I looked at my father and saw only evil.There was no sorrow.No devastation.
“How?”I asked again, quieter this time, because sometimes rage turns so cold it stops sounding like itself.
He held my gaze.“It doesn’t matter.He was laid to rest.”
I went still.
“You buried him?”
“There were circumstances requiring discretion.”
Discretion.
The word burned clean through me.
I was across the room before anyone could react.
One fist in his collar.The other buried in the front of his shirt.I drove him backward into the drinks cabinet hard enough to rattle the crystal.
“You buried him without me?”
Hands were on me instantly—guards, coming out of nowhere, dragging at my arms.I threw one off and elbowed another hard enough to hear a bone crunch.
“You buried him,” I snarled, lunging again, “without me?”
My father straightened his jacket with infuriating calm once they’d pulled me back.
“Take him out,” he said.
They locked me in the east study.
I demolished it.
The first chair went through the glass cabinet.Then the lamp.Then the decanter.Books followed, then framed photographs, then whatever else my hands could find.It was not enough.Nothing was enough.The room remained standing when it should have come down around me.My chest still held breath when it should have given out.
I remember very little except the aftermath.
My knuckles split open and throbbing.The floor littered with wreckage.My body shaking hard enough I could feel it in my teeth.
And beneath all of that, something uglier was forming.
Because once the first disbelief cracked, another thought slithered in where grief had torn the skin open.
If he had truly done it—if Rasputin had put a bullet into himself and walked away from this life—then he had left me.
He had left Anna.
Left us with Viktor.
For several monstrous minutes, I hated him for it.
The shame of that has never left me.
But grief is not noble.It is not graceful.It does not sit prettily in candlelight and mourn with dignity.It claws.It accuses.It lashes out at the dead because they are safer to hate than the living when the living are still holding a knife at your throat.
Late that night I broke out of the study by forcing the inner latch with the iron poker from the hearth.
No one stopped me.
