Koroleva

Introduction

Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka maya!

V sadu yagada malinka, malinka maya!

I hummed, bringing the bottle of Grey Goose to my lips, painted with Rouge Dior. It's not that Grey Goose was my favorite vodka; there were better ones, but it was Yuri's, and today I'm drinking to his soul.

The events of the past few months had led me to a determination: someone had killed my brother and put the pharmaceutical company in jeopardy. The dead were piling up behind me, and the one that mattered the most was like a hot iron piercing my soul.

"Yuri, Yuri, Yuri."

I couldn't stop replaying the tune of the song my brother dedicated to me when we were kids. He would sing it while I chased him around the garden, trying to find any trace that would reveal his hiding spot. After a few minutes, I would grow desperate; Yuri was always very skilled at that game.

I would start shouting and kicking stones because if there was one thing that got on my nerves, it was being without him for too long. Patience was never one of my virtues, although over time I had to work on it. As my father used to say, "Impatience was the weakness of the strong, and patience, concentrated strength."

My dear brother used popular rhythms to give me a clue to his whereabouts; he hated to hear me cry, and hearing my indignant shouts begin to turn into crocodile tears, as he called them.

We were four years apart, but that was never an obstacle; quite the opposite. My brother was always my accomplice, my protector, and it was strange for one of us to be somewhere without the other following.

One day, when I was about eight, I asked him why he always used that little song. He explained that it was because I reminded him of one of those berries mentioned in the song.

In the garden, we had several Kalinka bushes, a shrub with intense red bitter fruits that acquired a pleasant astringent taste with the first frosts. Inside, the seed was heart-shaped. Yuri always said that I was the little sister of his heart, which is why he decided to nickname me Kalinka in private.

We both enjoyed picking the berries to eat. We almost always ended up stained, and my mother would go crazy because red fruit juice was hard to remove, even if she didn't wash the clothes herself.

We always lived more than well; at that time, there were three of us siblings. Yuri, the eldest; me, the middle one, and Irisha, who was two years younger than me and held the title of the youngest.

It would have been logical for my sister and me to be inseparable, or so my mother thought. But the reality was that the one I still couldn't detach from was our brother, the heir to the Korolev empire.

I admired him so much; I always wanted to be like Yuri, he was my role model in everything. Plus, he was the one who managed to get my father to accept me by his side while he learned the tricks of the trade.

When no one expected the family to expand, mom surprised us all with the news that she was pregnant again. Sarka, the princess of the house, arrived months after my eleventh birthday. Closing the number of descendants at four; three girls and one boy

I took a breath, enjoying the salty perfume. In St. Petersburg, we also had the sea, so in a strange way, I still felt connected to my city. Smells had the ability to transport us to any place or memory.

I had left the pub where my sisters had decided to celebrate my "bachelorette party." I glanced at the gold watch resting on my wrist. In a few hours, I would be getting married, not far away, twenty-five kilometers away, in Marbella. So we decided to go to La Marca de Caín to spend my last night without a partner.