“Did you kill her?” I whisper. My vision blurs completely now, tears spilling freely as I look at him through the distortion. “Why would you do it?”
He stops a few feet away. The space between us feels deliberate, a line he has drawn across the carpet that he refuses to cross.
“Because your father asked me to.”
The air leaves my lungs all at once, as if someone has reached inside me and hollowed me out. The room tilts sideways. The walls feel too far away, the chair unstable under me.
“What?” I choke.
“He ordered it,” Sasha continues, his voice low, stripped of all emotion. “Paid for it. I executed the deal.” His eyes hold mine, unwavering. “That’s what I do, Alina. I make problems disappear.”
Something inside me collapses.
The story I have lived with my entire life—the speeches, the interviews, the grief I’ve suffered in private when no wandering eyes were watching me, waiting for me to crack—explodes in real time, crumbling under the weight of a truth too heavy to carry.
My father didn’t lose my mother. He removed her.
And Sasha didn’t just know about it.
He pulled the trigger.
I shake my head violently. “You’re lying.”
I say it again in my head over and over like a mantra that might make it true. He has to be lying. Hehasto be. This can’t be real.Not him. Not my father. Not both of them standing on either side of my life like executioners.
He can’t… he can’t.
His voice is steady.“I’m not. Your father wanted her gone. I only pulled the trigger he loaded.”
The sentence lands with surgical precision, clean and devastating, slicing through the last thin thread of denial I’ve been clinging to. My hand flies out to grip the edge of the desk for balance, my fingers digging into the wood like it might anchor me to something solid.
I look at him again,reallylook at him, and suddenly, I can’t reconcile the man in front of me with the monster those words describe.
“You’re disgusting,” I breathe.
The word is small compared to the hurricane ripping through my body, but it’s the only one I can find. It’s all I have left that feels sharp enough to cut him back.
He doesn’t argue.
That’s what makes it worse.
He just stands there with his shoulders squared and eyes locked on mine. For the briefest moment, so fast I almost miss it, something fractures across his expression, a flicker that I have barely any time to register. Regret, maybe. Or pain? Something so close to guilt that it makes my stomach churn.
It’s gone before I can name it.
Tears spill freely now, hot and relentless, streaking down my face as the truth finally overwhelms me. My throat tightens until it feels like I’m choking on it. “I hate you.”
He exhales slowly. It sounds like acceptance.
“You should not have opened that folder,” Sasha says. He finally moves, rounding the desk with slow steps as if approaching a skittish animal instead of a girl whose world has just collapsed.
I stand too fast. The chair legs scrape against the floor as I stagger backward, dizziness swamping me all at once. “Don’t come near me.”
My heel catches on the rug and I sway. He reacts without thinking, his hand shooting out to steady me.
“Don’t touch me!” The scream rips out of my throat, raw and uncontrollably louder than I intend it to be.
He freezes, his hand hanging suspended in the air between us, fingers curled slightly as if they ache to close around something solid. The moment stretches, taut and unbearable, every breath heavy and loud in my ears. I can see it on his face, the instinct battling with discipline, the man fighting the monster he’s taught himself to be.
