Page 39 of Beautiful Ruin

I shouldn’t be shocked she knows about the Iron Pact. That was bound to come out eventually. You cannot drop a woman like Sofia Kuznetsov into the same atmosphere as men like her uncle and Nikolai Malyshko and expect her not to notice the invisible hierarchy everyone else lives under.

The Pact is not a fairy tale whispered to frighten children into behaving. It is the skeleton beneath half of Moscow’s elegant corruption that makes it work.

It isn’t a kept secret within the estate. Not in any real sense. But not many bring it up in casual conversation, least of all our Pakhan. If Sofia knows the name, if she understands enough to connect it to her father’s disappearance, then someone has been talking.

“Who told you about the Iron Pact?” I ask.

She huffs at me again like I am the one being unreasonable. “What does it matter? You’re focusing on the wrong point, Rowan.”

The sound of my name in her mouth causes heat to pool low in my gut. I try to hide the reaction on my face by turning around and shifting the car into drive.

Enough of this.

This has gone beyond reckless curiosity and inconvenient defiance. She has information she shouldn’t have, theories pointed too close to old graves that don’t need digging up no matter how suspiciously it may seem that they got there, and a notebook full of names that could get her punished if it ends up in the wrong hands.

The morgue can wait. Dead men will stay dead. Sofia, apparently, requires more active supervision than I’ve been giving her.

“We’re going back to the estate.” I say.

“What? No! You haven’t even listened to me!”

I ignore her and press down on the accelerator. The road ahead curves beneath bare winter trees, the estate still close enough to return before anyone notices she’s missing. I should have done this the second I found her in the back seat, not sat around listening to the theories she’s been concocting inside her head.

My eyes catch her moving in the rearview, and it is my mistake not to shift the car into park and wait for her to tug a seatbelt across her chest before moving again.

One of many where she is concerned.

She lunges forward without warning. For one impossible second, I don’t understand what she’s doing because it’s too fast for me to react in time. Her body shoots between the seats and her hands grab onto the wheel, using the momentum to wrench it hard to the left.

The tires scream as the car swerves violently off the road at the same time I hit the brakes, nearly catapulting us toward the drainage ditch. My body reacts before thought catches up, one hand yanking the wheel back with brutal force and the other shoving her back between the seats, palm planting hard against her shoulder before she can interfere a second time.

The SUV fishtails. When the tires finally catch traction on the road, the vehicle jerks back from the shoulder and lurches to a stop, half-angled across the unmarked road. I slam the vehicle into park so hard the gearshift protests.

“Are you insane?” I snap.

“Read,” she snaps right back, practically slamming my chest with the notebook. Her eyes blaze, bright and furious. “Then you can yell at me.”

My patience has already burned away but I park the car anyway. I snatch the notebook from her and flip it open with more force than necessary to the page she already has dogeared for me. At first it’s only to shut her up, to prove to both of us that this is reckless, childish, dangerous nonsense neither of us needs to be digging into.

Her notes are as meticulous as I figured them to be from the flashes I caught earlier. Timelines are cross-referenced with articles around the same time period. Scanned fragments of old police reports she must have pulled from public archives or paid someone to dig up are taped in between her own notes. An autopsy summary is what catches my attention the most, though, one of her mother that doesn't match the official story.

From this report, it states Irena wasn’t killed in a simple car accident as what’s been told countless times to not only me but the rest of the world by her brother. She was shot multiple times. The bullets entered from the rear passenger side at close range, killing her almost instantly. The car wreck happened after the fatal wounds according to the external injuries sustained after Irena’s heart stopped, possibly suggesting a staged coverup for the gunshot wounds.

Sofia’s father, Dmitri Orlov, who supposedly caused the crash from reckless driving? Not there at the scene of the accident. Blood spatter patterns on the inside of the cab, along with the entry angle of the bullets, had Orlov’s DNA nowhere near any of it.

I stare at the pages in front of me for so long my eyes begin to go cross-eyed.

Ivan never hunted any gunman. Not as far as I know.

And while I always found it strange he never hunted his sister’s killer—despite the official story naming it as an accident to begin with—after she was gone and buried, I never thought to question it much, either. Grief always does strange things to people, even those as composed and level-headed as my Pakhan.

I figured there was a reason not to pursue revenge, or least of all, official charges against Orlov. Perhaps Ivan has figured his losing his wife was punishment enough. After Irena was finally laid to rest, he buried the story and shipped his niece halfway across the world before she could start asking questions.

If this is true… if Irena was indeed assassinated, none of what happened afterward fits the man I know.

“None of this makes any sense…” I mumble, flipping through page after page. “Where did you get the autopsy report of there being gunshot wounds?”

Sofia watches me carefully. “I emailed the records department who had the files and pretended I was a reporter covering a story about previous accidents at that location. They bought it after I sent over forged credentials.”