"Don't talk about my mother."
"Yourmother." He spits the words like poison. "Your mother spread her legs for anyone who showed her attention. Did you really believe that story about you not being mine? That convenient lie I told to justify what needed to be done?"
The confession hits me like a physical blow. I feel it in my chest, in my broken ribs, in the hollow space where certainty used to live.
"What are you saying?"
Father smiles. It's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen because there's nothing behind it. No warmth. No humanity. Just the cold satisfaction of a predator playing with wounded prey.
"You were always mine, Yelena. Every pathetic, disappointing inch of you. That man I killed? He was nothing. Nobody. A convenient excuse I invented because I needed a reason to dispose of your mother that my men would accept. She was becoming inconvenient. Asking questions. Threateningto expose certain business arrangements. So, I created a story. An affair. A bastard child who was never really my blood." He pauses, letting the horror settle into my bones. "The truth is much simpler. You were always my daughter. I just decided you were worth more dead than alive."
The world tilts, shifting on its axis. Everything I thought I understood about that day, about my mother's death, about my own torture and abandonment, rearranges itself into something even more monstrous. He killed my mother because she was inconvenient. Tried to kill me because I was a loose end. Not because of some affair. Not because I wasn't his. Because he simply decided we were worth more as corpses than as family.
"You're a monster." My voice comes out raw, broken in ways I didn't know I could still break.
"I'm a man who always gets what he wants." Father rises from the chair, gun still held loosely at his side. "Your mother understood that eventually. So will you, in whatever time you have left." He moves faster than I expect. The gun comes up and fires in a single, fluid motion. I'm already diving, pain screaming through my ribs, but the bullet still catches my already wounded shoulder. Fresh agony explodes through my arm. Blood sprays, and I hit the ground hard, feeling something else crack.
Volk returns fire. Father ducks behind the chair, using its bulk as cover. More shots are exchanged. The room fills with the acrid smell of gunpowder and the deafening percussion of bullets hitting plaster and wood.
I force myself to my feet. My shoulder is on fire, but the arm still works, still holds my weapon, functions well enough to fight. I circle right while Volk keeps Father pinned behind the chair.
"You can't win this," Father shouts over the gunfire. "Kill me and the organization hunts you forever. Let me live and I might, might, consider making your deaths quick."
"We'll take our chances." I'm behind him now. Close enough to see the sweat beading on the back of his neck. Close enough to smell his expensive cologne mingling with the gunpowder in the air.
He spins. Fires. The bullet goes wide because his wounded leg gives out at the crucial moment. I close the remaining distance before he can correct his aim. My fist connects with his jaw. The impact jolts up my arm, sending fresh waves of pain through my injured shoulder, but I don't care. I hit him again. And again. Every blow carries ten years of rage, of grief, of the desperate need to make him feel even a fraction of what I felt dying in that desert.
He fights back. Harder than I expected. Despite his wounds, despite his age, he's still strong. Still vicious. His elbow catches my chin and makes my teeth clatter together painfully. His knee comes up toward my face, but I twist away, barely avoiding the blow. We grapple, fall to the floor. Rolling across expensive custom carpet now stained with both our blood. His hands find my face, squeezing tightly, and his thumbs press dangerously close to my eyes.
Then Volk is there. He tears Father off me with brutal efficiency, throwing him against the wall hard enough to crack plaster. Father slides down, stunned but still moving. He makes a weak attempt to reach for his fallen gun, but Volk kicks it away, stomping on Father's wounded leg in the process. The scream that tears from his throat is the most satisfying sound I've ever heard.
"Finish it," Volk says, stepping back, giving me room. Giving me the ending I've bled for.
I stand over the man who raised me. Who killed my mother in front of me. Who sent me to be tortured and violated and left for dead in the desert. Who just admitted he did all of it not because of some affair but simply because we were inconvenient.
"Any last words?" I ask.
Father looks up at me. Blood streams from his nose, his split lip, a cut above his eye. For the first time since I've known him, he looks old. Fragile. Human.
"You'll never be free of me," he whispers. "Everything you are, everything you've become, I made you. You're my legacy whether you like it or not."
"No." I kneel beside him, bringing my face close to his. "I made myself. Out of the ashes you left behind. And when I'm done here, your legacy dies with you." I pull the knife from my ankle sheath. The blade that's been waiting for this moment since I first wrapped my fingers around its handle years ago.
Father's eyes widen. For the first time, I see real fear there. The inherit animal’s recognition of prey, understanding it's finally cornered.
"Yelena, please." His voice cracks. "I'm your father."
"You stopped being my father the day you killed my mother." The first cut opens his chest. Shallow. Testing. He screams and I let the sound wash over me like music.
"This is forMamochka."
The second cut goes deeper. Blood wells, dark and thick. "This is for every night I spent screaming in that desert."
A third cut. A fourth. I lose count. My hands are slick with his blood. My face is wet with tears I didn't know I was crying. Everything I've held back for ten years comes pouring out in a flood of violence that should horrify me but doesn't.
I feel nothing but release.
When it's finally over, more of his organs are outside than in and his blood covers me like a second skin, I sit back on my heels, chest heaving.
