Konstantin held his gaze.
“I’m fairly certain it was our mother who did the actual work,” he said.
I took my glass from my father and passed one to my brother, catching his eye with a look that said leave it.
He didn’t leave it.
“Do you really want to know what I did with her?” our father drawled.
Konstantin looked down at the scan picture in his hand.
I could remember very little of my mother. Long dark hair. The ghost of a perfume. Fragments that could have been real or invented over time—I had stopped being able to tell the difference years ago.
“She was fucking one of the guards,” he said, lifting his glass.“So I sold her. Killing her would have been too kind.” He looked between us.“Za zdorov’ye.”
My eyes met Konstantin’s as we drank to our father’s toast to good health.
We had always wondered what happened to her. Knowing didn’t fill the void—it just gave it a different shape. A woman sold rather than buried. A mother who existed somewhere or didn’t, and either way had never come back. The old man had no regrets. He never did. Regret required a conscience and Lev Dragunov had traded his in long before either of us arrived.
Konstantin finished his drink and looked at the scan picture for a long moment before handing it back to me.
“Congratulations,brat,” he said quietly.
Then he turned and left the room.
The silence he left behind had a specific quality to it.
“Idiot boy,” my father grumbled, and poured himself another shot.
The room rumbled first—a deep vibration moving through the floor and walls before the sound caught up with it. I dove instinctively, throwing myself to the far side of the room.
The blast followed a fraction of a second later.
It flung me against the wall with enough force to knock the air from my lungs, my back connecting hard with something solid. I stayed down, one arm over my head, while the roar moved through the building and then out.
Silence.
Then dust. Everywhere.
I opened my eyes. The room was thick with it—plaster and debris suspended in the air, making it impossible to see the full scale of what had happened. I got to my knees, then to my feet, moving carefully over what had been floor and was now rubble.
Plaster collapsed. Walls knocked through. A wooden beam hanging from the ceiling at an angle that suggested it was considering falling further.
My father’s armchair was empty.
I found his legs first, sticking out from beneath a section of collapsed ceiling. I moved the debris off him and knelt down.
His eyes were closed. I checked his pulse.
Konstantin came over the rubble at speed and stopped beside me.
“The Pakhan is unharmed,” he said, loud enough for the room.“Secure the house. Find them.” He waved the dust from his face and lowered his voice.“There might be more. You need to get out.”
I could hear Bogdan taking command beyond the doorway. Movement. Boots on broken glass.
The shrapnel had got Lev. Pierced through skin and bone, enough damage to be fatal. He was alive when I checked—barely—but the kind of alive that had a direction to it.
“A parcel came for him,” Konstantin said.“Left in the foyer.”
