Page 36 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“I’ve never given it thought before,” she sighs.

Before? I think. Before what?

And then, just like that, the pieces click into place for me.

“It took my mama a day to give you an existential crisis, did it?” I’m not trying to rub it in, but that’s how it comes out sounding. It’s already too late to take it back.

Already, Darya shoots me an unamused look. “No. She expanded my perspective,” she argues. “I’ve spent no time thinking about what the life of a political housewife would be. It’s possible my own mother was one, but that’s nothing she and I’ve ever discussed. She’s in Moscow; we’re here. My sisters-in-law all have careers. My sister is the closest thing to a political wife, and she can’t keep a plant alive. But Galina...”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say automatically, though I’ve distantly known the Yuri brood has no real elders. Their father was an only child who died in a gang war in Moscow when Trifon was a teenager. He took on the throne young, with no guidance from watching, and then whatever he learned on the job. Despite how often we’ve been butting heads in our attempts to work together to weed out this fucking mole, I respect him for what he’s turned his Bratva into.

Darya exhales a terse laugh. “It isn’t one. She was a stranger to me. But I appreciate the sentiment. I’m just saying your mother is more interesting than I gave her credit for.”

“Interesting how?” I question.

Darya seems to mull that over. “She’s more self-aware than I expected.”

“She’s had to be,” I point out.

“Because of your father?”

“Because of her whole life. But yeah, Sergei did a real number on her. She didn’t expect him to love her, but she expected him to honor their marriage. Or, at the very least, not publicly embarrass her. Instead, he brought his whore’s child home and told her to raise him,” I say.

It doesn’t matter if I don’t mean to sound harsh. My tone grows abrasive of its own accord as I broach the subject. Still, I don’t take the words back. This is her family, too, now. And it isn’t as if it hasn’t occurred to me that Darya could be using a relationship with Galina as a bargaining chip against me later. It’s as much sharing as it is a warning, telling her all of this.

“Is that why you hate Viktor?” she asks, undeterred by my tone, like I more or less expected her to be.

“Did I say I hate Viktor?” I challenge.

Darya blinks at me. “Your eyes do.”

“I resent,” I pointedly correct, “that he made my mother’s life hell despite the sacrifice she made, calling him her own. And then he kept his own mother on the side the entire time.”

For a long moment, Darya says nothing at all.

When she finally does speak, her voice sounds almost pained, divulging, “She’s just as protective of you, you know that?”

All my curiosity about her takes a backseat to that one note of pain in her voice, like my world has been narrowed down to it. I find that it makes me ache, like I’ve got a pinched nerve.

“It’s interesting that you say that, because I’ve always been a little jealous of the bond you share with your siblings,” I admit before I’ve made the conscious choice to. Anything, apparently, to get that tender, bleak look off her face. “That’s why I got so annoyed with you the first time you came up to talk to me at that fucking party. You likened mine and Viktor’s relationship to what you share with your siblings—but the truth is that you’d die for each other. It used to fucking kill me that it couldn’t be like that with my brother. If there’s anything I hate him for, it’s probably that he’s made that impossible.”

She cherry-picks her words with a great deal of evident care. “Is that why you’re typically so closed off? After—Irina?”

Every muscle in my body seems to freeze. I’m not unaware that the news of my first marriage is well-known. It’s almost as well-known as the fact that I don’t like to talk about it. Her. Irina. Hers is a name no one brings up to me, for fear of risking my ire.

Yet ire is not what courses through me at the wary look on Darya’s face. “I don’t like to talk about her,” I sigh. “But yes, that’s why. That’s a big part of why.”

Oh, her wide-eyed gaze says. It takes a beat for her lips to shape around the same sound. In the face of it, for some reason, I find myself smiling through my own raw confession.

Chapter 13 - Darya

I wonder what it says about me that I wasn’t nervous after he fucked me and left me in a tub, but seeing him the morning after an unforeseen heart-to-heart is what has my nerves wriggling like a can of worms.

Even when I steel my shoulders and keep my head high, it just feels like a front. Like a performance I’m putting on, but without my heart in it.

Looks like it’s on Anton to follow the status quo and kindly pretend the “Library Incident”, as I’ve been referring to in my head all morning, never even happened.

“Good morning,” he greets me lightly, taking a sip from his cup.