My shoulders start shaking before I can stop them, and the sound that escapes me is ugly enough that I’m grateful no one’s there to hear it properly. I don’t cry quietly, I never have. It comes out more like something being ripped apart, which, in all honesty, is exactly how I feel. “I’m sorry,” I choke on the words. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
The words are useless and relentless, and there’s nobody left who can forgive me for any of it. I hit the heel of my hand against the steering wheel once. Then again. Then I stop because the thought of waking Vladimir slices through everything else at once.
I force myself to breathe quietly, wiping my face with the back of my sleeve. In the mirror, Vladimir shifts and lets out one small, sleepy sound, then settles again.
I straighten in the seat slowly, my hands trembling in my lap. The guilt is crushing, but I don’t get to collapse properly now. Not yet, with Vladimir in the back seat.
I turn the key, and the engine starts on the first go. As I pull out of the hospital lot, the tyres crunching over fresh snow, the cold realisation drops into the pit of my stomach, making me feel physically sick.
I’m alone.
Ari left me.
Ari left me and handed me a responsibility I can’t put down.
But I’ll do it, because I owe him, and because I owe Niko.
I don’t get to fail this kid, too.
THIRTY-EIGHT
ARSENY
They all want things from me. Statements, clarifications, and, worst of all, cooperation. Their language keeps changing depending on who’s in the room, but it all means the same thing in the end. They want me to help them turn this into something tidy, something that can be written down, filed away, and explained until it stops looking like what it is.
A failure.
A death.
They want a version of events that can be flattened, stamped, and handed round to all the right people so everyone left standing can keep pretending the system works.
Tragic, yes. Regrettable, of course. But not senseless. Never senseless. There always has to be a line somewhere at the end of it that says ‘this made sense.’
I hate them all for asking.
I hate the officers who look at me with that careful, measured sympathy they’ve probably practiced in mirrors, all soft eyes and lowered voices, as if grief has made me fragile enough to snap if they use the wrong tone.
I even hate the ones who don’t look at me at all.
I hate the system that taught them how to behave this way and calls it professionalism.
But most of all, I hate the words. Loss. Risk. Operational necessity.Acceptable.
I sit through one meeting, then another. I answer only what I have to. Name, rank, relationship to the deceased, confirmation of identity, then I ignore the rest. The questions come dressed up as procedure, but I know what they want under that. They want my compliance. They want to see whether I’m still inside the lines. They want to know whether I’m going to stay useful.
I stay quiet long enough that they start mistaking it for control, which is their error. One of them, a man with a face I have never liked and now never will, folds his hands on the table and says, “I understand this is difficult.” No, you don’t. I think. What I say, though, is nothing. He goes on anyway. “Given your relationship to Senior Sergeant Zakirov and the recent death of his partner, we need to establish whether there were any additional concerns regarding his readiness.”
There it is. What I was waiting for. He’s not just a dead man now. He’s a dead man, and now there’s blame to distribute. I stare at him until he has the decency to shift in his seat. “You already know the answer,” I say.
He clears his throat. “We need your statement.”
“You have my statement.”
“We have a preliminary account,” he corrects, and I almost laugh. There’s something darkly offensive about being asked to help them build the official version of my brother’s death when the truth is already sitting in the roomwith us, ignored because it doesn’t fit into their forms or narrative.
The CO advised against the mission. Caiden pushed for it. The operation went ahead, and Niko died.
End of story.
