Flashback - Archie
By the time I was thirteen, I knew how to read a room before I opened my mouth.
By fifteen, I knew how to shoot without blinking.
At seventeen, I understood that my father destroyed everything he touched.
Some truths arrive slowly, like frost thickening at the edges of a windowpane until you wake one morning and find the whole view obscured. Others strike all at once and split your life clean down the middle.
For me, it happened outside my father’s study.
I had gone looking for Rasputin.
He had become more difficult to find in those days, dragged deeper into the machinery of the empire whether he wanted it or not.
Men sought him out. Deferred to him. Looked at him with that particular blend of expectation and caution reserved for heirs and executioners.
He carried the weight of being Viktor Popovich’s firstborn in every room he entered, and though he wore it without complaint, I knew him well enough to see what it cost.
It was late. The estate had thinned into its quieter version of life, where servants moved softly and the guards settled into routines. I should have gone to bed.
Instead, I wandered, as I always did when the walls felt too close.
As I crossed the west hallway, voices rose beneath the almost-closed door of the study.
My father’s voice first—measured, irritable, and sharp.
My mother’s second.
I stopped.
Not because eavesdropping was unusual in a house like ours. Everybody listened where they could. Information was oxygen. But because my mother rarely raised her voice, and when she did, it meant she was terribly upset over something.
I stepped closer.
“—never hear a word of your gratitude,” my father was saying.
My mother laughed.
The sound of it skinned me alive. Because there was no joy in it. Only contempt so deep it was harsh and cold.
“No,” she said. “You wanted my obedience. You insisted on it.”
I went still.
Even now, I can remember exactly how the light fell beneath the door. How one of the sconces in the corridor buzzed faintly. How my own heartbeat began to thud in my ears as though it knew something before the rest of me did.
“You were dying where I found you,” my father snapped. “I improved your circumstances.”
“You bought me.”
The words hollowed out the world.
I do not remember breathing after that.
Silence stretched. Then came the scrape of a chair, the muted clink of glass.
When my father spoke again, his voice had dropped, which only made it uglier.
“I gave you a son. I gave you security. I gave you a respectable name.”
“You gave me a cage.”
A cage.
There are words that alter the architecture of your life the moment you hear them. That was one of them.
Suddenly every sadness in my mother made sense in a new and terrible shape. Her distance. Her rage. Her hollow-eyed stares through winter windows. The way she clung to me as if I were not merely her child but the only thing in her life that had not been forced out of her.
I stepped back from the door on unsteady legs.
I wanted to know more. Had to know more. But if I stayed any longer, I might have gone inside and done something I could not yet survive the consequences of.
The next evening I found Rasputin by the stables.
He stood with one shoulder against the fence, a cigarette between his fingers, watching one of the horses circle the paddock. Dusk had already deepened the sky to a bruised purple. The air smelled of hay, damp earth, and the first warning of snow.
He looked at me once as I approached and sighed through his nose.
“What happened?”
“Why do you assume something happened?”
“Because you have that look about you. Like you’re deciding whether to commit murder.”
I stopped beside him and stared through the fence rails without seeing anything.
“Did you know?” I asked.
The cigarette paused halfway to his mouth.
“Know what?”
“That he bought her.”
The silence that followed was answer enough.
I turned to him. “How long?”
His jaw worked once before he said, “Long enough.”
“You never told me.”
“It was before you were born. You were a child.”
“I’m not a child now.”
“No.” He flicked ash into the mud. “Now you’re old enough to understand what knowing does to a person.”
There was no comfort in that. No lie offered to soften the edges. That was not how Rasputin loved. He gave truth cleanly, even when it hurt.
I leaned both forearms on the fence and looked out at the horse. It moved in a wide dark circle, breath pluming white in the cold.
My mother had been bought.
Not courted. Not won. Not cherished.
Bought.
Folded into our house like some exquisite object my father had decided to own.
The pressure in my chest became something hotter. Darker. More useful.
I said, “I’m going to kill every man I find doing that.”
Rasputin did not laugh.
He only studied me with that unreadable stillness of his and said, “You’ll run out of bullets before you run out of men.”
“Then I’ll use knives.”
That got the faintest shadow of a smile from him, but it vanished almost at once.
When he looked back toward the stable yard, his face had shuttered again.
“My mother hated him too,” he said.
I turned.
He almost never spoke of her.
“When I was young,” he continued, “I used to think if I was quiet enough, he might leave her alone. If I did well enough. If I pleased him enough.” His mouth twisted, bitter and brief. “He never leaves anything alone. Tragically, his hobby is obliterating things.”
The horse kicked up dirt at the far end of the paddock. Somewhere in the stable, a groom laughed too loudly at something which didn’t seem quite funny in the moment.
Rasputin’s gaze had gone distant.
“They said she fell,” he murmured. “From a horse. It was a clean break. A tragic accident, they said.” He looked at me then, and there was something in his eyes I still remember too clearly.
Not grief. His grief had long since calcified into something denser, heartbreaking.
“But I remember her screaming the night before.”
Cold moved through me. I said nothing.
“I know what he is,” Rasputin said quietly. “Even when no one says it out loud.”
I swallowed hard and stared at my hands. At how young they still looked then. At how useless. At how much damage they had yet to learn to do.
“My mother looks miserable every day,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I hate him.”
“There’s that, too.”
“I can’t stand that he makes her so miserable.”
Rasputin dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his heel.
“Then learn to be a better man than he is, Archie. And learn to recognize cages,” he added. “They don’t all have bars.”
That stayed with me.
In the years that followed, I saw it everywhere.
Not just in locked doors or split lips or women moved across borders under different names—though I saw those too.
I saw it in silk dresses and careful smiles.
In wives who spoke only when spoken to. In girls pulled into rooms by men old enough to know better and rich enough not to care.
In places polished enough to pass for respectable, where the violence didn’t need to shout because money had already done the work.
It wasn’t hidden. It was an evil sitting there in plain sight. And no-one did a damn thing to stop it.
I started interfering.
Quietly at first. A maid whose makeup sat too thick over one side of her face. A girl no older than sixteen tucked into an apartment that didn’t belong to her, paid for by a man old enough to be her grandfather. I moved them when I could. Paid for rooms. Forged papers. Made problems disappear.
And when quiet didn’t work, I became louder.
I broke hands that reached too far.
I broke jaws that spoke too freely.
Sometimes I beat men bloody in alleys and left them staring at their own teeth in the snow.
It didn’t fix anything. But it made a dent.
I told myself that was enough, knowing that it wasn’t.
I didn’t do it because I was good.
I did it because every time I saw it—every time I heard it—I saw my mother on her knees and my father standing over her as though he’d been appointed her judge and jury.
And I wanted to change the ending.
So I kept going.
Until the night I realized something I should have understood from the start—I wasn’t stopping it.
I was just getting better at surviving it.
And one day, that wasn’t going to be enough.