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He laughed, the sound devoid of all humor. “Let you leave? Let her leave? Pah, nyet. That would have brought shame on my name. Better her dead, outside of me, than back to Russia husbandless and wearing her badge of insolence!”
I had wanted answers.
But I had wrongly assumed they would be bigger than I could fathom. I had assumed that there would be more to the story, depths that I hadn’t heard of before . . . but he paid to kill her solely because of his ego, because of his pride.
And for those same reasons, he had married me off to a man he considered worthy of being dead.
“It’s never been about the family name,” I whispered, my throat closing around the words. “It’s never been about family at all. It’s about you and it always has been. Your ego. Your pride. Your wants and needs, what about us, Papa? What about your wife, who you claimed to love, what about me?”
“Stupid, selfish girl,” he spat, his nose wrinkling. “You think you know? You think you knowanything? Do not speak to me of family and ego when you come in here—”
He cut off at the sound of me cocking the gun. He had been taking angry steps closer to me with each new word, his face a mask of fury, but my rage was greater. My anger burned brighter. My hurt ate like acid at my stomach lining.
“I can’t forgive you,” I said, swallowing the indecision that seized me the moment his eyes widened as far as they did. “And I can’t let you live, I can’t—”
“You can’t be like him.” Dmitry’s voice sounded suddenly from behind me. I hadn’t heard him approach, I hadn’t heard anything but the pounding of the blood in my ears. But there he stood, framed in the doorway and covered in blood as always seemed to be the case lately.
His own gun was lifted, his eyes solely on me, despite the danger in the room.
“You are not a killer, my tigrenok,” he said softly, coming up beside me and putting his hand over the barrel of the gun. After a moment, I lowered it.
I could feel the words stuck in my throat, bobbing as if they were some actual, physical obstruction. “He paid to have my mother killed,” I whispered hoarsely, unable to explain any further than that. Dmitry’s hand was warm against the small of my back, holding me steady even as he brushed his thumb over the dimple there under my dress.
“And he will be dealt with—” Dmitry started, only to be cut off by my father’s loud grunt of laughter.
“Me? I will be dealt with? Nyet. I think you forget where you are, Koalistia. You are in my house, on my grounds, and—”
“And all your men have either been dealt with or stood down,” Dmitry answered, speaking over him. “I know where I stand, Sorokin. It is a shame you did not know the same.” His voice was cutting, clear, carrying through the air with all the authority and certainty of a man three times his age. I could see the mantle of leadership he bore effortlessly on shoulders.
As if to back up his words, more men entered the room at that moment, their eyes to Dmitry as if waiting for a command.
“I can shoot him now, Tigrenok, but I do not think—two years from now—that you will like me having done that.” Dmitry spoke softly once more, drawing my face to his with his fingers curled gently around my chin. “I can ruin him and take all those things he cherishes. I can exile him, send him back to Russia, and ensure you never have to see him again. I can make sure he spends the rest of his days working for just enough to get by, never able to overcome that. . . . I can give him a fate worse than death, where he is forced to remember the choices he made to lead him there, for however long he has left.”
His words were so serious, so even, so absent the fury that rang through me that they almost sounded hollow . . . but I knew his word to be anything but.
I wanted to argue that my mother’s death called for his own, because that is how I felt, right then. But I also knew that he was right. Killing him now would make me hate myself for the rest of my life, whether I pulled the trigger or not.
My body curled in on itself as I sank instead into Dmitry’s chest, the fight slowly leeching out of me.
“Tigrenok?”
“I trust you, Dmitry,” I whispered, turning my face from my father for the last time and focusing solely on the man who had saved me from his toxicity. “Get me out of here . . . please.”
