“The child’s standing is independent of the marriage,” I say, before I can decide whether it’s my place to speak first. “Even if the contract were dissolved.”
Alexei looks at me, faint surprise crossing his face, the look of a man who didn’t expect the documentation’s subtlest clause to be the one I caught. “Correct. The drafting was deliberate. The heir’s position cannot be made contingent on the parents’ arrangement remaining intact.”
“Why?”
“Because succession disputes over legitimacy have ended this organization’s predecessors more than once,” Fedorov says, leaning forward. “A clean line matters more than the marriage that produced it.”
I sit with that. It’s not warmth, not exactly, but it’s something closer to structural respect, an acknowledgment that the thing growing inside me matters here, independent of whatever Zane and I are or aren’t to each other. I find I don’t hate hearing it stated so plainly.
“I’d like the documentation amended,” I say. “One clause. Educational and medical decisions for the child remain solely with me until age eighteen, regardless of any council interest in the succession line.”
The room goes quiet.
Henrik speaks for the first time. “That clause weakens organizational oversight of the heir’s development.”
“It protects the child from being raised as a political instrument before they’re old enough to understand what that means,” I say, holding his gaze. “I’m not asking you to give up the succession recognition. I’m asking you to let me raise my own child.”
Henrik’s jaw tightens slightly. He doesn’t respond.
Alexei looks between us, then makes a note. “I’ll have the clause drafted for review.”
It isn’t a yes. It isn’t a no either. But it’s on paper now, under consideration in a room I walked into alone, and that alone feels like more ground than I expected to gain today.
The meeting closes twenty minutes later.
Fedorov stops me near the door. “You handled that well,” he says, quiet enough that it isn’t performance for the rest of the room. “Gregor was wrong about you. I should have said something sooner.”
“You don’t owe me an apology.”
“No,” he agrees. “But I’m giving you one anyway.”
I nod, something loosening slightly in my chest that I didn’t know was tight.
Henrik passes us on his way out. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t acknowledge me at all, his expression unreadable, the same stillness from the start of the meeting carried straight through to the end of it. I watch him go.
“Don’t mind Henrik,” Viktor says, appearing beside me. “He opposed Zane’s father on principle thirty years ago too. It’s not personal. It’s just who he is.”
“That doesn’t make it easier.”
“No,” Viktor agrees. “It doesn’t.”
I walk out of the council room alone, the way I walked in, and Roman is waiting exactly where Zane said he’d be, though he doesn’t ask how it went. He doesn’t need to. He can read it on my face the same way everyone in this world seems able to read things on faces, a skill I’m only now starting to develop myself.
“Two votes shifted,” I tell him anyway, because saying it out loud makes it feel more real. “One didn’t.”
“That’s better than most people manage in their first formal session,” Roman says.
I think about Henrik’s unreadable face, about the clause sitting in Alexei’s notes waiting for review, about the long table and the twelve chairs, and how much of my life now runs through rooms like that one.
It’s progress. It isn’t peace.
I’ll take it anyway.
28
ZANE
Roman givesme the council report at six, standing rather than sitting, which is how I know he wants to deliver it without the formality of paperwork between us.
