The clean honesty of it catches me harder than an excuse would have.
“You knew what he was to me, and when I woke up without that part of myself, you decided not to give it back. You let me build a life over a grave I didn’t know existed. You let me look at my own history as if it belonged to someone else. You let me hate him for pieces of a story you knew were incomplete, and you let everyone around me participate.”
Ruslan’s jaw tightens. “I let you live when you woke with your mind half torn open. You were violent, unstable, and full of enough pain to make every doctor in that room choose their words like they were walking through mines. You remembered Vieri as an enemy. You remembered duty. You remembered enough hate to hold onto, and nothing that softened it. If I had forced the rest on you then, do you know what might have happened?”
“No,” I say. “Because you never gave me the chance to find out.”
He stands too quickly for a man his age and turns toward the back window, one hand braced briefly on the counter. “No. I did not. Because I knew exactly what it could do to a man to be handed love and loss in the same breath.”
I watch his back. There is no victory in pressing him when he sounds like that, but I press anyway because I am his son, and mercy is not our first language.
“You knew what it did toyou,” I say. “So, you assumed it would do the same to me.”
I watch the minute flinch in his shoulders, and know I’ve hit the mark. What Salvatore told me was correct—they were doomed lovers.
“So, you know what happened, then,” he says, and looks over his shoulder, blue eyes hard. “You think you are so different?”
“I think I had a right to my own ruin.”
Ruslan turns fully then, and for a second, the retired man is gone. The former Pakhan stands in his place, not as strong as he once was, perhaps, not as feared in the world beyond this villa, but still dangerous. Still my father.
“Yes, you did. That is what I have learned too late.”
The honesty steals half my anger, leaving me with nowhere good to put the rest. I hate that. I came here wanting something simpler. Not an apology, I know better. Not absolution—he has no right to ask, and I have no interest in granting it.
But perhaps I wanted the clean satisfaction of being able to hold his actions up to the light and call them only cruel. Instead, he stands across from me in a modest kitchen in Kolomna, with pain behind one eye and vodka at his hand, and he tells me yes. He hurt me because he was afraid I would become him.
He lowers himself back into his chair more slowly this time. I look away first, because watching him admit fault feels more intimate than watching him bleed.
“You did it because of Salvatore,” I say, turning back to him. “You looked at me after the ambush, and you saw yourself. That’s what this was. You saw a Dragovich boy ruined by a Vieri, and decided you’d rather carve the wound out than let me carry it.”
My father’s mouth flattens. “You were broken.”
“I was hurt.”
“You were compromised—”
“I was in love!”
His face goes unreadable in the way only the truly dangerous learn how to do. He doesn’t deny it; instead, he says, very quietly, “When I looked at you after that ambush, I saw a boy who still had a chance to live. You call it theft because you’re standing here now with a crown on your head and a recovered memory making you believe pain would have been noble. Butnoble pain is for poets and dead men, Nikolaj. Men like us do not survive it.”
My jaw locks. “You survived.”
His laugh is soft and brutal. “Did I?”
That shuts me up for one ugly second, because there’s the answer, isn’t it? Not in theory. No, Ruslan did not survive Salvatore. Not really. He endured it. He built over it. He turned the wound into a doctrine and called it survival because he didn’t have another word.
Which means I was right.
He did it to save me from becoming him.
I drag a hand over my mouth and look away toward the windows because if I keep staring at him right now, I’m going to say something I can’t take back.
“I get that you thought you were sparing me. I get that losing him destroyed you, and you looked at me and couldn’t bear the idea of history repeating with a different son.” My throat tightens. “And I’m still angry. Because none of that gave you the right.”
“Anger,” he says slowly, “is often the tax on understanding.”
I almost laugh at the phrasing because only my father could turn an apology-shaped moment into something that sounds like a lecture. “I wanted better than this.”
