Flashback - Archie
By twenty-five, the crown had become a noose everyone else insisted on calling an honour.
I did not want it.
That was the one truth I had spoken consistently enough to wear grooves into the walls of that house.
I did not want the title, the ceremony, the deference, the poisoned inheritance I was supposed to acknowledge and be grateful for.
Whatever power came with that seat had already soured in my father’s hands.
I had no interest in inheriting what was left of it.
It should have gone to Rasputin. Not because he craved it. But because he understood what it demanded without confusing duty for vanity.
He could have ruled well if fate had given him a different father.
He knew the people. Knew how to command without theatrics.
Knew where fear ended and respect began.
Men listened when he spoke because he did not waste words, and because there was something in him they trusted even when they did not understand him.
My father knew that too.
That was part of the problem.
The older I got, the more often Viktor called me to him.
He held private dinners and closed-door meetings that excluded Rasputin.
He watched me the way some men inspect a weapon before deciding whether to use it or display it.
He spoke to me more and more as though my future had already been chosen.
As though the crown was not a question but an inevitability waiting for me to stop resisting it.
I resisted harder each time.
One evening, after a dinner so strained the silverware sounded hostile, he made his intentions plain.
We were alone in one of the smaller sitting rooms. The fire had burned down to embers, the lamps dimmed to a low glow that softened the edges of the room without warming it. Snow pressed quietly against the windows, gathering in slow, steady silence.
“It will be you,” he said.
I looked up from the drink I hadn’t touched.
“What?”
“The succession.”
The casualness of his tone made something ugly move in me.
“It should be Rasputin.”
“He is not suited.”
I laughed once. Sharp. “For what? Cruelty?”
His gaze hardened. “Watch your mouth.”
“Or what?”
“You mistake sentiment for wisdom.”
“No,” I said, setting the glass down before I put it through his face. “He is better suited for leadership, and we both know it.”
The slap came fast enough to turn my head.
Pain bloomed hot across my cheek. I tasted blood where the inside of my mouth had split against my teeth.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.
He stood over me breathing hard, fingers flexing as though he had not yet decided whether he wanted to strike again. I looked back at him slowly. My face stung. My pulse had gone strangely calm.
There was a time when he hit me often.
That had changed as I became a man—not because he had found restraint, but because he had realized one day I would hit back.
He had not been wrong.
“Done?” I asked.
He hated when I met violence with stillness. Hated it in the same instinctive way he hated Rasputin’s quiet refusal to become him. My father understood fury. He understood fear. He even understood grief, provided it could be exploited. But stillness unnerved him. It implied a man might be thinking.
“You will never lead by clinging to weakness,” he said.
I smiled without humour. “Is that what you call loyalty now?”
“I call it burden. Your brother is too much of it.”
“He is my brother, and your firstborn,” I reminded him.
“He has limits,” my father snapped. “And men with limits are consumed by men without them.”
There it was. The gospel according to Viktor Popovich.
Take first. Kill cleanly. Own what can be owned. Break what refuses to yield.
It was not power he worshipped. It was domination. And he wanted the son least likely to challenge that religion.
“You’ll never get me to want it,” I said.
His expression changed then, not softening, but shifting into something more thoughtful. Colder.
“You are leaving tomorrow.”
The change in direction was so abrupt it took a moment to settle.
“For what?”
“Business in Novosibirsk. A dispute over shipping routes.” He lifted his own drink and sipped it as though the dispute had not just happened. “You will handle it.”
“I have no intention of—”
“You will go.”
There were ways to disobey my father and ways to survive doing it. That was not one of them. Not then.
I left before the walls could press any closer and went looking for Rasputin.
I found him in the old gym.
He was working the heavy bag like he meant to break it—each strike landing hard enough to drag a protest from the chain above. His shirt clung to him, dark with sweat, wraps tight around his hands, shoulders coiled with a tension that never really left him.
He stopped when he saw my face.
“Finally decided you belong in the ring with me?” he said, a crooked grin cutting through the tension.
“Not likely.”
The grin faded.
He watched me for a second too long, reading what I wasn’t saying. Then he exhaled, slow, like he’d already reached the conclusion.
