Page 159 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

Dmitri doesn’t reach for me. “Mama needs a minute,” he says, picking up the red car with care. “We’ll keep the race ready for her.”

Mikhail accepts that because Dmitri says it calmly.

I leave the nursery before my son can ask a harder question. No one stops me in the corridor. A guard turns his head once, then steps back. Dmitri must have told them, or maybe they can all see that I’m not running.

My feet carry me out past the nursery corridor and down the covered path toward the garden. I walk past bare trees, iron lanterns, and snow gathered along the gravel. The estate sits quiet around me, tucked deep in the woods, with guards posted at corners I pretend not to see.

I enter the winter glasshouse. The garden smells faintly of wet earth, old leaves, and the small orange trees someone has coaxed into surviving under glass. At the far end sits a wooden gazebo. The little garden pavilion looks built for summer tea, but winter has claimed it. Frost clouds the lower panes. A few dry leaves sit trapped in the corners.

I sit there with my coat around me and take out my phone.

My hands shake when I open the photos. The first one that catches me is ridiculous.

Patrick at fourteen, grinning with a missing front tooth after he tried to jump a bike over our father’s toolbox. I am beside him, ten years old and furious, holding a bag of frozen peas to his mouth while Mom laughs so hard she has one hand against the kitchen counter.

I swipe.

Dad in a paper birthday crown. Mom holding a cake with one side sagging because Patrick and I stole frosting before dinner. Patrick’s arm around my neck, pulling me in close while I pretend to hate him. My face is pink from laughing.

Another swipe.

A beach day in Boston. Wind in Mom’s hair. Dad asleep under a towel. Patrick holding my sandals over his head while I chase him across wet sand, both of us skinny, sunburned, and sure the world owed us nothing worse than homework.

My breath breaks.

I press my fist against my mouth. No kind words come. I don’t have good words for what he became. Nothing rises for my parents either. They’re faces in the pictures and ghosts in my chest, people who loved badly, missed too much, and left us to build our own rules out of fear, charm, and damage.

But Patrick was my brother.

Before the money, before the lies, before the way ambition grew in him without enough talent or decency to carry it, he was the boy who taught me to climb out the kitchen window when we wanted ice cream after bedtime. He was the boy who put a blanket over me during storms and then denied it in the morning. He was the first person who knew how to make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe.

I loved him very much. A sound comes out of me, small and broken. Then another. I bend over the phone and cry into my hands. I don’t have a big speech. No clean ending. Just grief coming through in unruly waves while snow presses against the glass and orange leaves shine under the lamps.

After a while, footsteps stop outside the gazebo. Dmitri.

I wipe my face with my sleeve. “Is Mikhail asleep?”

Dmitri stands beyond the carved rail, hands open at his sides. “Kathryn is with him. He’s listening to a story now.” He pulls out a folded handkerchief from his coat pocket and holds it out.

I nod and take it, then turn my face away. “I don’t want to hold him right now,” I say into the clean white cloth pressed against my mouth. “Does that make me a bad mother?”

Dmitri’s face changes. He kneels beside me and places his big hand on my shoulder. “No, it doesn’t.”

“It should,” I say, staring at the phone in my lap.

“No.” His voice is gentle.

It almost ruins me.

“I look at him and I see what Patrick used,” I whisper, closing my hand over the phone. “Then I hate myself for thinking that because Mikhail is mine. He’s innocent. He’s everything.”

Dmitri crouches in front of me, careful, giving me the choice to pull away.

“You’re allowed to be in shock,” he says, his voice low. “You’re allowed to hate your brother and miss him in the same breath.”

My eyes burn again. “He wasn’t always this.”

Dmitri reaches for my hand, then waits. I give it to him.