“I’ll get you guys to the estate,” Mikhail tells us.
The estate, or what’s left of it?
When we arrive, courtesy of Mikhail, my eyes land on a carcass of stone and timber sprawled across the hillside. Smoke curls from the charred skeletons of windows as snow settles over the rubble like a shroud, attempting to soften what cannot be softened.
I haven’t seen it since the night everything fell apart.
The silence hits first, followed by the memories. Anger, hot and familiar, seeps into my veins.
Harper walks slightly ahead of me, boots crunching through the snow. She moves like someone navigating a graveyard.
The front hall is a hollow rib cage of beams and ash. The chandelier—once a monstrous, glittering thing—lies in a twisted heap, its crystals dulled by soot. I step over a collapsed support beam, the wood burned through at the center.
“This place was beautiful once,” Harper murmurs. Her voice is soft, reverent in a way I don’t deserve.
“Beauty doesn’t mean innocence,” I say.
Her eyes lift to mine, searching. She opens her mouth—maybe to argue, maybe to soothe—but no words come out. She just nods and steps deeper into the ruins. I follow her lead.
The further we go, the more the memories sharpen, cutting at me from every direction. Here, the hallway where I learned to shoot. There, the parlor where my father taught me how to negotiate with a smile sharp enough to bleed someone.
Every charred wall feels like a confession I never asked to make.
Harper kneels beside a half-melted picture frame buried under a broken stone column. She pries it free, brushing soot off the glass. The photograph beneath is warped from the heat: my parents stand beside me at age nine, the three of us wearing stiff winter coats, trying to look like an ordinary family.
She glances up at me.
“Do you want to keep it?”
No. Yes.
I don’t know.
The emotions push against each other like waves battling for the same stretch of shore. I crouch beside her, taking the frame from her hands. The glass cracks under the pressure of my grip.
“I don’t know who this boy is,” I say quietly.
“Maybe you don’t have to,” she replies.
Her voice is steady, but her eyes are too honest. They see through every defense I’ve used to survive this legacy. I want to look away, but I resist the instinct.
We sift through the debris for hours, not to salvage anything, but a memorial of sorts that we never got to have. Scraps of documents that survived the fire, shards of evidence that might help rebuild something less monstrous from what used to tower over this hillside.
The sun sinks lower, bleeding orange through the gray sky. Snow begins to fall again, softer this time, as if careful not to disturb the wreckage.
Harper’s breath hitches when she finds a scorched file half buried beneath a collapsed beam. I move toward her instinctively, every sense wired to protect.
But it’s only paper, just the last thread tying her investigation to the empire that tried to swallow us alive.
She hands it to me, our fingers brushing. A small, quiet spark threads through the contact, grounding me more than any absolution ever could. Above us, another helicopter circles. Mikhail’s silent promise of protection that the wolves are muzzled for now.
Isn’t victory supposed to feel cleaner? Lighter? Like stepping out of a dark tunnel into a sunrise?
It just feels like standing in the ashes of a home I never asked to inherit.
Harper leans into my shoulder. I feel her warmth seep through the cold, reminding me that survival is not the same thing as living.
And the weight of everything we’ve lost settles around us like the beginning of winter.
