Page 24 of The Pakhan's Bride
It is not a night to die, but it could be. The trees loom, tall and skeletal, their branches lacquered in ice. The wind moves through them like breath, like warning. Somewhere far off, a fox yips once and falls quiet. Even the moon looks sharpened, its light angled like a blade. There is no safety in this wilderness, no promise. Only the cold and the rhythm of my heartbeat in my ears.
I walk toward the woodpile. The logs are half-buried under a fresh crust, brittle and silver. My breath forms clouds. I watch them rise and vanish, the only proof I am alive.
Somewhere behind me, the porch groans. I freeze.
It could be Galina asking me to hurry up. Could be the wind. Could be a hundred things. I stay crouched, one hand still buried in the snow, the other wrapped around a log that I've pulled out.
Then silence again. Not the absence of sound, but the pressure of something watching. I turn slowly, still kneeling, still half in the snow. The cabin is behind me. The door is closed. The steps are bare.
But there is someone there.
A shape between the trees. Still as the night itself. No movement. No fog of breath.
My throat tightens. My first thought is to run. My second is that I won't make it. I rise to my feet, log still clutched in hand. The figure steps forward. Black coat. Leather gloves. Boots that do not crunch.
My legs don't move. My hands drop the wood. I hear it thud into the snow, but it sounds distant, like a page torn fromsomeone else's story. He doesn't raise a weapon. He doesn't shout. He just walks toward me with dreadful familiarity. The distance between us collapses. I see the shape of his shoulders, the set of his mouth.
And I know. I know before he speaks. I know by the way the world seems to lean toward him, as if gravity itself remembers.
My knees want to buckle. I force them to hold. He steps into the open, and the moon hits his face.
Konstantin Vetrov. The man I loved, the man I tried to kill. His eyes are the same. Everything else has changed. The cold has made him more beautiful somehow, more dangerous. The kind of beautiful that breaks nations.
"You really thought I wouldn't find you?"
The moon highlights the shape of his jaw, the scar on his cheek, the white of his smile.
I know that smile. "Hello, Zoya," he says.
He stops two meters from me, just out of arm's reach. His eyes are bright, fevered, but the rest of him is calm, so calm I want to scream.
He looks at the log in my hand and smiles, and I hate what it does to my heart. Konstantin, Markov, lover, murderer, executioner. "Going to kill me with that?"
"If you make me," I say. The words come out steady. My knees are less sure.
He laughs amusedly. "Your Papa would be proud." He shifts his weight, never taking his eyes off mine. "Put it down, sweetZimushka. I'm not here to hurt you."
11
KONSTANTIN
At nine hours on the dot, three black SUVs come up the one-lane logging road. They drive over the drift like it's not there, flattening the crust and whatever hope Galina had of making it to her cousin's truck. They come early, before dawn, when the world is most brittle. Zoya is awake and she has bundled Lev, his hair pressed flat, his mouth a perfect circle of sleep. Galina stands by the stove, watching the frost melt on the glass. She doesn't bother waking me. They knew the game was over last night when I showed up on the porch. I watched her decide between trying to kill me once again and accepting her fate. It took two heartbeats.
The irony doesn't escape me, not for a moment, that the woman I love—the woman born to carry my name, to warm my bed and rule beside me—looks at me as though I'm the monster she was warned about in childhood stories, as though every nerve in her body is trained to recoil from me, when all I see in her rage and resistance is the fire that made me want her in the first place. Because the truth is, the more she hates me, the more beautiful she becomes. The fact that she truly believed she could end me still makes me smile, not out of mercy or pity butsomething far more indulgent, because my little assassin was never going to succeed, but God help me, I adore her for trying.
I almost let her run. But I do not surrender what is mine, not when she still wears my mark in the way she walks, in the son she tried to hide, in the impossible ache she brings with every breath she takes, and when I looked at that boy—at our boy—there was no question in my mind, no need for proof or paperwork, just instinct, blood calling to blood, and in that moment, I knew what I had always known—that she belongs to me, utterly and irrevocably.
Russia has already bent the knee, and she will follow, whether by choice or by fire, because I didn't climb my way through war and betrayal and blood-soaked nights just to lose her now, not when I have come this far, not when I am this close to reclaiming what was always mine.
The men work quietly. Nobody shouts, nobody roughs up the old lady, nobody leaves a mark. Zoya resists, but it's the resistance of a mathematician running out the clock. She calculates the odds, tries a feint at the side door, then folds the bluff when Lev's eyes open and see the guns. Her expression is blank, but the hands she wraps around Lev are not. We bring them to a holding site just north of Moscow, a brutalist leftover from the Cold War. The walls are double-thick concrete, and the windows are less than a rumor. I've had the place scrubbed and modernized, but it still smells like ghost sweat.
They separate the three of them, just enough to keep Zoya on edge. Galina goes to the medical unit for a check. Lev gets a real breakfast and a nurse who can pronounce his name. Zoya gets the interview suite comprising four bare walls, a polycarbonate table bolted to the slab, and a chair designed for discomfort. On the table is a single folder.
I watch her for fifteen minutes on the feed before I go in. She does not fidget or blink at the cameras in the corners. Shesits with her arms folded tightly, ankles locked, chin tucked. The posture is classic—a wounded animal, teeth bared but throat exposed.
I enter with nothing but two paper cups of coffee. No guards. No gun. I close the door behind me and sit at the far side of the table and offer her a cup. After a moment, she takes a sip, gingerly. We watch each other. "You look well," I say, just to break the ice.
She bares her teeth. "Is that a joke?"
