VERA

My father has been dead for fourteen months.

He takes his coffee the same way he always did.

I don't run. That's the part nobody believes, including me. I sit down across from the man who buried an empty box with his name on it, and I let him talk, and I count how many times he lies. It's a skill he taught me. He taught me everything I'm about to use on him.

They married me to Kirill in a room with six families watching, and called it peace.

I wore my mother's dress to a wedding that was a contract with a signature line.

He hasn't touched me since. Not once. He stands where he can see the door and waits for me to ask, because somewhere along the way he decided I should be the one who gets to choose.

I'm going to make him regret that restraint.

I stopped being the quiet one the day I found out my silence was worth six million dollars and four hundred lives.

And when the account opens, I'm going to be the only person in the room who can read it.

KIRILL

They put a ring on her and called it a treaty.

I signed it. I have signed worse.

What I did not plan for is a wife who sits through a briefing about a body in a freezer and asks a better question than any man at the table.

She is learning. Fast. Faster than is safe for either of us.

She used to flinch when I came up behind her. Now she leans back into me without looking.

Her father is alive and calling it mercy. He wants the account opened and he wants her hands to do it, and every man in that room agreed, and I said nothing, because saying something would have got her killed in the doorway.

She thinks I chose them over her.

Let her think it. Angry keeps her sharp, and sharp keeps her alive.

There is one name in that account that ends me the day it is read aloud.

She is going to read it in her own voice, out loud, in front of everyone. And I am going to let her.

This is the second book in The Silence Pact series. Reading order:

The Silence We Bury.

The Silence We Break.

The Silence We Bleed.