The Don Isn’t Mine…

Anya.

“Where do you think you’re going to?”

Fingers clamped around my ear and twisted. I gasped, and the mug I was hiding behind my back nearly slipped from my grasp.

“Mama, please, I only wanted to—”

“Quiet.” My mother dragged me backward from Yelena, my twin sister’s door, and tears formed in my eyes from how terribly my ear ached with her pinching.

She pulled me along like an animal down the hallway, her strong perfume choked me hard. “Do you know what day this is? Your father has spent months preparing for today. A man who can make or break this family is going to walk through our front door any moment from now, and here you are! Creeping through the halls like a rat looking for crumbs!”

“I was only going to show Yelena—” I tried to speak, to explain, but Mama hissed, cutting me off instantly.

“Yelena is resting. She has locked herself in to prepare, and she is not to be disturbed by you!”

“This is a gift! I made a gift.” My ear burned as I struggled to push the words out. “For Dmitri. He’s coming tonight after the guests leave. I painted it myself, it took me a whole week, I only wanted Yelena to see it before—”

“Dmitri.” Mama scoffed, a rueful smile on her face as she glanced back at me. “His father signed an engagement paper with your father before you were scarred, and now we are all too polite to tear it up. Do not mistake that for devotion, Anya. Did your father and I stutter when we instructed you to stay in your room? We already let you eat our food and live in this house! You don’t do any work! All that we request is that you hide and never show your face in this world! Forever!”

She yanked me to my door and flung it open.

“Inside?” she ordered, pointing to the room. “The guests are here for your twin sister, not for you! Make sure you don’t show that hideous face out here!”

My throat bobbed, fear curling around my spine as I stuttered. “P-please, let me just—”

“Inside!”

She shoved me, and a gasp tore from my throat as I stumbled over the threshold. My hip struck the edge of the dresser, and the mug flew out of my hands.

I heard it before I saw it. That high, terrible sound of something beautiful becoming absolutely nothing.

I dropped to my knees. The blue-and-gold porcelain lay in six pieces across the floorboards. A shard had caught my palm on the way down, and blood was already dripping onto the little painted fox I had spent seven nights perfecting.

“Look at that,” said Mama from the doorway, unmoved. “Even your gifts are clumsy.”

I looked up at her through a blur. “Please, I only—”

“Lock it from the inside. Do not come out until I send for you. Not for water, not even if the house is on fire.” She smoothed her silk sleeve. “And do something about that face. It scares me. Powder it, paint it, bury it under a sack for all I care. I will not have that ugliness spoiling my mood on the one day I need it perfect.”

The door closed. I crawled over and turned the key myself, because I had been taught that a good prisoner locks her own cell.

For a long moment, I did not move.

The air was quiet, eerily quiet, then something soft pressed against my knee. Barsik, the old gray cat, was watching me with his enormous, unreadable eyes. Pushok, the spaniel puppy, was already tugging at my sleeve. Even Kesha, my green parrot with the bad leg, had shuffled to the edge of her perch and was making a low, worried clicking sound.

“I’m all right,” I told them, my voice breaking in the middle. “Don’t look at me like that.”

I pressed my sleeve to my palm and crawled to the vanity for the little bottle of spirits and a roll of gauze. The cut was deep but clean. I bit my lip and poured, and the sting made my eyes water even harder than they already were.

Then I sat on the floor and gathered the pieces of the mug into my lap, one by one.

The fox’s tail was in two halves. The gold rim had split into slivers. The tiny letters I had painted along the handle, D.O., were broken clean down the middle.

“A whole week,” I whispered. “I redid the fox three times because the ears weren’t right. I wanted him to open the box and just…”

I couldn’t finish. Tears rushed down my face without control.

Pushok licked a tear off my chin. Barsik climbed into the nest of my skirt and settled over the broken porcelain as if he could guard it.

“He’ll think I forgot him,” I said. “He’ll come tonight and I’ll have nothing to give him. And it’s my fault. I couldn’t even carry a cup down a hallway.”

