Page 39 of The King's Pawn
At first, I don’t recognize where I am.
The room is large—far larger than the supply closet or the servants’ corridors I’d just come through. Its ceiling, while high, is vaulted in a way that immediately sets it apart from the utilitarian spaces beneath the estate. The air smells different here too, a faint trace of cologne that lingers like an imprint rather than a presence with the slight undercurrent of tobacco.
It’s a study.
Not one of the formal ones meant for guests or polite meetings, but something more private. More personal.
Dark wood shelves line the walls from floor to ceiling filled with books and binders and neatly labeled filing cabinets. A massive desk dominates the center of the room, its surface meticulously organized. Too organized, if I’m being honest, as if disorder isn’t tolerated here even in thought. A lamp casts a warm pool of light over the desktop, illuminating stacked documents, a leather blotter, and a closed laptop pushed slightly to the side.
Behind it, a large map hangs on the wall. It isn’t decorative. It’s detailed and annotated, marked with things I don’t immediately understand.
Red lines carve through neighborhoods, black dots cluster in patterns. Some areas are circled, others slashed through, a few marked with a sharp, decisive X. There are dates scribbled in the margins. Numbers. Short phrases written in tight, angular handwriting.
My breath catches.
I know that handwriting.
I’ve seen it on documents my father brought home late at night, on notes scrawled in the margins of reports he never meant for me to read. On envelopes that would arrive periodically to our home without warning with messages that would make my father hole up in his office for days on end.
Sasha.
A cold awareness slides down my spine.
Is this… his study?
I step farther inside, the door clicking shut behind me, and only then does the realization settle fully into my chest.
I shouldn’t be here.
This isn’t just another room in the estate. It isn’t a guest space or a shared area meant to be stumbled into by accident. This is a place where decisions are made that ripple outward into the city, affecting lives I will never know. Lives that I am almost certain will never know who decided their fate.
I should turn back.
Every instinct screams that this is the moment to retreat, to slip back through the door and pretend I never saw any of this. Ignorance would be safer. It would let me keep pretendingthat Sasha is a man who is only interested in controlling what’s behind the gates of his estate. It would let me cling to the smaller, more survivable fear that he isn’t only cruel in a personal way, but his power extends far behind that.
He’s part of the Iron Pact. What did you expect?
The thought lands with bitter clarity, stripping away any remaining illusion that I’ve wandered into the wrong place by accident. Men like Sasha don’t rise by coincidence. They don’t inherit this kind of authority without blood being paid somewhere along the line. This has been going on for far longer than either of us have been alive for.
I swallow tightly, my throat burning.
They were supposed to be a myth.
A name whispered by politicians who liked to imagine themselves more important than they were. A bedtime horror story told in half-jokes and careful euphemisms to keep children from misbehaving. Four families so powerful, they operated beyond consequence, beyond law, beyond morality, but only in theory.
They were never supposed to actually be real.
My father hadn’t been paranoid. He’d been terrified. What stands in front of me now is something far worse.
This room doesn’t belong to a captor.
It belongs to a king.
Yet still, instead of retreating, I let my eyes wander.
I can’t help that I’m drawn deeper into this space, pulled forward by the terrible gravity of what’s laid bare in front ofme. Knowledge has always been my weakness. It’s why I studied what I did, why I’ve always asked too many questions, why my father’s silences never sat right with me.
My hands drift over the ledgers on his desk before I can stop myself. Everything is arranged with meticulous care, stacks aligned, edges squared, tabs color-coded. I tell myself I’m only looking for a second. That I’ll close whatever I open and leave no trace behind once I’m done, but I have to know for my own good.
