I hated the world for knowing it and taking aim anyway.
The next morning he walked me to the car.
Snow had begun before dawn and thickened by breakfast, the grounds gone pale and muffled.Security moved through the courtyard with their shoulders hunched against the cold.The driver loaded my case into the boot while another guard checked the route.
Rasputin stood beside me under the front steps, coat buttoned high, dark hair dusted white at the edges from the snowfall.Neither of us were sentimental men.We did not make speeches.We did not say what we felt unless the feeling had become impossible to contain.
Still, something in me resisted the goodbye.It wasn’t fear exactly, but a deep seated anxiety.
“Don’t let him bait you while I’m gone,” I warned him.
That earned the faintest ghost of a smile.
“I’ll try not to deprive him of his hobbies.”
I should have gotten in the car then.
Instead, I looked at him and said it again, because some stubborn part of me still believed repetition might save us both.
“It should be you.”
His face hardened, but not at me.
“Archie.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“I would rather cut off my own hand than sit where he sits.”
He stepped closer and put one hand on the back of my neck.Not rough.Not gentle either.Solid.Anchoring.
“You are not him,” he said.
“Neither are you.”
“No,” he murmured.“And that is why he will never forgive either of us.”
The driver cleared his throat discreetly.
Time.
Rasputin’s hand dropped away.
“Three days,” he said.
“Three days.”
I got into the car and looked back once through the window.
He was still standing there in the snowfall, broad-shouldered and unreadable, watching the gates swallow me whole.
That was the last time I saw my brother alive.
If I had known, I would have torn the door off its hinges and gone back.
I would have dragged him with me.
