Cold. Gray. Beautiful only if one has learned to appreciate stone, shadow, and restraint.
It doesn’t charm the way Paris does or seduce the way New York does at night. Moscow makes a person earn whatever affection they have for it. It stands there with its wide roads, ancient buildings, heavy sky, and gold domes half-hidden behind winter haze, daring you to misunderstand it.
To me, it’s familiar enough to be almost dull.
To Katerina, it’s magic.
She sits beside me in the back of the car wearing the dark green dress I knew would suit her, a long wool coat buttoned to her throat, and boots warm enough that she’s stopped pretending she’s not freezing. Her hair falls loose over one shoulder, still soft from the shower, and she keeps leaning toward the window like a child who has been told not to touch glass but cannot help herself.
“What is that?” she asks.
I follow the direction of her finger. “A bank.”
Her face falls. “Oh.”
I almost smile. “You expected a palace?”
“It looks like a palace.”
“In Moscow, many banks do.”
She keeps looking anyway, her breath fogging the window slightly before the car’s heat clears it. A few minutes later, she points again. “And that?”
“A government building.”
“Why does everything look important?”
“Because most things here are trying to intimidate you.”
She turns toward me, eyes bright. “It’s working.”
Moscow slides past us in winter fragments. Black branches against a white sky. Snow packed along the edges of the pavement. Women in long coats moving quickly through crosswalks. Men with briefcases, heads lowered against the wind. The river, dark and slow beneath the bridges. A flash of red brick. A dome catching weak morning light.
I have crossed these roads with guns in the car. With blood on my shirt. With men beside me who didn’t live long enough to see another winter.
Today, I’m watching a woman discover the city through a tinted window, and somehow that feels more dangerous.
I look away from her and let my eyes move over the street. My mind tries to return to the reason I’m here.
Revenge.
For years, I have carried it without letting it show. I have built companies, bought loyalties, buried enemies, and let men call me patient because they did not understand the difference between patience and hunger.
I have not come back to Moscow to make peace with Andrei Morozov. I have come back to end him.
My father.
The man who gave me blood and denied me name. The man who kept his legitimate family safe by making my mother and me disappear into another country, another life, another version of history. The man who let his wife call me a bastard in rooms full of men who laughed because they knew he would not defend me.
Tomorrow night, I have a meeting with Oleg Voronin. He worked for my father for almost thirty years and knows how the Morozov business is actually held together. I need three things from him: the men who can be turned, the accounts Andrei keeps off the books, and proof of which officials are still on his payroll. If Oleg gives me even half of what he claims to have, I can start pulling my father’s operation apart before Andrei realizes where the damage is coming from.
I have come back to take his house apart from the inside.
First the money. Then the men. Then the alliances. Then the name.
The Morozov line ends here.
If I have to go down with it, so be it.
