Page 128 of Cruel Submission

Three seconds. Three guards. Three bodies on my father’s Persian rug.

And there, behind the mahogany desk that’s been the seat of his empire for thirty years, sits Gavriil Laurov.

He hasn’t moved.

My father sits the same way he’s always sat—spine straight, hands on the armrests, chin elevated at an angle that communicates superiority regardless of circumstance. He’s wearing a suit, dove-gray, the tie loosened at his collar. A crystal tumbler sits beside his right hand, half-full of something amber. As if he’s been waiting for us. As if he heard the gunfire and the shouting and decided that standing was beneath him.

“Well,” he says. “My sons. Together. How touching.”

I level the Makarov at his forehead. The distance is eight feet. At eight feet, I couldn’t miss if I tried. The front sight sits steady on the bridge of his nose, the same nose I inherited, the same bone structure that looks back at me from mirrors and makes me sick.

“Where is she?” My voice sounds foreign even to me. Thin. Stretched taut.

Gavriil’s eyes move between us—me, Yanis, Stefan, the bodies on his floor. Calculating. Always calculating. Even now, even with a gun pointed at his skull, the old bastard is running probabilities.

“She’s safe,” he says. “For the moment.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“She’s in the sitting room. Unharmed.” A pause calibrated to maximum effect. “Mostly.”

Mostly.

The word makes bile rise up my throat… and rage along with it. My finger finds the trigger’s breaking point—two pounds of pressure, maybe three, the Makarov’s pull as familiar to me as breathing. One more pound and it’s done. One more pound and Gavriil Laurov stops existing, stops hurting people, stops being the shadow that falls across every decent thing I’ve ever tried to build.

“What did you do to her?” Yanis now, stepping forward, his weapon up. His voice carries a coldness I’ve rarely heard from him—Yanis, the diplomat, the mediator, the brother who always found the gentler path. Not tonight. Tonight, his eyes hold something I recognize because I’ve seen it in my own.

“I slapped her.” Gavriil says it the way another man might say I checked the post. “She told me she was Debra’s twin. I found that surprising.”

“You slapped a pregnant woman,” Yanis says slowly, disgusted.

“I slapped what I thought was my property.” Gavriil takes a measured sip from his glass. “My mistake. An understandable one, you’ll agree, given the circumstances.”

“Your property.” My voice has dropped to something subterranean. “Debra was never your property. She was a child when you took her. A girl. Eighteen years old. And you molested her for years.”

“I gave her everything she needed.”

“You raped her!” The words tear out of me and bounce off the wood-paneled walls. “You beat her and raped her and called it love, you sick fuck. You—”

“Careful, boy.” The command in his voice is so instinctive, so embedded in the structure of our relationship, that for a split second my body responds—the old deference, the child’s reflex to obey the patriarch. “You’re in my house. Pointing a gun at your father. Think about what you’re doing.”

“I’ve thought about nothing else for years.”

Gavriil studies me. Then he does something that surprises me, which is rare, because I’ve spent my entire life learning to predict this man.

He smiles.

“You won’t shoot me, Arkady.” Quiet. Certain. The smile of a man holding a card nobody else can see. “You want to. I can see it. Your whole body wants to. But you won’t.”

“Try me.”

“I don’t need to try. I know you.” He sets the glass down and steeples his fingers. “You’re the boy who killed his brother with a gun he thought was empty and spent the rest of his life choking on the memory. You think you can shoot your own father in cold blood? You, who can’t close your eyes without seeing Mishka’s face?”

The jab lands where he intended it—deep, between the ribs of my resolve, in the soft tissue where the old wound lives. Mishka. Twelve years old. The click before the crack. The surprise on his face. The blood.

My hand doesn’t move. The Makarov stays centered on Gavriil’s forehead, steady. But inside… Inside, something is happening. A crack, widening.

You killed your brother. You broke your mother. You’re the reason this family is destroyed.