Collaboration with @silmarilz1701
Svetlana knew how to play the game. She'd been caught in the political drama of Stalin's inner circle since birth. The only child of one of Stalin's closest friends, she grew up in the limelight, scrutinized by frie...
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Each footstep sounded like cannon fire as Sveta put one boot in front of the other, crossing the threshold into the arched brick tunnel. It led to the elevator. Glancing left, she made eye contact with one of Easy's newer replacements. Blond hair, blue eyes, nameless. He wore the same uniform they all had, had cheeks rosy, flushed from either champagne, fear, or excitement. Sveta couldn't tell them apart any more.
The tunnel stretched on, heated, with marble to line the walls. Her feet dragged as she began the march to the end. So many thoughts swirled in her mind. Anger, fear, despair. But, more than anything really, she felt regret.
Sveta had no power. She'd lied to herself for a long time. The way the trigger felt against her finger, that little resistance it put up before compressing and taking a life meters away, Sveta had thought that meant power. But it didn't. It never had.
Power was the way the thought of Beria's presence stripped her of her own mind. Power was the way the Toccoa men wove tales of her allegiance to the Gestapo under their breaths. Power was the way Zhanna's pretty blue eyes inspired pity in the men and fear in Sveta's heart.
She regretted everything. Sveta regretted the lies. She regretted letting Zhanna know her secrets. And as she came to the guard at the elevator door, the man a few inches taller than her and apparently on loan from Dog, she wrestled with more.
When the door opened, Sveta stopped breathing. The warm but dark hallway opened to a golden elevator, with polished mirrors and emerald cushioned seats. It could've sat ten comfortably. As the door closed behind her, Sveta felt her fists clench.
Exhaustion crashed over her. On all sides, she could see her reflection in the mirrors. Her dark hair, braided to perfection that morning, had come loose in some places. It stuck to her cheeks, catching in the tears that Sveta couldn't restrain. The red undertones of her complexion, which Sveta always appreciated for hiding her blushing, seemed almost splotchy. Dark circles echoed her dark eyes.
The pale scar, like a brand placed there by Stalin's war, stood out against the discoloration. But more than anything, Sveta saw reflected a woman she'd never wanted to become.
Where had the little girl from 1935 gone? The one determined to be anything but what her father expected? The girl who begged her mother to shield a young blonde Jewish girl from the horrors of the men in blue caps with polished Korovin pistols?
Sveta searched her own face in the mirrors of that gilded cage. She saw a pawn, a puppet, a marionette. The oxygen left the room. She couldn't hear the rumbling elevator. Silence engulfed her as Sveta stood, staring at the frowning, trapped woman that she had unwittingly become.
Regret. Her constant companion.
The lurching halt of the elevator forced Sveta away from her reflection. She turned from the gilded cage to the door that slid open. Her gaze drifted over the dark, circular room on top of the world. Three abandoned tables had only empty bottles of champagne as their companions. The dark night created voids where the windows should've allowed cascades of light inside.
