Page 57 of The King's Pawn
It became obvious soon after she arrived at my estate that Viktor had never told her anything regarding the contract. He had kept her deliberately ignorant of the arrangement for reasons I still don’t fully understand. Guilt, perhaps, or cowardice. Maybe even a misguided belief that sparing her the truth was an act of mercy.
Then again, I don’t have answers for myself, either. I don’t know why I went out of my way to intervene at all. I am not a bleeding heart. I do not lose sleep over collateral damage, nor do I concern myself with the fates of people outside my inner circle. Compassion is a liability and sentimentality gets lesser men killed.
And yet…
Seeing her that night, barely out of high school, smiling because she had been taught to, standing beside a father who saw her as nothing more than a show pig ready to be given to the highest bidder…
It angered me.
Deeply. Viscerally. More than I have ever cared to admit.
Even my sister had been bewildered when she discovered the contract buried in my files a year later. She’d stared at it for a long time, silent, then looked at me like she was seeing a stranger.
“You don’t do this,”she had said quietly.“You don’t… rescue people, Sashenka.”
She wasn’t wrong.
I still don’t know why I did it. But what’s done is done and there is no going back.
The corners of Nikolai’s eyes crinkle slightly, narrowing the longer he studies me. Silence is one of his favorite weapons, and he wields it with surgical precision, letting it stretch until it becomes uncomfortable enough to draw out any deeply hidden confessional.
Finally, after what feels like an entire lifetime, he rolls his shoulders back and settles deeper into his seat. “I see.”
I don’t respond. I don’t nod or speak. I let the words sit between us unresolved because anything I say now risks tipping the balance in a direction I can’t predict. Nikolai is not finished yet. He rarely is when he grows quiet like this.
Volkov, on the other hand, has never possessed an ounce of that level of restraint in his life.
“So… what?” he says at last, irritation bleeding openly into his tone. He leans forward, elbows braced against the table, his fingers lacing together as if that alone might keep his impatience contained. “We’re supposed to sit around and wait for the FSB to figure it out? Since when do we work on their timeline?”
His gaze flicks briefly toward Nikolai, then back to me, sharp and accusatory.
“If Morozov is guilty, what exactly is the use of waiting for them to charge him formally? We don’t need indictments. We don’t need press conferences. We decide when a man becomes a liability and when he needs to go.”
Nikolai clears his throat softly. Every eye turns back to him immediately.
“Sasha is right, Aleksandr. We don’t make decisions based on rumors. We make them based on evidence.”
For the briefest moment, I can’t quite hide my reaction. My eyes widen just enough to betray surprise.
Volkov notices.
He scoffs out a sharp, disbelieving sound toward our leader. “You’re serious.”
Nikolai’s gaze shifts to him slowly, the full weight of his attention settling onto Volkov like a hand closing around a throat and squeezing. Whatever faint amusement had lingered there evaporates instantly.
“Of course I am,” Nikolai replies. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Volkov straightens immediately, his earlier bravado snapping into something much more careful. He clears his throat, visibly recalibrating, trying and failing to mask just how deeply unsettled he is by that attention.
“I wasn’t doubting you. I just… we usually don’t wait around for outside authorities to do our work for us,” he says quickly.
“And we aren’t,” Nikolai agrees calmly. “Did I say we are?”
The silence that follows is absolute.
It presses in on the room from all sides, thick and suffocating. No one moves. No one even breathes. Even Volkov seems to understand that pushing any further would be a fatal miscalculation.
I fight the smirk threatening to surface at the corner of my mouth.
