Another six months of pining.
I say nothing. There is nothing to say that wouldn’t sound strange in front of the guard, and we both know it.
But Ruslan leans forward and whispers, “See you in six months,lyubimiy,” before walking off.
I follow the guard down two corridors, through a narrower hall lined with portraits and heavy drapes, and toward the private study the hotel uses for high-level guests who need quiet rooms and thicker walls.
The walk doesn’t take long. It feels endless anyway. Something under my skin has gone taut, some instinct older than sense pulling tight the closer I get.
The conference room door stands half open when we arrive.
The guard knocks once, then steps aside.
I don’t know what I expect when I walk in. A lecture, maybe. Another task. A correction about something I say at dinner or failed to say at the right moment. My father doesn’t summon me after midnight for trivialities. Whatever it is, it matters.
The room is warm and dim, lit by the desk lamp and the fire. My father stands behind the large table with his back half-turned, one gloved hand resting on the polished wood. He does not look up when I enter.
I take two steps inside before I see what’s spread across the table.
Photographs.
Black and white. Grainy. Intimate in the most brutal possible way.
Ruslan and I standing too close in a corridor. My hand is caught in the lapel of his coat. His mouth at my neck on a terrace half-hidden by shadow and still unmistakable. Another outside a hotel entrance in Prague, his hand at the small of my back. Another, worse than all the rest, the angle caught through a barely open door, his body pressed to mine, my face turned up toward his.
Every drop of blood in me goes cold, and I stop breathing.
My father still hasn’t said a word, but he doesn’t need to. The silence in the room is no longer pressure—it’s judgment.
And standing there in front of his desk, staring at the physical proof of my ruin laid out in neat, merciless rows, I understand with perfect clarity that whatever shape my life had before this moment, it has just been split clean in two.
My father finally lifts his eyes to mine.
He says nothing.
Ruslan
peace – Taylor Swift
Ileaveherbedroomfeelingdirtier than I do after blood.
The corridor outside the guest suites is quiet in that expensive, suffocating way rich families mistake for elegance. Thick carpet swallows my footsteps. Somewhere farther down the hall, a clock ticks behind closed doors, delicate and smug, as if time itself has manners in a house like this.
I fasten the last button of my shirt with fingers that don’t shake, though I’d almost prefer if they did. Shaking would mean some part of me still gets to be honest about disgust. Instead, I’m exactly what my father raised me to be. Calm. Composed. Useful.
I can still smell her perfume on me.
Too sweet. Powder and flowers and the kind of expensive softness women from old families get drowned in before they’re old enough to understand it’s training. She’s beautiful, of course. They always are. Pale skin, careful smile, the right pedigree, theright bloodline, the right father sitting on the right amount of money, and just enough fear to make him pliable.
I’m not cruel enough to pretend she doesn’t know what tonight is. She knows. Maybe not the whole board, but enough of it. Enough to understand that being led to bed by a Dragovich son while both our fathers drink downstairs isn’t romance. It’s leverage with a pulse.
I do what Mikhail asks because that’s what sons like me are for. We don’t get to ask whether we want the task. We get given the task, then judged on the neatness of the outcome.
And God, I hate every fucking second of it.
I hate it because halfway through, I have to close my eyes for one second and picture Salvatore’s face to finish what my father asks of me.
That’s the part that makes me feel fucking vile.
