Page 8 of BRATVA'S Poisoner Bride
He rolls the ring once more between his fingers, then closes his hand around it.
“Thank you,” he says. Two words, polite enough. But his gaze doesn’t match the civility. It feels like a promise. Or a warning.
I realize, suddenly, that I’m not afraid of him in the way I should be.
I should be terrified. This is a man who lived in Piotr’s shadow and walked away unsinged. A man whose eyes missed nothing at the funeral. A man who stands in my doorway now holding the ring that symbolised my cage.
Instead, the coldness in my chest tangles with something else, something that makes my skin feel too tight. Attraction is too small a word. It’s not a crush, not a silly flutter. It’s recognition with teeth and claws and determination.
I push it down until it settles somewhere deep and molten, where I pray it will cool down into placid civility and I can ignore it.
“I—” My voice comes out too thin. I clear my throat. “I should get back to the kitchen. The cake…”
The timer chooses that moment to beep, shrill and insistent down the hall. The sound jerks me back into myself, into this house, into the reality where people are killers or killed.
“Of course,” he says. “I’ll speak to your father another time.”
He steps back, out onto the step, the cold air rushing in to fill the space where his body was. I feel it on my beneath the knit of my sweater, a sudden chill that raises goosebumps.
He doesn’t put the ring in his pocket. He keeps it in his hand, like a marker.
“Good afternoon, Elizabeth,” he says.
My name in his mouth does something awful to my chest. I nod, because I can’t trust my voice, and close the door gently.
My breath comes out in a rush. On the other side, his footsteps recede, measured and unhurried, each one taking him further away and somehow lodging him deeper under my skin.
The timer keeps beeping. I push off the door and walk back to the kitchen.
The lemon cake has risen beautifully, golden and domed, the air rich with sugar and citrus. I pull it from the oven and set it on the cooling rack. Steam curls up, coating the window, blurring the world outside into vague shapes.
I pick up the lemon I zested earlier and turn it in my hand, pressing my thumb into the rind until the juice bursts through, sharp and clean under my nails.
Piotr is dead. His ring is gone. His nephew walked up to my home and looked at me like he could see the dark, crooked path that led from my grandmother’s diary to a man gasping his last breath.
I should feel free.
Instead, as the scent of warm lemon fills the room, I realize with a slow, sinking certainty that I’ve only traded one kind of danger for another.
I killed the man who killed my mother and wanted to own me.
And now I’ve caught the attention of the man who might know the truth without me ever whispering a word.
Diomid
The door closes with a soft thud, but the sound echoes through me like something far louder. For a moment I stand there on the step, staring at the grain of the wood she she touched, the faint heat of her presence still radiating in the space. The winter air cuts clean across my face, sharp and cold, but it does nothing to steady the pulse beating too close to the surface.
I walk down the steps slowly because my body refuses to move at any other pace. The world feels different than it did when I arrived. The drive is the same, cracked concrete, crooked trees, a sagging gate, but I feel as if someone has adjusted the focus of a camera I didn’t realize was out of alignment. Everything is clearer. Sharper. More dangerous.
Her father’s house is ordinary in the way decay often is. The window frames don’t sit quite square, the weight of time and neglect too heavy. The gutter hangs at an angle. Paint peels from the trim, the bricks look frostbitten. But what’s inside those walls is something else entirely.
I reach my car but don’t unlock it. Instead I rest a hand on the roof, the metal cold enough to sting. The other hand holds the ring she placed in my palm, a glittering band of gold and diamond that never should have belonged on her finger. It catches the thin light like an accusation. Like a secret.
She could have sold it and made enough to half fix up this decrepit old mansion.
Only she didn’t hesitate when she pressed it into my hand. She didn’t linger. She didn’t ask what I planned to do with it. She simply gave it back, as though severing ties with a dead man could be as simple as removing a piece of jewellery.
But I saw the way her breath shifted. I saw the tightness in her shoulders. I saw the flicker of relief she tried to mask with that calm, steady voice.
