Page 109 of Cruel Submission

Maybe some rotted, stubborn part of me still sees him as my father. Maybe some fucked up part of me still wants what that represents.

But Gavriil Laurov was never father material. And I don’t know why I can’t come to terms with that.

Yobany v rot.

I pour another vodka. Don’t drink it. Just hold the glass and stare at the liquid catching light.

I already killed part of my family. All this time, and I still hear the click before the crack. Still feel the recoil traveling up my arm. Still see Mishka’s face… not the pain but the surprise. The pure disbelief of a boy who trusted his brother with his life and got a bullet instead.

It was an accident. I know this. Yanis knows this. Even my father knows this, though he’s spent years converting that knowledge into a weapon. You killed your brother. You broke your mother. You’re the reason this family is destroyed.

Accident or not, the outcome is the same. Mishka is dead. My mother ended her life. And I carry both of them—in my chest, in my hands, in the compulsive checking of every chamber twice because I will never again be the boy who assumed something was safe.

Killing Sergei Tulikov was a different kind of accident. It wasn’t pleasure—I’m not that far gone, not yet—but it was deliberate in the way all violence becomes deliberate when someone threatens the people you love. He came at me, and I put him down.

And then Rosanna.

I didn’t kill her. I know this, rationally. She was already drowning—had been for years, depression pulling her under long before I entered the picture. But I took her father away. Destroyed the last anchor she had, and without Sergei, she stopped fighting. Drove her car into a wall—or off a bridge, or into oncoming traffic, the reports conflict—and left a baby in a hospital bed with no mother and a father who isn’t sure he’s earned the title.

Every time I look at Aleks, I see the cascade of consequences. My role in Sergei’s death, Sergei’s death in Rosanna’s despair, Rosanna’s despair in a motherless infant who grips my finger and doesn’t know yet how much wreckage preceded his existence.

I set the glass down. The vodka is warm now. Untouched.

God help me.

I don’t believe in God—haven’t since I watched a priest tell my mother that Mishka was in a better place—but the words come anyway.

God help me so I don’t have to kill my own father.

Because if Gavriil comes back—and he will—then the crosshairs will find his skull again. And next time, my loyalty to a fucked-up father won’t be enough to keep my finger off the trigger.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Mirabel

The armored car doesn’t look armored.

That’s the point, Stefan explained this morning while handing over the keys—something about ballistic glass being indistinguishable from regular glass until someone tests it with a bullet. I didn’t ask for specifics. I just nodded and tried not to think about the fact that I now live in a world where the vehicles I drive need to be bulletproof.

The car is quiet. Whatever soundproofing they installed to protect against bullets also protects against traffic noise, birdsong, and any reminder that the world outside still operates according to normal physics.

Debra sits beside me in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the motorway unreeling ahead of us. She looks better than she did three days ago. Better than the night of the engagement party, when Gavriil’s voice reached through the walls of Ashwater Heights and dragged her back to a basement she’s been trying to recover from.

But better is relative. Better is still a woman who dissociates when someone closes a door too loudly.

“It’s time we tell him,” I say.

Debra turns from the window. “About where I’ve been.”

“Yeah. He’ll start asking questions soon. We need to get our story straight.” I signal to change lanes even though there’s no one behind us. Arkady’s men are back there somewhere. I don’t look for them. I just drive and pretend I’m a normal woman taking her sister to visit their father, not a pregnant mob wife being escorted by armed guards.

“We can’t tell him everything,” Debra says. “He’s still recovering. The shock—”

“Could kill him. Yeah. I know.” I sigh. “But when the hospital called, they said he’s getting stronger.”

“Yes,” says Debra.

“We tell him you were taken,” I say. “Kidnapped. That part’s true. We don’t tell him who or why or what happened while you were gone.”