Page 7 of BRATVA'S Poisoner Bride
It looks wrong here. Too bright. Too clean. Like a lie set in bright gold.
I pick it up between my thumb and forefinger. Cold metal, smooth and unforgiving. The diamond catches the light and throws it back in a hard, prismatic flash.
You were going to belong to him, I think. The man who killed my mother. The man I killed slowly, carefully, with doses measured in my grandmother’s handwriting.
It feels like something unfinished, still tying me to a ghost.
I close my fingers around it and head back down the hall.
Diomid is where I left him, patient as a statue, one hand in his pocket, the other resting lightly against the doorframe. He looks up when he hears my steps, amber eyes catching on the tight set of my mouth, the closed line of my fist.
The space between us seems smaller now. The outside world is a blur at his back, the inside of the house a shadow behind me. We’re standing on the threshold of something I’m not ready to try to understand.
I hold out my hand.
“This was your uncle’s,” I say. “I don’t think it’s right for me to keep it.”
For a heartbeat, he doesn’t move. Then his gaze drops to my hand. His fingers brush mine as he takes the ring, a whisper of contact that shouldn’t matter but sends a little electric shock dancing along my skin.
His hand is warm. Steady. Real.
He turns the ring between his fingers, studying it with a little furrow between his brows, as if the metal might confess something I won’t.
“Most women don’t give something like this back,” he says quietly. “Especially not in this world. They fight for it. Claim it as payment. Compensation.”
I think of the tiny notes in my grandmother’s margins. The careful dosages. The pressed flowers. Remedies for everything except what to do with the ring of the man your father gave you to.
“I didn’t earn it,” I say. “It was never really mine.”
His gaze lifts, pins me again. “You were engaged to a powerful man. That alone issomething.”
“I agreed because my father asked me to,” I reply. “Because it was expected. Because it was easier to say yes than to start a war over a wedding. But that doesn’t mean it belonged on my hand.”
His mouth twists, not quite a smile. “So you were being dutiful.”
“Isn’t that what good Bratva daughters do?” I ask, the sarcasm dripping from the words before I can think to control it.
The answer hangs between us, more honest than anything I’ve said out loud in months.
His eyes narrow slightly, studying my face. I feel stripped bare under that look, as if he’s reading layers of me like pages, flipping through until he finds the line that doesn’t match.
“And did you love him?” he asks.
The question lands soft but heavy.
For a moment, the house feels full of ghosts. My mother’s laugh, the smell of herbs, the rasp of Piotr’s voice when he told me he’d be a kind husband if I didn’t make him be something else.
I could lie. Good daughters lie all the time. They say what eases their fathers’ pride, their uncles’ tempers, their world’s thick, choking traditions.
But there’s something in Diomid’s gaze that makes lying feel pointless.
“No,” I say simply. “I didn’t love him.”
There’s no tremor in my voice. No sorrow. Just fact.
Something changes in his eyes. It’s small, but it’s there. A flicker of satisfaction, or maybe confirmation.
The silence stretches, taut as a wire. I’m painfully aware of how close we’re standing, of the way his shoulders fill thedoorway, of how my heart won’t slow down no matter how hard I tell it to.
