t understand anything.
But I nod because she’s my sister and she’s telling me to do something, and even now, even being carried out of a room by a man who killed our mother, she’s still trying to keep me alive.
“Good.” She says it to me, but she’s looking at Roman now. “Good.”
Roman’s hand tightens on her waist, and he looks down at her with those hungry eyes, and I think he sees it too, sees whatever shifted in her, because his jaw unclenches just slightly, and he says something in Russian too quiet for me to hear.
She answers him the same way.
And then they pass through the broken doorframe. Roman’s hand comes up without looking, cups the back of her head, shields her from the jagged splinters of wood even while she’s gripping his jacket with white knuckles.
A car door slams somewhere outside.
An engine starts.
Tires crunch on wet pavement.
And then they’re gone, both of them, together, and I’m lying on the floor of the common room with Kolya standing over me and the taste of blood still copper-sharp on my tongue.
“Come on, kid.” Kolya’s voice is gentler than I expected. “Boss wants you protected. I’ve got a car outside.”
I push myself up off the floor.
My ribs ache where the guard’s arm caught me, my tongue is still bleeding, my hands are shaking so hard I can barely stand, but I stand anyway because Anya told me to go with him.
Kolya leads me toward the broken door, and I step over the splinters where Roman shielded Anya’s head.
My sister is gone. The monster took her. And God help me, I think she let him.
Kolya opens the car door, and I get in.
The black king is still in my pocket. And somewhere in the snow, my sister is holding onto a monster who thinks he’s taking her home.