Zachary
of the holidays, my parents send out their formal invitation to Theodora’s house.
They don’t question me about it—which is surprising—but it’s clear they are more than a little intrigued about meeting the mysterious girl who’s been stopping me from being top of all my classes throughout my entire academic career.
On the third day of the holidays, Iakov comes to stay. When he turns up at the door, dressed all in black with snowflakes sparkling on the black spikes of his buzz cut and melting on the shoulders of his leather jacket, I stare at him like he’s a ghost.
“What are you doing here?”
He shrugs. “Your thorny sister.”
“Zaro invited you?” I stand aside, and he walks in with his black duffel bag. “I thought she hated you.”
“She does.”
“Ah, Iakov!” A voice exclaims from behind me. I turn to see Zaro come down the stairs, looking radiant in an excessively flouncy dress and beaming at Iakov as if he’s her oldest, closest friend. “Did you remember my macarons?”
With a grunt of acquiescence, Iakov pulls out a pink and gold Ladurée box from the pocket of his leather jacket. Zaro takes it with a wince.
“Really? You thought of no better way to carry it than your pocket?”
He shrugs. “Rode the bike here.”
“I hate that thing,” she replies. “I would’ve sent the limo out if you needed.”
“I’m good.”
“Since when are you two friends?” I interrupt them.
“We’re not,” Iakov says immediately.
“We’re not friends,” Zaro says at almost the same time. “But my actual friends and I are doing New Year in Paris, so we need him to come along.”
“To Paris? For New Year? Why do you need him? I thought you wanted me to—” I pull a face and gesture. “Call off my dog.” I nod at Iakov. “Sorry, Kav.”
“No, yes, I did ask that, of course.” Zaro doesn’t exhibit so much as an ounce of shame as she shrugs and opens her box of macaroons. “But it turns out your dog made my friends feel safer when we go out clubbing, so we decided to keep him around.”
“He’s not an actual dog, Zaro.” I stare at her in complete disbelief. “And he’s not your bloody bodyguard either. He was just looking out for you as a favour to me.”
“And now he’s looking out for my friends as a favour to me—he doesn’t mind, do you, Fido?” With the giggle of a mischievous tyrant, Zaro reaches on the tip of her toes to pat his head.
Iakov’s expression the entire time is completely blank as if he couldn’t care less regardless of the situation. When she pats his head, he lets her, and when he does, he does remind me of a dog. A black Doberman Pinscher, muscular and intimidating and almost regal.
The kind of dog that might guard the gates of hell—or rude aristocratic brats, in this case.
both of them separately. Since we are both too old for me to climb onto her balcony, I catch Zaro in the pavilion, where it’s her habit to hide while she smokes.
The pavilion is hidden from view from the rest of the house by the semi-circle of oaks and willows which surround our lake, and it has a small firepit in the middle to keep her warm.
“You can’t speak to Iakov that way,” I tell Zaro as soon as she looks up at me.
She rolls her eyes and exhales. I wince, avoiding the poisonous wreath of smoke to stand with one shoulder against a pillar.
“He doesn’t mind,” she says with a careless wave of her hand. “It’s not like he gets offended.”
“That doesn’t matter, Zaro. He’s still a human being, and he deserves to be treated with the same respect and courtesy we should treat everyone with—not just the people we deem worthy of our respect.”
“You’re making this into a bigger deal than it is.”
“As I should. Especially since Iakov’s only sin was to do me a favour and look after my ungrateful brat of a sister.”
“Ungrateful brat?” She raises an eyebrow. “Sorry for not kissing the floor at your feet because you decided to get your friend to spy on me.” Before I can reply to remind her we’ve already had this argument, she adds, “Anyway, I’m pretty sure your Iakov would rather spend Christmas in our nice house and the Ritz in Paris than live in that horrible shithole in St Petersburg waiting for his dad to smash his face in.”
A horrible lurching feeling sinks through me, like suddenly falling into a sludge of ice-cold mud. It’s not a feeling I’ve felt often, but it’s exactly the same feeling I got when Theodora told me she couldn’t be happy around her parents. For a second, I can do nothing but stare at Zaro. She frowns at me, and then her eyes widen, and then her face drops.
For the first time in a very long time, a look of true devastation and regret darkens her features.
“Oh. You don’t know?”
I don’t even know what to say.
The sad, appalling truth is that I don’t even know what I don’t know. When it comes to the Young Kings, our friendship is a thing with its own set of rules. We party together, we hang out. We’re closer to each other than to anybody else in Spearcrest.
But our friendship is like a ghost tethered to a house. Once we leave Spearcrest, our friendship becomes ephemeral. At most, I’ll text Evan and Sev. Iakov is too busy, and I dare not even imagine what Luca gets up to when he’s not limited by the restraints of being on school grounds.
Those of us who want to talk about our personal lives, our family lives, or our holidays, do. Those of us who wish to keep our privacy, do. We don’t push one another for intimate details—we don’t have that kind of friendship.
If anything, some of us go out of our way to keep secrets, like Evan falling in love with his prefect or the way Sev quietly obsesses over the fiancée he claims to hate.
Or me hiding Zaro from everyone.
So why shouldn’t Iakov have secrets of his own?
Except that my secrets are harmless. Iakov’s bruises and scars are as much part of him as his tattoos and black combat boots—but I never really questioned them before. I’ve seen Iakov on nights out, I know how bloodthirsty he can get once the night gets dark and there’s more vodka than blood running through his veins.
But who am I kidding? Assuming that Iakov brought those injuries on himself was the easy assumption, the safe assumption. The assumption that holds me the least accountable for not giving a shit about my friend.
