Page 50 of The King's Pawn
I straighten slightly, moving closer to my desk to grab the folder and open it. “What kind of decision?”
Roman exhales through his nose. “Details were thin. In my opinion, that alone is concerning.”
I hum quietly. “I agree.”
Nikolai never shows his full hand unless he’s already decided how the game will end.
Roman studies me for a moment longer than usual. Then he says finally, “You should know… that according to what I gathered from Malyshko’s second, Volkov and Kuznetsov have already been briefed.”
My eyes narrow.
Icing me out, then?
That seals it.
If Volkov and Kuznetsov were consulted before this meeting—or worse, brought in early enough to shape the outcome of it—then whatever Nikolai plans to present today is already decidedand most likely not something I’m going to want to hear. This meeting will be nothing more than theater, a formality meant to give the illusion of consensus while quietly sidelining me.
Or, and this thought is far less palatable, they were involved from the beginning and I was deliberately excluded.
Either way, the message is unmistakable. Nikolai is dissatisfied.
Not with the bombings themselves—those are merely the catalyst—but with how I’ve handled the aftermath. With how I’ve handled Alina and how I’ve allowed Viktor Morozov’s mess to bleed into my territory without immediately severing the limb.
Whether Nikolai knows the full extent of Viktor’s involvement is irrelevant. He doesn’t need proof to smell rot. A man like him understands patterns. Two bombings, same district, same political family hovering just beneath the surface of it. A daughter suddenly transferred into my custody under the polite fiction of “protection” doesn’t register as coincidence to someone with his instincts.
Nikolai is young, but he is not naïve. There is a reason he succeeded where so many heirs before him failed.
A man who can overthrow his own father who held power with iron certainty for decades and do it swiftly the way he did without the city erupting into complete chaos is not someone to underestimate. That kind of coup doesn’t happen on bravado alone. It requires intellect. Planning. Loyalty so absolute that men are willing to burn bridges, bloodlines, and traditions without hesitation.
It is that loyalty that makes him dangerous. His loyalists don’t just obey him. Theybelievein him. And belief in our world is far more lethal than fear.
If a civil war were to fracture the Iron Pact, Nikolai would not be fighting alone. He would have an army convinced they were saving the future by destroying the present. That is not the kind of battle anyone survives unscarred. It is certainly not one I want to find myself in the middle of.
And yet…
The irritation burns hot and sharp beneath my restraint.
I have held my position far longer than he has held his crown. I earned my seat at this table through blood and discipline, through years of consolidating power when Nikolai was still a boy watching from his father’s shadows. I remember the day he was brought home from the hospital, red-faced and screaming, oblivious to the empire he would one day inherit and dismantle with his own hands.
To have a man nearly half my age orchestrating moves against me from behind closed doors is more than insulting.
It is infuriating.
I keep my expression neutral as Roman watches me, but inside, the pieces are already shifting into place. Nikolai may be testing me, probing for weakness or for attachment, for hesitation.
He will find none. But what he will also find is that I am not so easily pushed aside.
“Prepare the car,” I tell Roman, flipping the folder closed.
11
SASHA
The drive to the Malyshko estate is entirely silent.
Snowmelt slushes at the edges of the road as the car glides forward, tires hissing softly over wet asphalt. Piles of dirty ice glitter beneath the weak, anemic sun, their surfaces fractured and grey.
A low fog clings stubbornly to the ground, rolling lazily between the trees and swallowing the forest in uneven breaths. The trunks rise out of it like specters with dark, bare branches reaching upward like broken fingers frozen mid-prayer.
