Page 61 of The Pakhan's Bride
My skin prickles. My hands sweat. I want to scream, but I don't. Instead, I gather the ashes into a Ziploc bag from my travel kit. I seal it, flatten it, and hide it in the lining of my suitcase.
I stand in the center of the room, scanning for more. I check the vent, the window locks, the floor for prints. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Except for the smell. It's faint, almost gone. Not smoke, but something sweeter. Amber, maybe, or an expensive cigar.
I close my eyes, try to place it. Ekaterina never smoked. But her lovers did. She wore their colognes like armor, even years after she'd outgrown them.
On a whim, I open the closet, scan the shoes. At the very back, a heel is slightly misaligned, the toe pointed toward the wall instead of out. I reach for it, tilt it, and something clatters inside. I turn the shoe over, and a toothpick falls out. Not a round one, but the flat, splintery kind you get in cheap vodka bars.
After picking it up, I rotate it. There's a dot of red lipstick at the end, as if someone had chewed it and then dabbed her lips. The message is clear—I am being watched, catalogued, and fucked with. Not by a ghost but by a very real, very deliberate hand.
I close the closet, draw the curtains tight, and check the lock on the door. I jam a chair under the handle, not because it will help but because I need the ritual.
In the mirror, I look the same as always. Hair pinned, eyes sharp, no color in the cheeks. But the skin under my jaw is twitching, a muscle spasm from too many hours without sleep.
I clench my teeth, flex my hands, and check the jewelry box again.
It's full night now. The moon is a coin, barely a sliver. The house has gone dead quiet. Not even the guards make noise. The only sound is the tick of the old clock in the corridor and the occasional crack of wood settling under the cold.
I strip off my clothes, fold them, put on an old T-shirt of Konstantin's, left behind on one of the rare occasions he slept here. It feels large on me, but comfortingly so. I stare at myself in the mirror, watching the pulse at my neck. The line of my jaw is sharper than last week, the bones standing out like warning signs. I tie my hair back, braid it, then slip the knife under the pillow.
I get into bed, covers tight to the chin, and listen.
It's not sleep that comes, but a kind of waiting. I count the minutes. Every five, I sit up, check the window, check the lock, check the time.
At 12:12, I hear sounds at the window. Three knocks, slow, spaced. Not hurried. Not desperate. Confident.
I freeze, breath locked in my chest. Another knock. Then a pause.
I slide to the edge of the balcony door, keep my body out of sight. I flatten against the wall, inch the curtain back. A silhouette is on the other side, human, tall, but the face is shadowed. Instead, a voice, low, muffled by the glass, but unmistakably my husband's.
"Open up," he says in Russian. The cadence is intimate in a way that makes my heart skip. I didn't realize how many hours had passed since I heard him speak.
I slide the lock, open the door a crack. The cold rushes in, but so does the warm scent of him. "What are you doing?"
"You jammed the door,Zimushka." The silhouette steps forward, face now visible in the moonlight. Konstantin is dressed in black, hair slicked back, eyes flat as river stone. He says nothing at first, just stares. "What do you want?" I ask, voice steady.
He glances at me. "You should know by now."
I open the door all the way and collapse into his arms. He holds me, running long fingers through my hair, murmuring endearments into my ear until I feel calmer than I have in the whole year. Finally, he says, "You're the only one I trust."
23
KONSTANTIN
Zoya is buried in my arms, shivering because the thinness of my T-shirt offers no defense against the cold. I hold her tighter, shielding her as best I can. The wind outside bites through the open balcony door, dragging snow in looping eddies across the floor tiles. The radiator ticks ineffectually in the corner, but it's no match for the draft. She's barefoot, and her skin feels like porcelain left out in frost. I run my palm over the bare skin at her hip, exposed because she's on tiptoe, and circle my thumb over the faint shadow of a bruise already yellowing there.
When she meets my gaze, it's with a kind of defiance, but something in her face is different, as if bits of her are melting at the edges. Her gray-green eyes are a shade too bright and unguarded. I am used to Zoya in armor, frost on her tongue, a blade behind her smile. But this is not the war-painted Zoya of boardrooms and back seats, nor the drunken Zoya who once staggered through the red-light tangle of Pigalle on a bet. This Zoya, tonight, is breakable. She looks to me through drooping eyelids, and the sadness in them chokes me more than any betrayal ever could.
"You and I," she says, voice choked with tears, "We always had the odds stacked against us. I knew the first night. What we do to each other…" She frowns, angry with herself for the confession, looking away.
I pull her closer and press my lips to her temple, breathing in the scent of her skin—roses and soap, something heady from her hair. "You ever think about running?" I ask. "Disappearing. No names, no debts, no history." It's a stupid question. But she surprises me.
Her mouth twists, and she lets out a strangled noise halfway between a laugh and a sob. "Every morning," she says, "for about five minutes. Before remembering who you are and what I've become."
Touché.
I lift her gently in my arms, feeling the line of her spine through the thin cotton. I kiss her mouth tenderly, then set her down, keeping her hand fixed in mine. There's a trembling in her, a held-back energy that makes me want to wrap her up and keep her from fracturing. The door to the balcony is still open, drawing the chill into the room. I reach over, flick the brass latch, and shut the door. "It's too cold for you to be half-naked," I tell her with a small smile, which she returns.
