Men call that strength because men are always eager to rename horror if horror keeps them safe. I know better. Strength has lines, and Nikolaj stopped caring where they were.
Arseniy knows it better than anyone else.
My eldest is gone now. Self-exile. Funny fucking symmetry, that. The old sins always come home eventually, and they rarely knock first. He left after Nikolaj had his wife killed along with the child she was carrying.
A traitor, yes. I know that. I know what she passed to our enemies. I know what information she sold, what names, what routes, what blood she was willing to gamble because she thought love, fear, or some private fantasy of survival would save her from consequences.
Shedeserved punishment. The child didn’t. And Arseniy, for all his sins, didn’t deserve to lose both in one brutal sweep of his little brother’s hand.
I wouldn’t have done it. That’s the thought that keeps circling, ugly and pointless. I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have buried the wife and spared the unborn. Or spared them both and caged her somewhere dark, where she could learn what betrayal costs without making a corpse of my son’s life in the process.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m romanticizing my own brutality because age makes men sentimental about the monsters they used to be. But no, this one I know. I would not have done that to Arseniy because there are lines even for men like me. And once a father starts killing babies to teach lessons, he’s no longer running a family. He’s just feeding something rotten.
Nikolaj doesn’t see it that way.
Nikolaj sees disloyalty and answers it with the fullest force available. He sees weakness and puts a bullet through its teeth. He sees grief on his older brother’s face and treats it as collateral. That’s what frightens me. Not the violence—violence is old and predictable. Violence can be shaped if a man’s still tethered to something.
It’s the fact that I no longer know what tethers him. Not me, not the line, not legacy, not even whatever pieces of his soul returned after Vintermoor. He’s become too much his own knife.
And here I sit on this terrace, wondering when exactly I became the soft one.
I laugh under my breath at that, and the sound vanishes into the cold.
Soft. The word would’ve disgusted me at thirty. At forty, too. At fifty, I’d have called it an insult and made someone bleed for having the nerve. Now I sit alone with a bottle and a bad eye and think maybe softness is just what men call the point at whichyour losses start outweighing your appetite for inflicting more of them.
The ache behind my eye pulses more sharply. I take another swallow of vodka and let it sit on my tongue a second before forcing it down. It does fuck all for the pain, but rituals matter when a life starts shedding everything else.
I’ve lost countries, names, positions, sons to one form of exile or another, lovers to choices I can’t unmake, and still the body keeps its rituals because it doesn’t know how to stop being a body until the very end.
The revolver is on the small iron table beside me.
I’ve had this one for years. Not my first or my favorite, but it’s steady, heavy, and familiar in the hand. There’s comfort in weight if you’ve lived the kind of life I have.
I pick it up and turn it once in my palm. The metal is cold. My fingers know the shape before my mind catches up, which says enough all by itself about how often this dance has happened in recent years. Not every night, I’m not that pathetic. Not every week, either. But enough that the body moves through the ritual with the ease of practice.
Open cylinder. Add one round. Spin.
I drop a bullet into the chamber. The click echoes softly under the terrace roof, then I spin it and watch it blur. That’s when the laugh comes—low at first, then uglier.
I sit there with a revolver in my hand playing Russian Roulette in a fucking Russian villa because apparently God has a mean little sense of humor after all, and the absurdity of it all splits something open just enough for laughter to crawl out.
“Look at you,” I say aloud, voice roughened by vodka, years, and all the smoke I never stop putting in my lungs. “Old enough to know better and still stupid enough to have a heart.”
The ache behind my eye syncs with the pulse in my throat. I lift the gun and settle the barrel against my temple with the kind of calm that ought to worry me more than it does.
I’ve never been afraid of death. Men like me spend so long surviving other people’s attempts that we stop treating our own mortality like an event and start treating it like another room we’ll eventually walk into.
Death stops being a terror and becomes a geography. The only thing that ever kept me from stepping through sooner is spite. Spite, duty, rage, sons, and one impossible, rotting love I’ve carried for so long it grew into the shape of another organ and refuses to let me die without dragging it with me.
I close my eyes.
“You should’ve been next to me,lyubimiy,” I mutter, because if I’m going to do this, I may as well do it honestly. “Fuck you for still not being here.”
“Then perhaps you should lower the gun and complain to me directly.”
The revolver slips from my hand and hits the stone with a loud crack that splits the whole fucking world in two.
My heart lurches once and then seems to forget its job for a second before slamming back so hard it hurts. I’m on my feet without feeling the movement, chair scraping back, vodka glass tipping and shattering near the balustrade.
