Page 4 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

Why paper and a church when I have spent my adult life lifting whatever I want from this city without a ring in the building?

Marriage gets me through the door. Her blood gives me standing. Her nomination would put my name before the captains.

The first two can be engineered.

The third must come from her.

Vasilisa will hate me long before she considers giving it, but impossible odds have never frightened a gambler. They only make the table worth sitting at.

I pick up the photograph again and hold Milyena’s eyes in her daughter’s face a beat longer than I intend. Then I slide it inside my jacket, against my chest, into the same pocket where Gavril carried it for years.

He does not have the spine to ask for it back.

“I’ll send my men for her,” I tell him as I stand.

The men at the bar straighten, and Danil steps aside to open the floor.

“You’ll want to run, Gavril. It will arrive around four in the morning, that itch to take my money and put a state line behind you. Strangle it in the crib. There’s no dirt on this continent where I don’t own a door, and if you make me walk through one to fetch you, I won’t come out in the frame of mind that keeps the rest of this deal breathing.”

He nods too quickly.

It is the nod of a man who has already chosen the highway but has not confessed it to himself yet. I let him keep the lie. He will learn the truth of it.

The ones who survive long enough always do.

I go to my office and sit behind the desk. I take the photograph from my jacket and place it beneath the low lamp.

Vasilisa.

A woman I have never met face-to-face, whose blood has finally been named in front of witnesses. She teaches other people’s children how to hold a pencil without stabbing themselves. She has her grandfather’s disputed kingdom sleeping inside her and no idea that nine men downstairs just heard her father confirm it.

Soon she will carry my name and hate its weight.

Every man who wants Ustin’s throne will want her dead before he ever learns the shape of her mouth.

I turn my father’s watch on my wrist. Both hands remain stopped, nineteen years and counting, the steel warm against my pulse.

They killed Matvei Etush in a single afternoon for the crime of being loyal to men who saw a hammer where a person stood. I have spent every year since building myself into the one thing in this business no one can erase.

Marriage will give me entry. Vasilisa’s blood will give me the right to stand before the captains. Her voice could give me the throne.

A voice like hers will not be easily taken.

That is the problem.

It is also the first thing about this plan that interests me beyond revenge.

My thumb moves over the photograph before I realize I have touched it. Across the freckles, the gold of them washed pale by the old flash. I put the picture back inside my jacket, over my sternum, where the man who sold her carried her for years without understanding what he had.

Danil enters my office alone and finds his boss sitting with one hand inside his coat as though I am holding a bullet against my chest.

“Boss.” He says it slowly. “Whatever I just watched, do you want to tell me what you bought?”

“A wife.”

“You don’t want a wife.”

“No.”