My father is behind his desk.
He’s in his full suit jacket, which he always wears when he wants a room to feel like a verdict. The pistol in his hand is aimed at the door, and his face, when he sees me, doesn’t change the way another man’s might. He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look afraid. He looks the way he’s always looked at me, like he’s doing the math on whether I’m useful today.
“Lev,” he says.
“Put the gun down,” I tell him.
“You’ve made quite a mess of things.”
“I’ve cleaned up your mess for fourteen years. Call it even.”
Something moves in his face at that. Not remorse. Something closer to acknowledgment, which from Vadim Morozov is the only version of honesty I ever expected to get.
“I built something here,” he insists. “Something that will outlast both of us.”
“You built it on bodies. Including the ones you put there yourself.”
He doesn’t deny it. That’s the thing about my father. He’s never needed to deny anything because he’s never believed he owed anyone an explanation. The pistol doesn’t move. He looks at me across the desk like I’m a problem he should have resolved earlier, and for one brief second, I see the version of tonight where he did exactly that, where he got ahead of it before I made it to his gates. It’s not a comfortable thought.
He stands then, slowly, and the gun comes with him. Something in his face has changed. The control I’ve known my entire lifeis gone, replaced by something that looks borderline unhinged. His eyes are bright with a light that doesn’t belong to a man in control of anything.
“You want to know something?” Something in the tone of his voice raises every hair on the back of my neck. “I knew from the moment you were born that you’d be the one to do this. I should have handled it then.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“The woman,” he continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “The surgeon. She’s pregnant, isn’t she? A child is very useful. Perhaps I could do a better job training them than I did you. All I’d have to do is get my hands on that pretty little Kozlov and?—”
“You touch her, and this ends with you dead.”
“Mm.” He considers this like a man weighing a mildly interesting proposal. “The problem, Lev, is that you’ve never been able to stop me from doing anything. Not once. Not when it mattered.”
He raises the gun, but I’m faster.
One shot. He drops behind the desk, and the room goes quiet. I stand in the doorway of the office where I spent my entire childhood being told I would never be enough, and I wait for something to arrive—grief, relief, some sense of hollowness that one expects to follow something this final.
What arrives is silence.
I stay in the doorway for another ten seconds, then turn and walk out. There’s nothing left in that room for me.
A Kozlov soldier is posted in the corridor, and I can hear Boris’s team barging up the stairs. The bastard probably thinks I’ve defected by now. I hold out my hand toward him.
“Radio.”
He unclips it from his vest without question and passes it over. I key the channel Boris has been running all morning.
“It’s Lev. Compound secured. Pakhan down.”
There’s a short pause before Boris’s voice comes back, and for once, it carries something that sounds almost like relief underneath. “Copy that. Confirmed clear on all floors?”
“The fourth floor is still hot. East corridor on two needs someone posted.”
“We’ll take care of it. Get out.”
I hand the radio back to the soldier and head for the stairs.
The ground floor is controlled chaos. Boris’s men move through it with the hard efficiency of cleanup, not combat. Someone calls my name when I pass the main entrance, and I lift a hand without stopping. Outside, the morning is bright and cold, and the compound grounds are a grid of Kozlov and Morozov men in various states of surrender, custody, and assistance.
I walk past all of it and don’t look too closely at any of it, because there’s an accounting that comes with this kind of morning, and I’ll have to sit with it eventually, but not yet.