I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth to hold back the sound of my sobbing. In this house, even crying had to be done carefully.

Then I heard the cars.

I jerked so hard I nearly dropped the pieces. Engines, several of them. The gates creaked open from below, and I put the shards on the dresser, climbed onto the window seat, and drew back the curtain an inch.

Four black cars in my father’s drive. Men in dark coats spilling out of them, scanning the grounds, the windows and the roofline. My father’s world was full of dangerous men, but these people walked differently. They walked like they owned the gravel beneath their feet.

I let the curtain fall.

When I turned back, I caught my reflection in the mirror above the vanity, and I frowned.

There it was, as always. The pale ridge of scar that ran from my left temple down to my jaw, as though someone had drawn a line through my face and decided I was not worth finishing. Now there was a smear of blood across my cheek too, from where I had wiped my tears.

I was eight when it happened.

It was summer at the dacha. My twin sister, Yelena, and I wore matching white dresses because Mama liked to dress us alike for photographs.

One of my father’s men had come to the house, drunk since noon. There was a shouted argument over money when suddenly a bottle flew toward Yelena, who was standing in the doorway.

I don’t remember moving. I only remember my hands against her chest, shoving her out of the way, and the sound the glass made before a raw, sharp heat traveled down the side of my face.

When I woke up in the hospital, I heard Mama through the door, speaking to Papa.

“Thank God,” she said. “Thank God it was her and not Yelena. Yelena’s face is perfect, but Anya, what will we do about her?! She’s useless!”

I was eight years old. I thought she was crying for me.

But as I grew, I knew better.

That was the day I stopped being Irina Sorokin’s daughter. I became the family’s problem. Their dirty little, imperfect secret. Whenever there were guests, I stayed locked in my room all day. Parties meant trays left outside my room. I was taken out of school and given tutors who never looked at me for long before sneering and quitting. Mama bought powders and creams and sat me in front of this very mirror each morning.

“Cover it,” she would say. “Try harder. You can’t be flawed, Anya! You can’t!”

I tried. God, I did.

But I was a child painting over a canyon.

Fifteen years later, I was still here. A prisoner in my own parent’s house. I was a daughter whose name was never spoken in front of guests. A daughter nobody outside these walls even knew was alive because Moscow had been told the Sorokins had one daughter. She was radiant and perfect, but she was not me.

I looked at my reflection for a long moment.

Then I wiped my face on my sleeve and turned to the animals.

“Listen to me,” I said. “All of you. I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for me.”

Barsik blinked slowly. Pushok tilted his head.

“I’m grateful. Truly.” I sat on the floor again, tucking the puppy under my arm. “Yelena still sneaks me out sometimes, did you know that? She lends me her coat and her big scarf, and I walk around the park with my head down.” I smiled. “I haven’t even seen her since last night. She must be so nervous.”

Kesha clicked her beak.

“And Dmitri.” My throat tightened with a warmth I never knew how to explain. “He knows everything. He knows there are two of us, he knows about the scar, he knows the whole ugly secret. And he still looked at me in that library and said it was the bravest thing he’d ever seen.” I laughed softly. “His letters have been shorter lately, but that’s only because his father is working him to the bone. He’s going to marry me, guys, and one day we’ll be out of this house, and I’ll never have to cover my face again.”

I held up my bandaged hand.

“So I have a sister and a fiance. I have Barsik, Pushok and Kesha, I’m not a poor little thing; I’m the richest girl in this house.”

Pushok barked once, firmly, in agreement.

“Exactly,” I said.

I stood in front of the mirror and opened the first little pot of beige concealer.

I did my makeup slowly. In the exact, practiced way I had done it for fifteen years.

A layer of green to cool the red, followed by a thick, careful stroke of concealer along the ridge, blending it until my fingers ached. Powder, then more powder. A little rouge. I swept my hair across the left side and pinned it with a pearl comb.

When I finished, I stepped back.

The girl looking back at me had soft, pale and even skin. She had a lovely, unremarkable face with no ridge and certainly no scars.

