He stood over me like he always had—a towering behemoth, all strength and rage—his face hard with fury.
His eyes wrecked me.Because they looked the way they used to when we were boys.When he’d drag me up after a fight, bloodied and stubborn, refusing to let me stay down.
Get up.
His mouth moved, the words striking through the dark.
Get the fuck up.
He was shouting now.Roaring at me like rage alone could pull me back.Like death was something he could force away with his bare hands.
Over and over, he said the same words.The same command.
And beneath the anger, beneath the violence in his voice, there was something worse.
Fear.
Rasputin was afraid.Not for himself, but for me.
And that broke something open inside me, because Rasputin was dead.
I knew he was dead.
I had watched him die a thousand times in my head.
But here he was, standing at the edge of whatever this was, furious that I was following him.
His face twisted, grief cutting through the rage.
“Not yet, bratishka.”
Not yet.
And for the first time since the darkness took hold of me, I understood.
He wasn’t here to take me.He was here to send me back.
But it couldn’t possibly be, because he was dead.
The memory comes back in bits and pieces, fragments of a past life.It bleeds in around the edges—grainy, flickering, like a corrupted file my brain keeps trying to reload.
I’m on my back.Or maybe I’m sitting.
No—there’s blood in my mouth.That much is real.Thick.Metallic.It coats my tongue and drips down the back of my throat every time I try to breathe too deeply.My chest burns like something inside it has been cracked open and left that way.
Voices echo somewhere close.Distant.Warped.
But none of it matters.
Because I’m back there.In Russia.
The room is dark except for the glow of the screen.There are too many men, but the silence is too heavy.It presses in on my skull until it almost splits.
Rasputin had just walked into frame, and he looked exactly the same as he always did.Big.Unmovable.Like the world would have to bend around him instead of the other way around.
My older brother.My shield.My constant.
He didn’t for one second look afraid.And that’s the part that haunts me when I think back to that day.
