At the threshold, I pause, glancing back once. “If you need…” I start, then pause, irritated enough with my own uncertainty that I force the rest out without elegance. “If you need me before I am dead, use the direct line. Not a secretary, not one of the guards. Come straight to me.”
I hold his gaze and let him see that I mean it. It changes nothing of what came before, but there are some things a father should say, even if he only learns how to after the ruin is already complete.
“You don’t have to say anything now. I know this is not…” I search briefly for a word and dislike all of them. “Simple.”
“No, it isn’t.” He looks toward the drawer once more, then back to me. “But I heard you, Pappa. Thank you.”
It is not acceptance or forgiveness; it is simply acknowledgment. Yet from him—from a son I have taught too well how not to need—it feels like more mercy than I deserve.
I nod once, then I leave him alone with the bullet in the drawer and the warning I should have given years earlier, or perhaps not at all.
nine
Nikolaj
Kaicomesintomyoffice carrying my missing life in his hands.
That’s the first thought I have when the door opens without ceremony, and he steps inside, carrying a stack of folders and one encrypted drive on top in a little anti-static case.
I don’t stand or offer him a seat. I stay behind my desk with my hands folded in front of me and watch as he lays the folders out one by one on the dark wood. The sound of paper hitting the desk should be ordinary—it isn’t. Every thud lands somewhere under my ribs.
When he’s done, he straightens up and looks at me. “So, you found them,” I say.
He looks down at the folders. “I always knew where they were.”
That answer would piss me off under any other circumstances. Right now, it barely registers because anger has already moved past hot and into something colder and more dangerous.
“And you still waited,” I say.
His gaze finally lifts to mine. “Yes.”
There’s no apology in his tone; it almost makes me respect him more. Which is irritating enough to make the ache behind my eye pulse harder. “Talk.”
Kai exhales slowly. “When the reports were first buried, Ruslan gave explicit orders that nothing from that period was to be shown to you unless he approved it personally. Arseniy reinforced the order after…” He stops himself, jaw tightening for half a second before he smooths it away. “After you returned.”
“After I came back with holes in my head and everyone suddenly decided silence was mercy,” I say.
He doesn’t deny it. “That was the logic, yes. It was for your own good.”
I laugh once, and it sounds as ugly as it feels. “For my own good.”
“That’s what they said.”
“And what do you think, Kai? Not as my second-in-command, but as family. What do you think about this whole fucking thing?”
Kai inclines his head and sighs as his shoulders drop slightly. “Later, it stopped being about obedience and started being about uncertainty. You had nothing—no memory of him, or what happened between you two. Every time something surfaced, it caused pain severe enough to drop you. You were unstable after the ambush, even when you pretended otherwise. We were told that giving you the truth too quickly could shatter what had held.”
“What had held,” I say again, hating the sentence. “You make it sound clinical.”
“I’m trying not to make it sentimental.”
“How noble of you.”
Kai’s mouth tightens. “If you want honesty, then take the useful version: we were told silence would keep you functional.”
I tilt my head. “You believed that?”
Another pause before he nods. “I believed we were choosing between two kinds of damage.”
