Page 27 of The King's Pawn
We were the only two children our parents ever had, raised in corridors guarded by armed men and windows reinforced against sniper fire. We learned early that outside ties were a liability and trust was rationed expertly. There were no classmates, no neighborhood games, no scraped knees from running freely in the streets with other children. There was only this estate, the routines, the drills, and each other.
When danger circled close—as it always did—it was Lena who hid with me under stairwells and inside forgotten studies, shewho listened through doors with me and learned alongside me that secrets made better shields than guns.
She knows the sound of my restraint cracking because she heard it form in real time, piece by piece, long before it hardened into the thing the world fears. She watched it take shape after our mother died, after our father taught us what survival actually cost, after affection became something rationed and weakness became a death sentence.
Lena learned to read me before I learned how to hide myself properly. She knows the difference between control and stubbornness because she has lived beside both for as long as I have been alive.
Which is precisely why her questions annoy me more than accusations ever could.
“Enough,” I mutter, the word low and clipped, meant to shut the conversation down before it goes somewhere I have no interest in letting it wander.
Her expression, predictably, grows more animated instead. Lena has always thrived on my resistance.
“‘Until you say’ is quite the timeframe,” she says lightly. “It can be interpreted in so many different ways. Is this a long-term investment, or are we using her for something specific?”
Wedoesn’t escape my attention. It lands between us with the weight of assumption, of shared ownership, of a decision she has already placed herself inside, whether I invited her or not.
I shift tactics. “Weren’t you supposed to be in London this week?”
She shrugs, unfazed, settling deeper into the chair as if she intends to make herself comfortable for the duration of this interrogation. “I grew bored of the food. Wanted to come back early to check and make sure my baby brother was doing all right without me.”
This time, I actually do roll my eyes.
I turn back toward the monitors, cycling through the feeds with a flick of my fingers, watching gates, corridors, perimeter lines.
Her stalling is deliberate, and while I recognize it for what it is, it still makes me restless. Lena does not show up unannounced and this early without reason. She does not circle a subject unless she already knows it’s going to upset me well beyond the reasonable threshold my patience allows.
As glad as I am to see her alive and well, she rarely visits me simply because. She has always been a self-proclaimed free bird and her attachments to this estate are soaked in a kind of grief she has been more than willing to leave behind since the day she turned eighteen and realized she could. She took the first open door and never looked back.
I have never blamed her for it. I never will.
Out of anyone, Lena is the one person who deserves to escape the life she had the unfortunate misfortune of being born into. And perhaps that is why her presence here now unsettles me more than any threat Nikolai, or any of the other Iron Pact members, could ever make.
“Yelena.”
She exhales, tipping her head back slightly in exaggerated patience. “Always to the point. You never did learn how to soften your edges.”
“That is why I am the head of our family,” I reply coolly.
She makes a soft grunt in response, conceding the point without granting it any respect, and straightens in her chair. The levity drains from her expression as if a switch has been flipped. “I heard about the university bombing. It is all over the news. Worldwide, even. The grapevine says Viktor Morozov is responsible for it.”
The grapevine, as she always calls it, is our network of informants. Politicians’ assistants, bankers’ wives, port officials, fixers, men who trade information the way others trade currency. It is vast, efficient, and rarely wrong. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t question her knowing this much, but it does strike me as odd that the information would reach her all the way in London during her self-imposed sabbatical, and that it would prompt her to return immediately.
Small catastrophic events rarely make either of us blink anymore.
My gaze turns to her slowly. “Is that why you came home?”
“Among other reasons,” she says lightly.
I level her with another look. “And what did your side of the network tell you, exactly?”
She lifts a single shoulder, casual as ever. “That you’re housing the suspect’s daughter.” Her lips twitch faintly. “When I heard that, I thought to myself… well, that can’t possibly be true. My brother would never bother helping someone claw their way outof a self-inflicted bind. But then I called Roman and he told me otherwise. So, here I am.”
My lips thin. “Our head guard sure does like to gossip.”
She shoots me an amused look. “Don’t be angry at the messenger, Sashenka. I pried it out of him.”
A small snort escapes me before I can stop it.
