I am not a man who performs rage for an audience, but there is no performance in this.
Just the genuine destruction of every breakable thing in arm’s reach, and I am moving through the room like a weather event and nothing in my path is surviving it.
I grab the heavy velvet curtains and pull with everything I have.
The rod screams, metal bending and screeching, until the whole thing collapses in a heap of brass and fabric, burying the wreckage.
I stand in the center of the ruin, my chest heaving, the air thick with the smell of dust and ozone.
My hands are shaking so hard they are almost a blur. I wait for the relief. I wait for the anger to leave me.
But the room is just broken. And he is still gone.
He’s gone. He went to a meeting and he’s gone and I didn’t…I didn’t get to?—
At some point Lyosha grabs my arms from behind. He’s the only one strong enough to try it.
He doesn’t say anything, just holds on, and I let him because my legs have decided they’re done and I go down to one knee in the wreckage of the room and put my fist against the floor and breathe.
Mike crouches in front of me.
He doesn’t offer me words.
There are no words for this and Mike, for all his warmth, knows when language is useless.
He just puts his hand on my shoulder and stays there.
Dmitri is in the doorway.
Phone gone.
Face uncharacteristically still.
Nobody speaks for a long time.
I adored him.
That’s the thought that keeps circling, the one with teeth.
Not loved, adored.
The way you adore someone who is both your father and your north point, the fixed thing you orient yourself by.
And now the fixed thing is gone and there’s just?—
Space.
“Tell me what you need,” Lyosha says finally. His version of empathy. Blunt and direct and entirely genuine.
I breathe in. Breathe out. Lift my head.
“The girl.” My voice is back to flat. Controlled. The Wrath, back in the room where the man was. “Sokolova’s daughter. She’s running with files that can destroy this family. She’s somewhere in this city, or she will be outside it soon.” I look at each of them in turn. Mike. Lyosha. Dmitri. “I’m finding her. I’m taking back what she has. And then I am finishing what Viktor started.”
Mike’s jaw tightens once. He nods.
Lyosha cracks his knuckles with unmistakable anticipation.
Dmitri is already reaching for his phone. “I’ll start pulling her profile. Sokolova’s daughter—there’ll be a record.”
