Silk & Sabotage

Part 1: The Pawnmaker

POV: Irina Kael

The east Wing had been sealed since the funeral. Dust clung to the curtains, and the air tasted like old thunder. It was her husband's side of the estate—Elias Drax's private library, still frozen in mourning, untouched by servants who feared ghosts more than grief. Irina stood in the center of it now, flanked by shadows and silence, the glow of a data-table casting blue veins across her hands. Her reflection in the glass looked thinner than she remembered.

On the table lay maps, redacted intelligence files, a leather-bound field journal with her father's insignia, and a photograph—creased, faded—of Mia Veyra at seventeen. She was barefoot in a garden, caught mid-spin, her laughter blurred in motion. A relic pulled from an old intelligence archive. A child destined to be a queen, molded by a murderer.

"You always smiled like the world hadn't already picked its target," Irina murmured to the picture, voice low, bitter.

Now Mia was set to marry Lucas. In two weeks, she'd stand beneath Rica's gilded chandeliers and swear herself to a country that once tried to bury her people beneath treaties. She'd take the Drax name—the same name Irina had once vowed to protect with blood. Mia would wear Drax silk, sleep in Drax linens, and walk through Irina's halls like the future she'd never earned.

Irina turned to the locked glass doors that led to Elias's old strategy room. The room had been sealed since the day his casket was lowered into the earth. Lucas hadn't touched it, either. He had taken the title, the power, the head of the family—but never the past.

"Funny," Irina whispered. "I buried one Drax beside this house. And now I bury another beside a woman he would've called the enemy."

Her voice didn't shake. Not anymore.

The memory shifted—dragged her back two years, to the Ruham border, to the war chamber cloaked in damp shadows and drone static. It was the night she gave Mino his final directive—the night she turned her half-brother into a weapon disguised as a lover.

He had come in late, soaked from the storm, gloves dripping onto the steel floor. He didn't speak until he dropped the classified file on the table in front of her.

"Your orders," he said flatly.

Irina didn't look up immediately. She kept writing in her journal, pen clicking softly. "You didn't open it?" she asked.

"I never do," he replied, but the tension in his jaw betrayed the lie.

She offered a thin smile. "You always say that."

He turned to leave.

"Mino," she said, and the word cut through the room like a knife.

He froze.

Her tone changed. Lower. Surgical. "Operation Dahlia is not about seduction. It's about infection. I don't want her broken. I want her altered. Do you understand?"

Mino didn't reply. His silence was trained. Taught.

Irina stepped around the table, slowly, heels echoing. "You'll make her love you. Let her think she's in control. She'll pull you closer, and when she does—she'll be ours. She'll start to change her decisions, her speech, her alliances. Not because you order her to… but because she thinks it's her idea."

She stopped behind him, close enough to catch the scent of rain in his coat.

"You're good at pretending you don't care," she said quietly. "But you and I both know… you've always needed to be needed."

She left the words hanging. Let them land.

"And Mia?" she added, her voice near his ear. "She's going to need you like oxygen. Just before she realizes what you are."

That was two years ago. Mino was long gone now—vanished into smoke and silence, leaving behind only the scar tissue in Mia's voice.

Irina stood alone again, the war room dim and ticking with digital pulses. On the table now was the wedding invitation—folded silk paper with golden ink. Mia's name etched in grace. Lucas's signature beside it, stoic and distant. Her brother-in-law. Her chess piece. Her one surviving tie to Elias. The man who had obeyed every strategy. Every mission. Every smile.

Too perfectly.

He had never argued. Never questioned. Always quiet. Always calm. Always helpful. Like a soldier who didn't mind dying for a war he hadn't designed.

But Irina remembered the way Lucas had looked at their father's funeral and later elias funeral. Alderic Drax and Elias Drax, both war heros, buried with full honors. Everyone else wept. Lucas didn't. He stood straight, hands folded, eyes still. Not grief. Not pride. Something else. Something colder.

He hadn't buried a kin. He had buried the last of man who could challenge his crown. A facade only few could identify.

Lucas Drax moved like a pawn. But only because he wanted people to look away.

She stared at his name again. Then at Mia's.

Two sides of the same trap.

And Irina? She was the one who built the board.

But even she, now, began to wonder—

Was Lucas playing a game she hadn't invented?

The thought chilled her. She pushed it aside.

She still had Mino. Still had time. Still had Ruham.

But the silence in the house no longer felt like victory.

It felt like someone else was already counting her moves.

And now she also has deal with the insurgency at Ruham Corridor.