I catch it before it hits the ground, but my hands are shaking so badly now that the screen blurs and I have to blink, have to force my vision clear, have to keep looking at his signature.
Twenty-five. He was twenty-five years old when he signed this. Already the heir. Already making decisions. Already looking at a list of test subjects and seeing my mother’s name and writing his approval like she was nothing, like she was disposable, like she was—
Bile surges up my throat.
I barely make it to the wastebasket before my stomach empties. Everything comes up in burning waves while my body tries to purge what my mind can’t process. My mother’s hollow face. Roman’s signature. Everything that proves he knew, he fucking knew, he KNEW—
“Net.” I’m sobbing between heaves. “Net, blyad, net—”
The phone buzzes against the carpet.
I grab it with trembling fingers.
She was conscious for most of it. The compound takes time to work. I thought you should know.
I throw the phone across the room.
It hits the wall, and I’m still kneeling over a wastebasket with bile on my chin and seven years of grief curdling into something that feels a lot like murder.
Was he just signing whatever Vadim put in front of him? Rubber-stamping documents he never read? Following orders from a man who raised him to believe obedience was survival?
Does it matter?
No. It doesn’t fucking matter.
The shower stops.
Silence crashes through the room.
He’s coming. Thirty seconds. Maybe less. I have less than a minute before that door opens and he sees me kneeling over a wastebasket.
Move.
“Anya? Who was it?”
I force myself upright. The room tilts, and I grab the nightstand, and my fingers close around cold metal. The USB drive.
Take it.
His Makarov sits beside it. I stare at the gun. I think about waiting for the door to open. I think about how easy it would be to aim at his chest and pull the trigger and watch him fall.
I leave it. I don’t trust my hands to aim true, and I don’t trust myself not to hesitate.
“Stay right there, I’m coming!” I force out of me.
Wallet. Cash. Passports. I grab everything.
His jacket hangs over the chair. Black wool. The jacket that saved us both when we jumped into the Black Sea, and the cold tried to drag us down.
I pull it over my shoulders, and my skin crawls because it smells like him, the warmth of a man who held me in the shower three minutes ago and told me I was the only thing that mattered.
Liar.Fucking liar.
I zip it up anyway. I pull on jeans.
“Anya, I found a massage oil.”
“Coming!”
