Page 25 of The King's Pawn
Most people would have broken by now. Locked doors, confiscated freedoms, the sudden understanding that their life is no longer their own are all things that usually crack a person wide open.
They beg, they rage, then they dissolve. It’s how it always goes. That’s how I know I’ve broken them down into something much more manageable.
However, she does none of that.
Instead, she burns quietly, gathering herself inward. I recognize the shape of it because I have lived it. That kind of restraint is not taught. It cannot be handed down in lessons or drilled into someone by discipline alone. It is found and discovered in the moments when breaking feels inevitable, forged through circumstances that would have crushed weaker minds outright.
I reach out and still the feed, freezing her image.
For a brief, irrational moment, I imagine leaving here and heading up to her room. I imagine telling her the truth, that the answers she is looking for are not something she wants to hear. That power rarely comes without dark secrets, and the blood on the hands of people she cares about has been there long before she was ever born. That the world she thought she knew was never real to begin with.
The answers she is hunting are not kind and never were. That power,realpower, is not principled and earned through virtue. It is taken, traded and defended with things most people refuseto acknowledge. With secrets buried so deep, they become the very foundations that new lives are built upon.
The world she thought she lived in, the one with laws and rules and moral lines that a regular society flourishes on, has always been an illusion, a story told to children and voters so the machinery beneath it could continue to grind without interruption. Men like her father were never innocent, only careful in how they move through both the underworld and the one above it.
I imagine her not refusing to believe me, not dismissing it as manipulation as she should, but absorbing it the way she seems to absorb everything else. I imagine the moment she understands that there is no returning to the life she thought she had, only moving forward into this one that she’s had the misfortune of being tangled up in whether she wanted to be or not.
And for a dangerous second, I imagine that she would choose to stand here with me.
The thought is intoxicating in a way that makes my jaw tighten. Because honesty like that is not neutral. It is not strategic in the slightest. It is an offering of something I never thought I had being gifted to her—sentiment, an underbelly I’ve long since tried to kill. Wanting her creates proximity where distance is required. It turns my control into a deeply bound connection and that connection into leverage that can be used against me.
I shake my head sharply, cutting her feed before my thoughts get even more carried away.
This is not the kind of desire I allow myself to indulge.
It is a sickness that must be dealt with before it spreads.
Out of the corner of my eye, movement on one of the other monitors pulls my attention away from the darkened feed of her room.
A familiar shape slides into view.
My sister’s Mercedes glides through the main gate, the headlights cutting clean arcs through the cold morning air as the wrought iron parts for her without hesitation. The guards straighten immediately, recognition sharp in their posture. No weapons are raised toward the car, no confirmation requested before they’re waving her through.
She has never needed permission to enter my estate. In all honesty, I doubt she’d ever ask for it even if I did require it.
I watch the car roll up the drive, finding no other cars following her in. Nothing tailing the turn after her, no secondary headlights lingering down at the gate.
I nearly roll my eyes.
Of course she is unescorted.
Lena has never tolerated handlers or convoys the way the rest of us do. Protection, in her mind, is a concession. One she only accepts when it suits her. She has spent her entire life refusing to be treated like something fragile despite the fact that her surname alone makes her a target.
Especiallybecause of it.
She knows the risks. She has always known them. She simply refuses to let them dictate her life.
It is infuriating as much as it is impressive and dangerously on brand.
There was a time when I insisted she travel with at least one vehicle behind her, a minimal show of caution. She lasted exactly three weeks before ditching them on the Garden Ring and calling me afterward to inform me that if I ever tried it again, she would start taking taxis out of spite.
By then, I had learned that Lena does not respond to force in the way most women do. She only responds to respect.
The car comes to a precise stop at the foot of the steps. The engine cuts and then she steps out moments later, unbothered by the cold, her heels striking against the salted stone walkway with the same confidence that has never once wavered in all the years I’ve known her.
Her dark hair is pulled back in a severe knot, the ends curled and falling just onto her shoulders. Her expression is controlled and that tells me immediately that she is not here for pleasantries. Her posture is rigid, her shoulders squared and chin lifted.
I exhale slowly through my nose.
