Page 131 of Wicked Proposal

I wet the rag in my hand and touch it to the cold, smooth stone of my mother’s grave. Grime sticks to the fabric, a year’s worth of it, staining my fingertips the color of gray earth.

“I met someone.”

No one else is here, so my words echo. It’s the crack of dawn on a Monday and not a soul in sight. Maksim is standing just a little way off, ensuring I won’t be disturbed, but he could have saved himself the walk.

“Her name is Mia.” I don’t know why I’m telling my mother this. Why my first words to her are about the woman I hired to pretend to be my fiancée. “She’s a nurse. An insufferable, stubborn nurse with zero bedside manner and the mouth of a sailor. Can’t imagine how she even got the job, really.”

I trace the letters of my mother’s name.Olga Lozhkin.The dates of her birth and death, too close together to be fair.

But this world has never been fair. That’s the greatest lie of all:fairness. Justice. Balance.

If you want balance, you have to even the scales with your own fucking hands.

“I hired her,” I confess. “To draw out the ones who did this to you.”

I move on to my father’s grave. My fingers follow the edges of his name.Yevgeny Lozhkin.Every year, they feel smoother.

“I put her in danger.” The words claw their way out my throat, leaving blood in their wake. It’s all I can taste lately—the blood I’ve shed. The blood Iwillshed. “Every time I walk with her, speak to her,lookat her, I’m putting her in danger. Her, and her son.”

I’m a liar. That’s part of the job description. When you’re apakhan,you can’t afford to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Hell, you can’t afford to have a heart at all.

But this is the only place where I can’t bury the truth.

Here, where I buried my family.

“It’s what I need to do,” I grit. “I have to avenge your deaths. All these years, I’ve been trying. Now, I’m finally closing in on them—themudakiwho did this to you. I can’t stop now. I won’t.”

But what if you did, Yulian?

That last thought comes in Alina’s voice. She died too young to know anything else. She never knew her toys were paid for by someone else’s blood. She was…

Just like Eli.

I banish the thought as I move over to her grave, the smallest one of the bunch. But no matter how hard I try, Mia’s son keeps crashing into my thoughts the way he crashed into her knees when she came home.

Faded memories bubble back to the surface: a marble staircase, a huge hall. The front door opening on my father’s shadow, back from yet another trip to Russia.

I’d slam into his legs, too. I’d tell him I missed him, that I wanted to come along next time.

When you’re old enough,he’d say.

Then Alina was born. My little sister, tinier than a loaf of bread, with the lungs of a fucking opera singer. She could scream all night long if something bothered her. I watched her grow, saw her turn into a two-legged creature, transform into a bright kid filled with joy.

We’ll take you both,my father started promising then.Once Alina’s older.

But she never got older.

And the sons of bitches who did it are still out there.

I rise from their graves. I place fresh flowers in fresh water, even though it won’t last. Even though it’s a meaningless gesture that can’t even soothe them.

Then I shift to the next grave.

It’s right by Alina’s, just separated enough to signal that it belongs to another family. The name etched in the stone isn’t Lozhkin, but it might as well have been.

Kira Morozova.