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“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Kirill.”

“I know you’ve been alone for eighteen years. You haven’t looked at another woman since she died.” His hands ball up at his sides. “And now, suddenly, you’re buying dresses and sending cars and paying ridiculous money for some girl who happens to be a dead fucking ringer?—”

“Enough!”

“—for the wife you fuckingmurdered.”

Fueled by frozen rage, my hand moves all on its own. The sound of the slap ricochets off the stone walls.

Kir’s head snaps to the side. A red mark blooms across his cheek where I struck him.

He doesn’t touch it. He just turns back to face me. His eyes are hard now. For once, they look like mine.

“Feel better?” he asks sarcastically.

I don’t answer. My palm stings.

“You know what the difference is between us, Father?” He straightens his jacket and smooths back his hair, reassembling himself little by little. “IknowI’m broken. IknowI’m fucked up. I don’t pretend otherwise. But you?” He shakes his head. “You really believe you’re in control. You still think all this—the money, the power, the fear you put in people—you think it makes youstrong.”

He steps aside, finally clearing the doorway.

“You’re every bit as broken as I am,” he concludes. “You’re just better at hiding it.”

With that, Kir turns to leave.

I don’t let him.

Again, my hand shoots out of its own accord. This time, it catches him by the collar. One shove and he’s pinned against the stone wall, my forearm pressed to his throat. The impact knocks the breath out of him.

“You don’t get to walk away from me,” I snarl. “I am your fuckingfather.”

The red mark on his cheek is already darkening into a bruise. But he doesn’t look away. His eyes bore into mine, taunting.

“What are you going to do?” he spits. “Slap me again? Go ahead. It won’t change anything.”

“You think you know what happened with your mother, but you don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“I was twelve, not blind.” He’s vibrating with fury. “I saw the bruises on her arms, Father. I saw how she flinched when you walked into a room. She stopped eating. She stoppedtalking.”

My grip tightens on his collar. “I?—”

“How long until Rae disappears, too? Is that how it’ll go? She’ll wither away until one day,boom, she’s gone?”

Something in me screams as it’s forcefully pried open. Not guilt—never guilt. Butsomething. A fissure in the ice that’s kept me functional for almost two decades.

I release him and step back. My hands are trembling, though I’ll die before I let him see that.

“You don’t understand what it means to protect what’s yours,” I say. My voice sounds all wrong. Too hoarse. Too human. “In our world, protection looks different. It has to.”

“Yourworld,” Kir corrects. “Not mine.”

“It’s the same world, boy! Everything I built—the company, the Bratva, the empire—all of it exists so that what’s mine can never be taken. One permanent thing in this life.” I meet his eyes. “That’s what you’ll inherit.”

Kir laughs in my face. “You think I want any of this? The blood money? The secrets? The bodies buried in fucking basements?”

I go still.

“I don’t want what you have. I’m trying to build something that doesn’t require murder to maintain.”