Her mouth tightens.
She takes a step, then another, until the desk is the only thing that keeps us from touching. “You’ve been distracted since you found her. You’ve been weaker since you brought her into this. You almost shot me because I said what everyone else has been thinking out loud. Now you parade her in front of all of us and expect our soldiers to believe your decisions aren’t colored by domestic sentiment.”
I let her finish. I learned a long time ago that there is no profit in interrupting a confession. When she’s done, she’s breathing hard and trying not to show it.
“You’re very close,” I tell her, quiet as snowfall, “to sounding like Anton.”
For a heartbeat, she looks like I hit her.
“I’m nothing like him,” she sneers, but there’s less steel in it than there had been before.
“You both believe the organization is a god that demands sacrifice. He sacrificed all he deemed unworthy of holding the Antonov name and still was never satisfied. You stand inmyfamily home and say my son’s existence weakens me.” I lean forward on my forearms. The desk groans under my weight. “Be careful, Alisa. I don’t take kindly to traitors.”
She holds my gaze.
I see it then in her eyes, the place inside her that reminds me not just of Anton, but of my own father. Where fear iscurrency and loyalty is met only with strong ambition. The desire to keep things eternally the same is never an ideal I’ve subscribed to. The world, for all its grim horror, will always continue to push forward, leaving all those behind who refuse to keep up.
It is a lesson some refuse to learn, even when reality comes to slap them hard in the face with its truth.
I can’t teach or lead a soldier who is uninterested in shifting the status quo. Challenging me relentlessly will never lead to a solid and unified front.
That is how we were almost toppled in the first place.
I refuse to go back to that time.
“You two are more alike than you think,” I finally say
“Perhaps,” she says after another long silence, “he had a point.”
It’s quiet enough in the room that a log shifting in a far fireplace sounds loud. My hands curl against the desk. She watches the movement and looks a little bit terrified, just as she did when I raised that gun to her forehead and almost talked myself into pulling the trigger.
My words are barely above a murmur. “Leave. Before I forget you’ve stood beside me more often than you’ve stood against me.”
Her chin lifts a fraction, defiance reduced to that of a child’s tantrum. She turns and walks to the door, pausing only long enough to toss over her shoulder, “You always said you valued the truth, Maksim. Remember that when we are standing on opposite sides of that desk again.”
The door closes with a soft click.
My hands flex, slowly unclenching from the fists I’ve curled them into. I stare at the wood until the grain patterns look like maps I can’t read. I pick up the phone and press the line that rings Lev’s room.
He answers on the second ring, grunting softly “It is three in the morning, Maks.”
My words are clipped. “Study. Now.”
He sighs. “Five minutes.”
It takes him three and a half. He scans my face, the room, the door, the window, cataloging exits and mood before settling into the chair across from me.
“Problem?” he asks, leaning back until the frame under him creaks.
“Potentially. Alisa came to visit.”
He makes a face. A rare occurrence, and one I chalk up to his being dragged out of bed halfway through his REM cycle. “What kind of ‘potentially’?”
“The kind that quotes Anton’s ideals to me and says he may not have had such bad ideas, after all.”
Lev says nothing. His silence is its own answer. I tell him the rest, detailing everything we said down to the fear I’d seen in her eyes as she walked out that door. When I stop, Lev stares at the ceiling as if the answer might be written in the plaster.
Then he exhales. “She’s always believed the Bratva should be run like a military operation. Much like most of the eldergeneration did before we wiped them out. She and Luka are the only ones left, though I suspect even if Luka doesn’t share her ideals, it won’t take much to convince him otherwise. She will test you to prove yourself to us now that Ivy and Leo are here.”
