My vision tunnels as I read 'acceptable collateral.' The words blur, refocus, blur again. A metallic taste floods my mouth, rage so pure it has flavor.
Acceptable collateral. My brother. My father wrote those words about his own son.
The security logs are next, Viktor's handwriting in the margins. "Ordered perimeter team to stand down 20:00-02:00. M departed 20:42." Blood from my cut knuckles drips onto the memo, marking Viktor's calculation with tonight's violence.They could have stopped him. Could have kept him from walking into that slaughter. Viktor chose to let him go.
My hands shake so violently I can barely turn the pages. Cold sweat makes my shirt stick to my back as each document builds the truth like a tower of bones. Viktor tracking Mikhail's movements. Viktor reading intercepted letters where Mikhail wrote about warning the Rosetti family. Viktor calculating the probability of his son's death and finding it acceptable.
The letter is at the bottom, never sent, in Viktor's handwriting. The paper trembles in my grip, crackling as my fist tightens:
"Alexei, If you're reading this, I'm dead and you've found what I kept hidden. Yes, I knew about Mikhail and the girl. Yes, I let him go that night. He was weak, sentimental, unfit to lead the bratva into the future. You were always the stronger one, the one who could do what needed to be done. Mikhail's death made you pakhan. It hardened you into the weapon our family needed. Every great leader is forged in loss. Consider his sacrifice my final gift to you. You're welcome. V"
You're welcome.
For letting my brother die. For orchestrating his death. For using his blood to shape me into this.
The scream tears from my throat before I know it's coming, animal, wordless, eleven years of grief redirecting into rage. I grab Viktor's desk and throw it against the wall. Papers explode across the room like white birds fleeing. The wood splinters, drawers spilling secrets across Persian rugs.
I destroy everything I can reach. The leather chair goes through the window. Books rain from shelves like judgment. Every photo, every memory, every trace of Viktor's existence gets torn apart by my hands.
The acrid smell of my own sweat mixes with the dust. Papers tear under my fingers, the sound like fingers down a chalkboard, like promises dying.
When the rage finally empties out, I'm on my knees in the wreckage, still holding that letter.
She kept Mikhail's secret to protect him from Viktor, the very monster who was planning his death anyway. Christ. She was trying to save him from the father who'd already written him off as acceptable losses.
My phone is in my hand before I even think about it.
"Alexei?" Katya's voice from Moscow. "What's wrong? Why are you calling so late?"
"He killed Misha."
Silence. Then: "What?"
I tell her everything. The photos. The memo calling our brother acceptable collateral. The security logs showing that Viktor let him walk to his death. The letter thanking me for becoming the monster our father always wanted.
Katya's crying by the time I finish, that awful sound of learning your whole life was built on lies.
"You're lying. Tell me you're lying, Alexei."
"I have his letter. In his handwriting. He wrote 'You're welcome,' Katya. Like Misha's death was a gift."
Long pause. Just her breathing, ragged and broken. Then: "I'm glad Mama died not knowing. It would have killed her all over again."
"Burn it," Katya says, voice hard as Moscow winter. "Burn word that bastard wrote. Burn his study to the ground if you have to."
So I do. The fireplace roars as I feed it years of lies. The photos curl and blacken, the acrid smell of burning chemicals filling the room. I keep just the evidence. Everything else curls into smoke.
Dawn breaks through the windows, painting the ruined study in shades of gold and shadow. I stand in the ashes of my father's secrets, truth eating through me like acid.
Viktor orchestrated all of it: Mikhail's death, my transformation into pakhan, Sofia’s destruction. Even from the grave, that bastard was still pulling our strings.
My woman is out there drowning in guilt for my father's sins. She's mine to protect, mine to heal, and I let her walk away thinking she's poison when she was just a girl trying to save the boy she loved.
Even now, destroyed by truth, I track her phantom scent like an addict. The need to find her burns through everything else: the rage, the grief, the horrible understanding of what my father was.
The admission hits me as I stand in the wreckage: I love her. Not just want her, not just need her. Love her with the kind of desperation that makes men burn down worlds. And she's out there thinking she deserves all the pain the universe can deliver.
Viktor took my brother. He won't take my woman too.