It was Yelena’s face.

My breath caught. I touched my cheek when suddenly a knock at the door made me jump.

“Miss Anya?” A whisper. “It’s Masha. Madam sent fresh gauze, she says you’re not to bleed on the carpet.”

I hurried to the door, turned the key, and cracked it open. Masha, the youngest maid, stood in the corridor with a tray, her eyes darting over my shoulder.

“Thank you, I—” I began.

She stopped. Her gaze landed on my face and her mouth fell open.

“Oh. You look just like Miss Yelena. I mean, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” She flushed to her ears.

Something white and gold shot between my ankles.

“Pushok!”

He was already halfway down the corridor, his ears flapping in the air. Masha yelped and nearly dropped the tray. I grabbed my skirts up and ran.

“Pushok! Come back here!”

He skidded around the final corner and vanished through the gap in the tall double doors of the great sitting room. I flattened myself against the wall beside them, my heart hammering as I pressed my eye to the crack.

I could see the long polished table. I could see my father, upright and gray-faced, in his best charcoal suit, sweat at his hairline. I could see the back of a dark head, perfectly still, seated in my father’s chair as though the house belonged to him.

“My daughter will join us shortly,” my father was saying. His voice was too bright. “Yelena is finishing her preparations. She is twenty-three, well-educated, and has a spotless reputation. My only child, Don Tariq. Everything I have built will stand behind you.”

My chest clenched tight.

My only child. I had heard it a thousand times, but each single time still felt like a knife stabbing and twisting into my heart.

“You said that an hour ago,” said the Don. His voice was low and thick. “And I told you last month that I did not come to buy a wife, Viktor. I will tell you again.”

Don Tariq… My brows furrowed. Could he be…?

“Name your price. Territory, shipping, my share of the port—”

“There is no price.”

“Everyone has a price!”

“Then you have not been listening.” Don Tariq snorted coldly.

The silence that followed was the kind that made the hairs on my neck rise.

That was when Pushok made his move.

He shot out from beneath the table like a cannonball, skidded across the marble, and collided with the leg of the Don’s chair. The whole room stopped. My father’s mouth opened. Pushok yelped, scrambled, bolted in a circle, and sat down directly on the polished toe of the most dangerous man in Moscow.

My feet moved before my mind did.

I pushed through the doors and entered the room, stepping into the light. I dropped to my knees, scooped the puppy into my arms, and bowed my head low as I had been taught.

“I-I’m sorry,” I breathed. “I’m so sorry. He got out, I only came to—”

A chair scraped. Slow footsteps crossed the floor and stopped right in front of me. Oh God.

“Viktor,” said the Don.

My father made a sound like a man choking on his own tongue. “T-This is… she is…”

“Is this your daughter?”

Silence. I could hear my own heartbeat.

“She is not what I—” My father swallowed. “She is…”

“Look at me,” the Don said, and it was not meant for my father.

I lifted my head.

He was younger than I expected. That was the first terrible thing. I had pictured an old man with rings on every finger. But the man standing over me was perhaps thirty-five, dark-haired, sharply dressed, with eyes the color of a river in winter. He was looking at my face, and I held my breath, waiting for the flinch, the pull of disgust, the thing that always came.

Nothing came.

His gaze moved slowly over my cheek, my jaw, the pearl comb in my hair. Whatever he saw didn’t seem to bother him much.

“Well,” he said, softly, almost to himself. “So this is what you have been keeping from me.”

My father did not answer.

The Don turned back to him, and the amusement in his eyes had gone. “I refused your offer, Viktor, because I thought you simply wanted to be acquainted with me. But now…” he straightened, something unreadable flickering in his eyes. “I withdraw my refusal. Give me your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

The room tilted.

The puppy shivered in my arms. My father’s face had gone the color of wet ash, and he looked at me, not at the Don, as though I had set the house on fire.

My voice, when it came, was so small I barely recognized it.

“Marriage?”

No one answered.

“Father,” I whispered, “what is he talking about?”