I fought him, too.With everything in me.I remember swinging on him.Trying to break free.Trying to get back inside so I could finish what had just started.
But he didn’t let me.
“You go back in there,” he said, voice low, controlled, cutting through the noise, “and you will die.”
I didn’t care.I would have died.Happily.Because living in a world where Rasputin didn’t exist anymore didn’t feel like much of a life.
But he dragged me out anyway.He drugged me.Sedated me into submission.
The next thing I remembered, I woke up on a plane.
I was in Italy.
The air was different.They spoke a different language.Led a different life.And it was the last place I wanted to be.But my uncle insisted.
He set me up with money, security, a clean slate where I was guaranteed safety.
When all I wanted was to go back home and tear my father to shreds.
“If you want revenge,” he told me once, after I’d finally stopped trying to tear my way back to Russia.“The only way you will get it is by depriving your father of an heir.And the way you do that is by not going back to Russia until I tell you to.”
I didn’t thank him.I didn’t forgive him.But I stayed.And something in me hardened.Because grief doesn’t just sit quietly inside you.It twists you inside out, turns you into something else entirely if you don’t cage it.
So I caged it.Locked it down.Buried it so deep that most days, I could pretend it wasn’t there at all.
Most days… I could pretend I wasn’t still that boy watching his brother die on a screen, powerless to stop it.
A rough breath tore out of me.Sharp and intoxicating.
The present bled back in—pain lancing through my ribs, my lungs, my skull.My body was wrecked.I could feel it in the way everything ached, in the way every inhale felt like I was dragging broken glass into my chest.
And then—through the haze—I saw her.
She didn’t belong in that memory.She didn’t belong to that lifetime.
Her hands.Her voice.
I remember her crying.Begging for me to stay with her.
No one had ever asked me to stay before.
They’d ordered.Expected.Used.
But her?She wanted me.
Even like this, knowing exactly what I was.
A slow, broken exhale left me.And for the first time since the memory dragged me under—something steadied.
Because Rasputin’s death made me dangerously ruthless.But Tone—she’s the one person that reached past all of that.The one place where whatever was left of my humanity flickered back to life.
It was fragile and threadbare, but it was there.
And as everything faded again—darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision—I held onto that.
Not Russia, or the betrayal of the past.Not the unending rage that coursed through my body, threatening to obliterate me.
Tone.
