My father’s reply cracks like something worn down. “I can’t understand it. She is a beautiful young woman, educated, intelligent, would make a fine wife—”
“You’ve had time to find an appropriate husband for her.” A chair scrapes. Piotr’s voice is a sickening thing. “And you’ve run out. A deal is a deal, and I want what was promised.”
I stop just short of the door. My pulse stays steady. It always does near him now. Panic belongs to another lifetime, before I learned that being calm is deadlier.
“I promised you five years,” Piotr says. “That five years is up today.”
The world tilts. Not enough to topple me, just enough to split something open inside.
“Are you sure Yelena agreed to this?” my father asks sharply, and for a second, he almost sounds like the man he used to be.
But Piotr only laughs. “Your daughter was promised to me, Lukan, and I’ve been a reasonable man but even I have my limit. It’s time she became my wife. Then we can both rest knowing our bloodlines will continue.”
My fingers tighten around the tray. Hot tea ripples.
A wife. His wife.
A life spent under the hand of the man who killed my mother.
The panic tries to rise, but something heavier presses over it. Something thicker and darker, like smoke. Like destiny dragging its finger down my spine and whispering:Finish what you started.
I look down at the cups. One life. One death.
My father’s voice comes through the door, hoarse and defeated. “I just don’t understand why she’s had no other offers.”
Piotr claps his meaty hands together. “That settles it then. Yelena would be pleased,” he says, triumphant and smug. “Her daughter will be well looked after.”
Silence. Long and heavy.
Then, barely audible—
“Fine.”
The word breaks something I didn’t know I was still holding.
Not the girl, she died with my mother, but the woman who still had a tiny bit of faith tucked away in her father.
I shift the tray in my hands, smoothing my expression into something quiet and dutiful. The kind of face men like Piotr never look at twice.
And then I knock on the door.
Diomid
The incense hangs thick enough to taste, sweet and suffocating, swirling through the vaulted arches of the church. Candles tremble along the walls, flickering against the gold of the icons, making saints blink in and out of shadow. I stand at the front like duty demands, even though it feels like a lie. I might be family by blood, but not by loyalty. I’m just a nephew to a man whose presence poisoned more rooms than his death ever will.
Piotr lies in his casket, hands folded, face arranged into peace he never earned. The mortician has smoothed away the lines that made him him. The sneer, the temper, the sharp twist of cruelty around his mouth. Death disguises monsters. Makes them look harmless. Almost holy. I wonder what he’d think of that, this soft mask he’ll wear in the ground.
I don’t mourn him. I’m not capable of it. But I can’t ignore the truth humming beneath my ribs.
He shouldn’t be dead.
Not like this. Not so quietly. Piotr had a constitution built from spite and vodka, a man who survived four stabbings and a car bomb no one was meant to walk away from. Yet in the last months, I watched him wilt. Slur. Forget. Shake. Until finally, with a gasp that seemed to strangle and twist him, he collapsed.
The decline was too precise. Too… engineered.
The thought circles in the back of my mind, restless, unfinished, like an equation missing the one symbol that will make the answer fall into place.
A door opens behind me, its echo rolling through the silence. I don’t turn at first. Funerals pull attention like gravity, people drift inward, shadows gathering near the coffin. But then the shift in the room changes, subtle but unmistakable. The air tightens. Conversations falter. Even the priest seems to pause between breaths.
