“I left you something.”
The words cut through the roaring in my skull.
I look at him.
Viktor’s expression settles. Not quite grief anymore. Something else underneath it, something watchful, but I’m too far gone to read it clearly. “The daughter escaped. Sokolova’s girl. She ran before my men could finish it and she took something with her—files. Documents Sokolova compiled. Everything he knew about this organization, accounts, names, operations. If those files surface, Razvan, the damage to this family will be catastrophic.”
Silence.
“Find her,” Viktor says. “Take back what she stole. And when you have the files—” He lets the rest sit there without finishing it. He doesn’t need to finish it. We both know Bratva law. When a man commits treason against this organization, his debt doesn’t die with him. It passes.
One person’s sin can bury a whole family.
Viktor leaves and the door closes. For exactly four seconds I stand in the middle of the room and breathe.
The silence in the room snaps.
I don’t decide to move; my body simply rejects the air it’s breathing.
I reach down and my fingers dig into the grain of the oak side table.
I don’t feel the weight of it, only the desperate, pulsing need to make something else break the way I am breaking.
I heave it upward.
The wood groans, then there is a sickening, hollowcrunchas the corner of the table buries itself three inches deep into the drywall.
Plaster dust explodes outward like a shroud.
I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I catch the edge of the bookshelf—the one Papa spent years filling—and rip.
The wood shrieks as the mounting brackets tear out of the studs. Books rain down like heavy, leather-bound birds, thudding against the floor in a chaotic pile.
I spin, my elbow catching a floor lamp.
The bulb shatters—a sharp, electricpop—and the room dims, shadows dancing wildly against the ruins. I find a chair and send it sideways.
It hits the hearth with a sound of splintering bone, its legs snapping like dry twigs.
Then, there is the glass.
I don’t even remember throwing it.
I just see the shards of the crystal glass I was holding embedded in the wall above the fireplace, the amber liquid weeping down the stone like blood.
I bring my fist down on the edge of the mantle. Hard. Again. And again.
The skin over my knuckles splits.
I see the red smears on the white marble before I feel the sting.
The pain is a tiny, distant thing, a pinprick compared to the roaring white noise in my head.
I want to hit something that won’t break. I want to hit the world until it gives him back.
