Page 8 of The King's Pawn
I should be dead. I should be under all that rubble. I should be?—
My thoughts fracture before I can finish it.
I turn back around and stare at my shaking hands resting in my lap. Blood—my own, maybe, or someone else’s—has dried on my sweater. Every bump in the road jolts through my skull like a hammer strike.
By the time we pull through the iron gates of thedacha, the ringing in my ears has settled into a dull roar. The snow-covered trees blur past the window, stark and skeletal.
When the engine cuts, I finally lift my head to look toward the front steps.
To where Papa is standing waiting for me.
His posture is rigid, his hands clasped behind his back, his face unreadable. His suit is immaculate as if he dressed deliberately knowing this moment would come, but that’s a wild thing to think when none of this could’ve been predicted. Two more guards flank him, their eyes scanning the perimeter instead of me.
Alexei opens my door moments later, but I’m frozen in my seat for a heartbeat, unable to make my body move.
“Devushka,” he murmurs.
Instinct takes over.
I step out on shaking legs, boots crunching weakly on the snow covered gravel. The cold air slaps my face, sharp enough to sting, but it barely registers. Papa’s gaze sweeps over me like a spotlight, assessing, cataloging the damage that still covers me.
He doesn’t run to me or grab me and pull me into his arms while whispering how grateful he is that I’m alive in my ear. He doesn’t even ask if I’m hurt. He simply nods as if I’ve completed a task exactly as expected.
“Inside. Now,” he says, his voice controlled, a command thinly veiled.
Somehow, that hurts worse than the explosion. Worse than the glass no doubt still embedded in my skin.
For the first time in my life, as I walk toward him, one truth pierces through the haze with stunning clarity. This was not anaccident. This wasn’t random. Not when that text message told me to run for my life before I could get caught in the blast.
Something inside me knows that whatever happened today touches closer to my father than he will ever admit.
And I’m suddenly terrified of what will come because of it.
2
ALINA
Aday later, the news story breaks.
“They’re saying it was extremists,” I say over breakfast. My voice sounds too thin, too far away, as if it’s traveling through cotton instead of air.
Not that my father notices. Or even responds.
I haven’t eaten a single bite of the food Evgenia placed in front of me nearly half an hour ago. The eggs have gone cold, the toast is stiff, and the tea beside my plate has lost all its steam. I stare at the food instead of the television because every time I look up, the images on the screen crawl under my skin and make it difficult to breathe.
Footage of the blast, aerial shots of the wreckage, reporters standing in front of the cordoned-off ruins with grim faces. Students are sobbing into each other’s shoulders as they tell their stories while body bags are lined up along the courtyard’s walkway like punctuation marks at the end of a sentence that never should have been written in the first place.
“They say a radical group claimed responsibility,” I add, my voice hitching slightly. “They’re calling it a political statement.”
Still nothing from him.
His eyes refuse to tear away from the massive TV mounted on the wall of the breakfast nook, his preferred seat in the mornings. He leans forward in his chair as though proximity will change the story, make the facts rearrange themselves into something more useful, more understandable.
His expression is carved from stone.
His hand is wrapped around an untouched mug of coffee, fingers tightening and loosening around the ceramic with restless energy at each passing image that flicks across the screen. The other grips his phone so tightly that I genuinely expect it to crack in half. His knuckles are chalk-white, tendons standing out sharply.
It’s rare for him to ignore me this blatantly. Even rarer for him to look this… afraid.
