Page 41 of The King's Pawn
Everyone knows the story. After my mother’s tragic car accident, Papa was changed. Grief-stricken. Haunted. A widower with ayoung daughter who suddenly understood how fragile life really was. The narrative had been polished to a mirror shine over the years, repeated in interviews and campaign speeches until it felt absolute.
Her death became the catalyst. He sought to better the city, to make it safer and protect families from senseless loss like his own.
Since then, he’s risen steadily through the political ranks. From committee to committee, office to office until his name carried real weight in Moscow. He learned how to smile at the right moments, how to speak with conviction about reform and safety while never actually promising anything concrete. He became untouchable in the way men with enough influence always do.
I grew up inside that story. I told it to myself more times than I can count. I’d rehearsed it to classmates and professors. To journalists who would ask gentle questions during interviews with sharpened curiosity hidden behind their sympathetic eyes.
“Mama’s death inspired him,” I’d always tell them, my voice steady, practiced. “He wanted to make sure no one else had to go through what we did.”
Rendered for removal.
My chest tightens painfully as doubt begins to seep through the cracks in my denial. Because if this was about property or assets or some abstract stepping stone toward Papa’s career, why does the date matter so much?
Why August?
Why that year?
Why does my body know deep in the place where my instincts live that this is not just coincidence?
“Looking for something,Printsessa?”
The sound of his voice hits me like a physical blow.
I jump so violently, my knees slam into the underside of the desk, the sharp pain barely registering over the spike of panic that rips through me. My head snaps up, heart lurching into my throat, and I nearly fall out of the chair as I look toward the main doorway.
Sasha fills the frame of the door, one hand still resting on the knob, his shoulders drawn tight beneath his suit jacket, his posture rigid with a restraint that feels far more dangerous than anger. His face is calm. Too calm, with the kind of stillness that comes from years of training himself not to react before deciding exactly how much damage he intends to do.
His eyes move slowly from the papers clutched in my shaking hands to my face and then back again.
I was so consumed by the file, by the words that have already begun unraveling my life thread by thread, that I didn’t hear him open the door. What’s worse, and what makes my stomach drop even further, is that he doesn’t look surprised.
“What—” My voice falters on the word. It comes out thin, barely recognizable as my own, but I force myself to keep going anyway. “What is this?”
I lift the papers and the folder higher as if presenting evidence in a courtroom. My hand is trembling so badly, the pages flutter. My eyes burn, the sting so sharp that I have to blink hard to keep the tears from spilling over and blurring everything completely.
His gaze flicks to the papers again, then returns to me, steady and unreadable.
“Put it down.”
The command is quiet and absolute.
My throat burns as I try to swallow past the knot lodged there. The sound that comes out of me is closer to a breath than a word. “What is this, Sasha?”
Something flashes across his face at the sound of his name on my tongue. It’s brief—so quick, I might have imagined it—but it’s there. A tightening around the eyes. A flicker of irritation. Or something worse.
He starts toward me.
Each step is measured the way a predator approaches prey that has nowhere left to run. His gaze never leaves mine even as the distance between us closes. “I remember telling you,” he says evenly, “when you arrived here not to go where you weren’t invited.”
My entire body goes numb.
The folder slips from my grasp as if my body no longer remembers how to hold on. It hits the desk with a soft, awful sound, the contents spilling out in every direction. Papers slide across the polished wood. Photographs scatter like confetti.
Her face stares up at me from the desk.
My mother’s smile is frozen mid-laugh, caught in a moment she never knew would be her last. She looks warm, alive… unaware of how close death already was.
A broken sound tears out of my throat.
