All Chapters of Sins of the Vor’s Daughter : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

DanikaI did not lock it.I stood with my back to the door long enough to hear him settle in the hall, the quiet shift of a man who had already decided where my windows were. Then I opened it again because I needed to see if he would look surprised.He did not.Kazimir stepped into my suite like he had measured it from the other side of the walls. Black shirt. Same ice eyes. The silver scar at his collarbone caught the lamp when he shut the door behind him with two fingers.“Rules,” he said.“You are in my room.”“I am in the room I am paid to keep you inside.” He glanced once at the sitting area, once at the bed, once at the balcony doors. Not hungry. Inventory. “You do not leave the wing without me. You do not dismiss a guard. You do not train alone. You do not touch the east studio window. You sleep with this door locked, and I stand where I stood.”“That is a list of ways to choke.”“It is a list of ways you stay breathing.”I walked past him on purpose, close enough that my shoul

DanikaThe bike came up on the left like it belonged in our lane.Kazimir did not swear. He did not look at me. He dropped the car into a gap that was not a gap, cut across two bumpers, and took an underpass so fast the lights smeared. The motorcycle followed.“Head down,” he said.I went down. My cheek hit the seat. His hand stayed on the back of my neck, heavy, not cruel, pinning me through the next turn. I smelled leather and his skin. My dress was up my thighs. I could not think about that and also think about dying, so I thought about both.We burst out onto a service road along the water. The bike tried to come alongside. Kazimir braked so hard I slid. Then he went forward like the car had been waiting to be used.I heard metal kiss metal. A short sound. Not a crash. A correction.When I lifted my head the motorcycle was down on the wet stone, rider skidding, visor still blank. Kazimir had put us between the bike and the open road and left the rider no clean angle. He did not ge

DanikaHe knew.The words hung in the hall with my bare knees and the shape of him under his trousers. I waited for a hand. I waited for the war he had named.Kazimir said, “Nightmares are loud.”That was all.Then he stepped aside and nodded at my door like a man ushering a child out of weather. He did not touch me. The almost was worse. My shirt hem trembled when I turned. I felt the heat of his chest an inch from my spine the whole way back into the suite.He stopped at the threshold.“In.”I went in. He reached for the door and I reached at the same time, and our fingers missed by a breath. Air where contact should have been. My pulse slammed so hard I felt it in my teeth.“Lock it,” he said.“You like that sentence.”“I like you on the correct side of wood.”The door shut. The lock turned under my hand. I stood there with my forehead on the panel and listened to him take his place again, as if three in the morning had been a drill and not the closest I had come to asking a strang

Danika1:17.The number sat in my mouth all the way back to the suite. He had given me the minute, the sweater, the pin in the camera, the grit on my heel. A map of a night I had been alone for.I showered until the water ran cold. I did not call for him. I dressed like a person who had decided speech was a gift I would no longer spend.Calculated silence is not emptiness. It is a blade you leave on the table and watch other people try not to pick up.Kazimir picked me up at the door for breakfast and got nothing. In the corridor I walked half a step ahead so I would not feel his heat. At the table I ate what was put in front of me and looked at the window. He stood where he always stood, a wall in a dark shirt, scar hidden, eyes doing their slow inventory of exits.“You will train at eleven,” he said.I set my cup down. No answer.His gaze flicked to my mouth, hunting for the fight. I did not give it to him. I wanted him to feel the missing sound the way I felt the missing truth.Ele

DanikaI did not sleep after the safety came off.I sat against the door and counted my own breath until the windows went from black to that cheap blue that means morning in this house. No shots. No running. Only the radiator and the man on the other side of the wood.When I opened the door, Kazimir was on his feet. The gun was no longer in his hand. His eyes looked used.“Well?” I said.“Handled.”One word. Clean as a closed wound. I wanted the body, the name, the trees. He gave me the lid.“Handled how?”“You eat. Then you train. Then you stay in the wing.”“That is not how.”He looked at my mouth like the argument was a place he could put his thumb. “The rose is gone. The gate has new men. The path by the wall is closed. That is what you get.”Handled. The night’s metal click turned into housework.I should have felt safe. I felt empty in a way that made room for him.Obsession does not arrive as a speech. It arrives as attention you cannot put down. I started keeping him the way h