Page 8 of His Contract Queen

I move to the couch across from his desk and sit, folding my hands in my lap to keep them from fidgeting. From here, I can see framed photographs mixed in among the medals of my father in his uniform shaking hands with officials, smiling stiffly beside men whose names I’ve heard only on the news.

There are a few pictures of us too.

His expression isn’t as composed in those, almost gentle, but there’s a distance in his eyes that makes my chest ache in a way I don’t have a name for.

It’s the same look he wore at my mother’s funeral when he stood at the podium and thanked people for their condolences, controlled, dignified, untouched by visible grief. The part of me that still wants his approval, that still believes he would never ask something of me without a good reason, always straightens instinctively under that gaze.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

“I need you to listen to me carefully,” he says calmly.

My fingers curl in my lap for a second before I force myself to relax. Whatever he’s about to say, I can already tell it won’t be a request. It will be an order.

“Okay,” I reply, though unease already coils in my chest.

The silence stretches longer after that. He doesn’t move or speak. When he turns around, he simply does so to stare at me.

After another beat, I can’t take it anymore. “What’s going on?”

“This is… not an easy conversation,” he says.

His hesitation feels… strangely strategic. As if he’s laying groundwork and preparing the terrain for something I’m not going to like hearing. I’ve seen him do this with foreign officials and political rivals in order to soften the air before delivering brutal news.

I nod anyway, because that’s what I’ve always done. I was taught that obedience is not weakness when it serves a greater purpose. My father exhales slowly as if steadying himself, and for afleeting second I think I see something like regret flicker across his face.

But it’s gone almost immediately.

“Katerina,” he begins again, familiar in a way that makes my throat tighten. “What I’m about to ask of you… will require sacrifice.”

My brows pull together. “Okay.”

“Have you heard the name Aleksandr Volkov before?”

My brows knit together further as the name settles between us. “I… don’t think so,” I say slowly. Not directly, at least. “Why?”

That isn’t entirely true.

Ihaveheard the name before, just not in the way he’s asking. Aleksandr Volkov is one of those names that floats through rooms carried on lowered voices and sidelong glances. A name spoken carefully because saying it too loudly might invite the devil himself in to overhear whatever is being discussed.

He’s one ofthosemen.

My father has crossed paths with him before, though never socially and certainly never by choice. Men like Aleksandr Volkov exist on the fringes of my father’s world, brushing up against it in ways that are unavoidable but never acknowledged in public. Criminal figures who operate beneath the surface of Russia, festering in the dark while pretending they serve some higher purpose. A necessary evil, they call themselves. A phrase that has always made my skin crawl.

“They’re parasites,”my father has said more than once over the years.“A cancer beneath the surface of the country. They infecteverything they touch and call it preservation. All for their own self-interests.”

I remember him pacing the living room late one night when I was younger, agitation sharp in his voice as he spoke about men like Volkov who claimed they stood against government corruption while quietly lining their own pockets from exploiting it. Men who wrapped themselves in the language of order, loyalty, and patriotism to justify violence and greed.

They are scum, in my opinion.

So when he says the name now, standing so rigidly by the window, hands clasped behind his back like he’s bracing himself for an answer he doesn’t want to hear, something cold settles in my stomach.

“What about him?” I ask.

“He’s a threat,” my father says without hesitation. “One we’ve underestimated for too long.”

The way he says it sends a chill through me. This isn’t the casual disdain he’s always reserved for men like Volkov. This is something worse. What could have possibly happened?

I swallow. “What does this have to do with me?”