They knew the rules. The youngest son is always the enforcer. And still she fell in love with him…
He was ten years old at her father's funeral, with a deck of cards and the worst shuffle in Georgia. She was fourteen, and she hadn't smiled in three days. He made her laugh anyway. Then he kept her card. Tessa was raised knowing all the rules, and this one she’s never forgotten: The youngest son is always the enforcer. She learned it the way other children learn prayers—early, and without ever being told what it cost.
Dmitri Markov was the light of that house. The one who did the silly impressions. The one who saved her the seat with the best view and made sure there were always lemon cookies in the tin. Four years younger than her, and the only person alive who looked at the family's most capable daughter, the heir to a fallen dynasty, and just saw a girl. For two years he drove her home on Sundays. For two years neither of them said a word about it. Then the family started sending him out, and she watched the light go down in him by degrees—the jokes landing quieter, the silence arriving where the laughter used to be. She was leaving for medical school eight hundred miles north. He was becoming the thing they had been sharpening him into since the day he was born the youngest son.
They had one night. They took it.
And in the gray light of the morning after, they swore it never happened, and that they would never speak of it again.
They knew the rules of their world. They followed all of them, except one.
THE MARKOV SHADOW is a short 10K prequel novella. It is the beginning of Dmitri and Tessa's story. Not the end of it. Ten years of yearning for the forbidden start here.
