Page 129 of Cruel Submission

The words are his, but the voice is mine. My own internal echo, repeating the indictment I’ve never been able to fully dismiss, no matter how many years pass, no matter how many times Yanis tells me it wasn’t my fault, no matter how many nights Mirabel holds me and says it was an accident.

The trigger sits beneath my finger. One squeeze and the hammer falls.

I can’t do it.

My arm is steady. My breathing is controlled. My sight picture is perfect—Gavriil’s head, centered, framed. Every element is in place, every variable accounted for, the execution window wide open and getting no wider.

But the command—the signal from brain to finger, the electrical impulse that should be simpler than blinking—won’t connect.

Because the last time I pulled a trigger pointed at family, my little brother died in my arms.

Mishka.

His face floods my mind. Not the blood, not the wound, not the aftermath—the before. Mishka grinning at me across the kitchen table. Mishka on my shoulders at the summer house. Mishka coming to my room during thunderstorms, trusting that his brother would keep him safe from everything, always, forever.

I kept him safe from everything except me.

“Arkady.” Yanis’s voice, from somewhere to my right. Strained. “Do it.”

I look at my brother. His weapon is up, trained on Gavriil, but his arm has the same quality mine does—rigid, locked, functional in every mechanical sense but missing the human component that completes the circuit. Yanis, who never pulled a trigger on a man who didn’t have a weapon in his hand first. Yanis, whose version of violence has always been bound by rules that I threw away years ago, but he still carries.

“You do it,” I manage.

Yanis’s mouth thins. A tendon stands out in his neck like cable. His finger rests on the trigger guard—not the trigger, the guard, and the distinction tells me everything.

He can’t do it either.

Pizdets.

Gavriil sees it. Of course he does. He’s spent a lifetime reading his sons, scanning for weaknesses, opportunities, points of leverage.

“Neither of you can,” he says. Not gloating. Stating a fact. “Because I’m your father. Because you still remember that. Because no matter what I’ve done, some part of you will always be the boys who sat on my lap and thought I was God.”

The quiet that follows is worse than the gunfire. It fills the room. Stefan stands by the door, weapon lowered, watching us with the expression of a man who understands that he cannot intervene in what’s happening between these three men and this blood and this history.

Gavriil starts to rise from his chair. Slowly. Deliberately. Testing.

“Sit down,” I say, but the command has lost its edge. He can hear it. I can hear it. We all can.

My father stands. Full height. Those ice-blue eyes level on mine.

“Put the guns down, boys.” He straightens his cuffs. “Let’s discuss this like—”

The shot comes from the doorway.

Not the suppressed whisper of our weapons—a full, unsilenced crack that splits the room in half. The sound of a civilian weapon fired by someone who doesn’t know or care about noise discipline.

Gavriil’s body jerks. Once. A sharp, involuntary spasm, the kind that happens when the brain receives information faster than it can interpret. He looks down at his chest, where a dark stain is spreading across the dove-gray suit with an almost artistic slowness.

His mouth opens. Closes.

I spin toward the doorway, weapon up, the reflex overriding every other signal in my body.

Debra stands in the threshold.

She’s wearing the blue cardigan—the soft one, the one Yanis bought for her. Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her face is colorless, drained of everything except a terrible, icy clarity. And in her grasp, held in a two-handed grip that nobody taught her and she must have learned from watching us, is a Beretta 92.

One of ours. From the weapons cabinet at Ashwater Heights.