He looks exactly the way Mishka will look in three years, and the realization hits me so hard I actually stop moving, my feet rooted to the tile while I stare at a stranger wearing my brother’s future face.
“Na pol,” Roman commands. “On the floor, all of you, hands where I can see them, seychas.”
They drop.
The cook sobs quietly with her face pressed against the tile.
The boy just stares, eyes fixed on Roman’s gun with the incomprehension of someone who has never been truly afraid before and doesn’t have a framework for processing it.
We’re moving past them.
I’m almost through the door when I hear it.
Fabric rustling.
Movement behind me.
I spin with my weapon raised and watch the boy reach into his pocket with fingers that tremble so badly he can barely grip whatever he’s trying to retrieve. I open my mouth to tell him to stop, to freeze, to put his hands back on the ground where they’re safe, but the words don’t come fast enough.
The shot cracks before I can speak.
Yuri Petrovich fires on reflexes. The bullet catches the boy in the chest and sends him sprawling backward onto the tile he was already lying on.
Red spreads across his white kitchen uniform.
His hand comes free from his pocket, holding a photograph with laminated edges worn soft from years of being carried everywhere, falling from his fingers to land face-up on the marble three feet from his outstretched hand.
A girl his age with dark hair and a smile.
He was reaching for her.
His eyes are going glassy, and the cook is screaming now, a raw animal sound ripping from her throat while she tries to crawl toward her son’s body.
Roman’s hand closes around my upper arm and pulls me toward the door with force that allows no argument.
“Dvigat'sya,” he says. “We have to move, Anya, there’s nothing we can do for him, we have to move—”
I step over the boy’s body.
My boots leave prints in his blood.
Galina appears beside me in the corridor, her hand finding mine.
“The throne costs,” she says quietly, for my ears only. “Every Volkov learns that price eventually. You carry the ones you couldn’t save, and you keep moving because stopping doesn’t bring them back.”
“He was seventeen.” My voice comes out strange, flat, nothing like my own. “Maybe younger. He was reaching for his girlfriend’s picture, Galina, he just wanted to hold her picture—”
“I know.” Her thumb strokes across my knuckles once. “And you’ll remember him. That’s what separates you from the ones who don’t deserve to rule.”
* * *
The study doors open, and Vadim’s desk sits in the center of the room, holding a ledger bound in black leather.
I grab the ledger while Roman covers the door, my fingers working to photograph pages as fast as I can turn them.
Names scroll across my phone screen.
Polina Tarasova.