“He told you about this?” I ask Zaro.
She seems genuinely crestfallen about accidentally revealing what she thought I already knew about Iakov, and that makes me feel so much worse.
“No.” She shakes her head. “No, but it—well, it was so obvious. He’d disappear for a weekend to go see his dad or do a job for him and then come home looking like meat. I asked him about it one time, half-joking, half-wishing he’d deny it, but he didn’t. He just shrugged and said his dad was angry at him. God, what an arsehole. Makes you think how nice we have it with ours, right?”
I stare at her. The cold, muddy feeling inside me spreads. I’m almost nauseous with it.
“I never knew,” I say. “I never thought to ask.”
“Don’t say anything,” she says quickly. She squishes the rest of her cigarette against the marble bench she’s sitting on, tosses it inside the bush of rhododendrons behind her and sprays herself with a bottle of Miss Dior. Then she stands and rushes to me, grabbing my hand. “Please, Zach. Don’t say anything to him. I don’t want him to think—” She shakes her head and waves her hand impatiently. “Just don’t say anything, alright?”
“No, Zaro, I’m not going to ambush my friend and ask him all about his abusive father,” I say drily. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “You don’t need to snap at me. It’s not my fault you don’t communicate with your friends.”
I glare at her, even though I can’t deny that she may have a point.
“If this is going to be a respite from his shit family,” I tell Zaro as we leave the pavilion, “can you at least be a little more polite towards him? I’m being deadly serious, Z. Make an effort.”
“Ugh. I told you, he doesn’t mind! But fine. In the spirit of Christmas… I’ll stop calling him dog names.”
“You call him dog names? On a regular basis?”
“It’s an inside joke,” Zaro says unconvincingly.
“You’re the worst.”
She rolls her eyes and scampers away from me.
much later that night, also sees me enduring the stench of cigarettes.
After dinner, Iakov asked where he could smoke without bothering anyone, and I offered to show him the grounds. Armed against the darkness and the cold with an old storm lantern and our coats, we make our way to the lake. Once we get there, Iakov crouches to sit on the shore, his boots right where the edge of the lake laps at the shingle. He lights a cigarette while I remain standing to the side.
“I’m sorry my sister is such a pain in the arse,” I say suddenly.
I can’t think of a more elegant way of starting this apology, but I doubt Iakov cares much for elegance. He just cares for saying what he’s trying to say in as few words as possible, a skill which flies in the face of everything I stand for.
He shrugs and waves a hand, the butt of his cigarette a red glow. “Nah, it’s alright.”
“She told me she calls you dog names.”
“Inside joke,” he says.
Even though Zaro said the same thing, it sounded like a lie when she said it. From Iakov’s mouth, it sounds like the truth.
Either that or bone-dry sarcasm. It’s almost impossible to tell with him.
I press a little. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather spend the holiday with your family than looking after Zaro and her friends?”
“Definitely not.”
“You sure, Kav?”
“Yea, trust me.” He lets out a sudden bark of laughter. “My dad’s a cunt.”
He doesn’t offer any elaboration, and I don’t prompt him for some.
Iakov will tell me more if he wishes to tell me more, and I might ask him for more information someday, but this is not the moment to do that. I need some time first, time to process what Zahara told me, time to get used to this sudden change in the status quo of my life.
The change from a world where Iakov is a rough, silent giant with a proclivity for violence to a world where Iakov is a rough, silent giant with a proclivity for violence and an abusive father.
arrives.
She’s welcomed into the house by the butler, who ushers her into the Blue Parlour—our cosiest living room—where I’m sitting in an armchair reading while Iakov slumps on the couch playing a video game.
We both look up when the door opens. Theodora stands a little behind Arthur, who introduces her before excusing himself. She thanks him and watches him leave, then she turns to look at me, then Iakov.
“Hey,” he says, glancing up briefly from his game.
She tilts her head. “Hi, Iakov.” She turns to me and gives me a stiff smile. “Did you invite everyone from Spearcrest?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I point at Iakov with my copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. “He wasn’t invited.”
“Liar,” Iakov says without any emotion whatsoever.
“Well, he was invited but not by me.”
“Oh.”
Theodora stands looking at me. She’s wearing a cream coat in the palest wool, her hair gathered back and caught in the grip of a gold hair claw. Her posture is rigid, her shoulders a little hunched, and her arms are crossed over the lapels of her coat.
And yet she looks so soft I have to make a conscious effort not to wrap myself around her.
“Want me to leave you two alone?” Iakov asks suddenly, lowering his controller to glance from me to Theodora.
“To do what?” I ask, the sharpness of my tone perfectly matched to the sharpness with which Theodora turns to throw him a glare.
He shrugs. “Fight. Flirt. Fuck. Whatever you two do.”
“Iakov,” Theodora says in a tone of warning.
“We don’t do any of that,” I add.
“Is that a yes or a no?” he asks. “I can’t pause this game.” He points at the screen, where a man in ridiculous armour crouches behind a wall while hawks with knives attached to their talons fly threateningly around. “Decide.”
“It’s a no.” I roll my eyes, set my book aside and stand. “You stay and do”—I point at the screen—“whatever it is you’re doing. I’ll show Theodora to her room.”
He grunts and resumes his game. When I reach Theodora, I stretch out my hand between us, palm up. She glances back at Iakov, who’s staring at the screen, where his character is now getting brutally assaulted by the beknived hawks, and then back to me.
A tiny smile appears on her face, and her entire posture softens as if the ice that was keeping her encased suddenly melted.
She places her hand in mine, and I lead her out of the room.
