Page 26 of The King's Pawn
This was inevitable.
Lena does not come here unless something has gone wrong or unless she intends to tell me that something is about to. She has always had a talent for arriving at the precise moment my life grows complicated enough to require her particular brand of interference.
I watch as she hands her keys to one of the men who greet her at the door, her mouth moving silently on the feed, already issuing instructions with clipped efficiency. The guards respond instantly, as they always do. My sister may not wear the crown, but she carries enough of its weight that no one mistakes her authority for anything less than absolute.
She disappears inside, and I switch the feed as she passes from one camera’s range to another, a ghost in black threading her way through my house.
I lean back in my chair, steepling my fingers as I wait for her to come to me, my mind already cataloging the reasons she might be here. An ally maneuvering behind my back, perhaps? Rumors about Alina being here traveling faster than I anticipated through channels I thought I still controlled?
The door to the control room opens moments later without a knock.
“Sashenka,” she calls, her voice deceptively bright. “You look like you’re brooding. That usually means you’ve done something very stupid.”
A corner of my mouth lifts despite myself as I turn around. I know better than to bristle at her tone. Lena does not needle without purpose. She tests and prods just like I do.
“Good morning to you too,” I reply.
She crosses the room in quick, confident strides and leans down to kiss both of my cheeks, leaving twin impressions of red I will wipe away later out of habit. She smells like expensive perfume and the cold air from outside.
Lena is the only person alive who can treat me so casually and still get away with it. She is also the only living soul who still gets away with touching me like this. And the only one who still calls me by the name our mother used when she’d whisper it into my hair before sleep, before a Chechen sniper tore her skull apart in Grozny and taught us both exactly how fleeting tenderness in our world could be.
She drops into the chair beside me with little grace, sprawling slightly. Her eyes immediately dart to the monitors, scanning them with the speed of someone who knows exactly what she is looking for. They snag on the darkened screen in the upper left corner.
I have no time to react. She reaches out and taps the control, and the feed flares back to life.
Alina’s room fills the screen again.
“Ah,” Lena murmurs, her tone thoughtful, almost pleased. “There she is.”
I let out a slow breath through my nose. “Is there a reason you’re here so early,sestrenka?”
She arches a brow at me, not even bothering to glance in my direction as she zooms in on Alina’s face, studying the tight set of her jaw, the restless tension coiled beneath her stillness while she paces the space in front of her door.
“She’s pretty when she’s angry,” Lena says lightly.
I don’t answer.
Her being pretty is irrelevant.
“News from the outside?” I try again, keeping my voice deliberately neutral even as I feel her scrutiny sharpening.
Finally, Lena tears her attention away from the monitor, though I catch the faint reluctance in the way her fingers linger on the console before she lets it go. She turns in her chair to face me fully, crossing one long leg over the other with practiced ease. Her expression is unreadable now, the brightness from earlier sharpened into assessment.
“How long will our guest be staying?” she asks.
“Until I say,” I retort. The words come out sharper than intended, edged with a petulance I immediately resent in myself.
I am aware of it the moment it leaves my mouth and the awareness irritates me further. I do not speak this way to anyone. I do not need to. Authority has never required volume or attitude in my presence. And yet, with Lena, the composure I maintain so effortlessly with generals andPakhansalike has always been… negotiable.
She notices, of course.
She always does.
One corner of her mouth curves upward. She does not comment on my tone, which somehow makes it worse. Lena has always had an uncanny ability to peel back the layers I present to the rest of the world without touching them directly. She does nothing, says nothing, and still manages to reach the childish part of me I learned long ago to keep buried.
It is not manipulation. It never has been.
It is familiarity.
