Page 15 of The Pakhan’s Heir

“Can… Can I help you?” I ask in Russian.

She stops and looks up at me, her blood red lips spreading into a slow smile. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember me?” she responds in English.

I blink. She looks vaguely familiar, I’ll admit.

“Second period English,” she says. “Eleventh grade? You were always sitting up front like a good little teacher’s pet.”

Right at ‘teacher’s pet’, it hits me. In high school, her hair was cut into a pixie cut and her uniform was always altered in some way. White dress shirt, tied up to show off her midriff. Plaid skirt hiked up so that it barely covered her ass…

“Yeva,” I say, and her last name slaps me in the face before I can speak it. “Molotov. Oh, My God.”

She chuckles. “You’re surprised to see me?”

Let me just say that Yeva and I were never close in high school. To say we didn’t run in the same circles is an understatement. But I knew of her. Everyone knew of her back then.

“H-Hi?” I manage to squeak. I clear my throat and add, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were related to, to⁠—”

“My brother? No, I guess you wouldn’t. There’s, like, a twenty-year age gap between us.”

“Alexandr’s your brother?” I cannot believe this. I’m about to be sisters-in-law with the school party girl.

She wrinkles her nose at me. “‘Alexandr’?” she says. “Kind of formal for your future husband.”

“He insisted,” I tell her. Now I’m wondering how much she knows about that awful date last night.

She tsks and says, “Sasha does kind of have a stick up his ass about his name. Don’t worry, he’ll warm up to you.” She looks me up and down again. “He’d better. You look incredible in this dress.”

I smile with a lost sense of approval from her that I didn’t know I needed. “Thank you.”

“Ms. Molotov,” Mrs. Babkin interjected in Russian. “This is Ms. Sokolov’s appointment. If you want to chat with her, you should do it after I am done.”

“Ne pizdi,” Yeva shoots back, and Mrs. Babkin gapes, the vulgar phrase shocking her into silence. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Mrs. Babkin’s face goes beet red and she storms out, slamming the door behind her.

“That was unnecessary,” I say. “She’s only trying to do her job.”

“She was being a pest. Old ladies sometimes need a curse word or two to snap them back in line.”

I have nothing to say to that, so I don’t speak. I just stand there as she continues to look me up and down.

“Well,” she says with a sigh, “You have really filled out since high school. That’s good news. Sasha’s a bit of an ass man.”

My hands immediately go to my backside self-consciously. “Um, is there a reason you’ve decided to stop by and interrupt my fitting?”

“Of course there is,” she says. “I wanted to scope you out before the wedding. See where your head’s at with all this arranged marriage bullshit.”

I shrug. “It’s for the good of our Bratvas. This marriage will bring us all together and make us stronger.”

Yeva raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Right. So, you’re about just towing the company line, then?”

I shrug. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“Well, that depends on which company line you’re towing,” she says, narrowing her eyes.

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“I think you do,” she says. “Listen, personally, I don’t care too much about where your loyalties ultimately lie. If you’re the kind of girl who likes to follow Daddy’s every rule, that’s cool. In a way, I can relate probably better than anyone else in the world. We’re the daughters of Pakhans, after all.”