“What did he do now?”
Our father didn’t need to be named. He lived in every fracture.
A laugh broke out of me—short, sharp, wrong.
Then I told him.
About the dinner. The slap. The crown hanging over my head like something that was decided instead of discussed. And the part that enraged me most of all was that once again, our father had spoken as if the throne belonged anywhere… but to his firstborn.
Rasputin listened without interruption, chest rising and falling slowly as he cooled.
When I was done, he stepped back from the bag and leaned against the wall.
“I’ve told him over and over it should be you.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know that too.”
“I don’t want it.”
His expression flickered, something between pity and resignation.
“No,” he said quietly. “You don’t.”
Frustration surged through me. I paced once across the gym floor and shoved both hands through my hair.
“Then why does he keep pushing?”
Rasputin was silent for a moment. Then, “He has named you heir apparent, Archie. You should not fight him on this, the same way I would never fight you on it. He knows if I take the throne, I will do things my way.”
I looked at him.
He held my gaze without flinching.
My brother had never been a vain man, but he knew his own worth. He knew the shape of his difference from Viktor. He knew our father saw it too, and hated him for it. Hated that the son most naturally suited to power would never wield it like a tyrant.
“He thinks he can shape me better,” I muttered.
“He thinks your anger is easier to point.”
I stopped pacing.
“He wants us divided.”
“Yes.”
“He won’t get it.”
Rasputin’s mouth curved faintly. “You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“He wants me to go to Novosibirsk to deal with a situation.”
He pushed off the wall then and came toward me, slower than usual, as though he were carrying a thought too heavy to say carelessly.
“You go to Novosibirsk,” he said. “Handle the meeting. Come back. We sort this after.”
“What does ‘sort this’ mean?”
“It means I’m trying not to kill our father before breakfast.”
The old gym felt too small all of a sudden. Too close. The air too thick with everything unsaid between our lives and the man who ruled them.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” I asked.
His face changed. Only slightly. But enough.
“Yes,” he said.
The honesty of it hollowed me out.
“Then why don’t you?”
His gaze drifted past me, beyond the windows, beyond the grounds, toward some point only he could see.
“Because families like ours do not collapse quietly,” he said at last. “They take whole districts with them when they go down. Women. Children. Men who never chose any of it. Somebody has to stand in the middle and stop worse creatures from crawling in.”
That was Rasputin.
He had always been too decent for the world that made him.
I hated the world for knowing it and taking aim anyway.
The next morning he walked me to the car.
Snow had begun before dawn and thickened by breakfast, the grounds gone pale and muffled. Security moved through the courtyard with their shoulders hunched against the cold. The driver loaded my case into the boot while another guard checked the route.
Rasputin stood beside me under the front steps, coat buttoned high, dark hair dusted white at the edges from the snowfall. Neither of us were sentimental men. We did not make speeches. We did not say what we felt unless the feeling had become impossible to contain.
Still, something in me resisted the goodbye. It wasn’t fear exactly, but a deep seated anxiety.
“Don’t let him bait you while I’m gone,” I warned him.
That earned the faintest ghost of a smile.
“I’ll try not to deprive him of his hobbies.”
I should have gotten in the car then.
Instead, I looked at him and said it again, because some stubborn part of me still believed repetition might save us both.
“It should be you.”
His face hardened, but not at me.
“Archie.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“I would rather cut off my own hand than sit where he sits.”
He stepped closer and put one hand on the back of my neck. Not rough. Not gentle either. Solid. Anchoring.
“You are not him,” he said.
“Neither are you.”
“No,” he murmured. “And that is why he will never forgive either of us.”
The driver cleared his throat discreetly.
Time.
Rasputin’s hand dropped away.
“Three days,” he said.
“Three days.”
I got into the car and looked back once through the window.
He was still standing there in the snowfall, broad-shouldered and unreadable, watching the gates swallow me whole.
That was the last time I saw my brother alive.
If I had known, I would have torn the door off its hinges and gone back.
I would have dragged him with me.
I would have set the whole cursed inheritance on fire while we watched it burn together.
But foresight is a mercy men like us are rarely granted.
So I left.
And my father made sure the road home ended in a grave.