Rasputin
I stood in the exact spot where my father had killed me. Or where he had tried to.
The office hadn’t changed.
It still had the same dark wood paneling.
The same heavy curtains drawn open to reveal the brutal stretch of Russian sky beyond the windows.
The shelves were lined with books Viktor Popovich had never read but liked others to believe he had.
The same desk where he had signed death warrants, bribed politicians, ruined families, and wielded his power.
The floor had been polished. Many times, I supposed. Someone had scrubbed my blood out of the wood. Someone had knelt right here with a cloth and a bucket and tried to erase the evidence of what had happened.
As if blood ever truly left a place. But it didn’t. Not when there was enough of it. And most certainly not when it belonged to a son.
I stood with my back to the door, staring out the window, one hand curled loosely at my side. My body looked whole now. Strong. Rebuilt. A beast dragged back from the edge and taught how to stand again through sheer willpower, fuelled by hatred and a thirst for revenge.
But I remembered lying here. Face down. Breath gone. Pain so bright it had turned the world white. I remembered the gunshot splitting the air before I even had the chance to turn around.
Viktor hadn’t faced me. He had put a bullet in my back like the coward he was. A father should have looked his son in the eyes before murdering him. Mine hadn’t even given me that.
The door opened behind me.
I didn’t move. I knew who it was before the first breath changed the room.
Archie.
My brother. My blood. My only unfinished prayer.
I had waited for this moment for years and still, when it came, something inside me tightened so hard it almost hurt worse than the bullet had.
His footsteps stopped just inside the room.
A weighted silence followed. A pulse.
I could feel him staring at my back. I could almost imagine the look on his face before I turned.
There would be shock first. Then horror.
I had thought about what I would say. For years, in hospital beds and safe houses, in fever and pain, in nights when my legs would not answer me and my body felt like a prison built by Viktor’s hand, I had rehearsed a hundred versions of this moment.
None of them survived the sound of Archie breathing behind me.
How did a man explain to his brother that the death he had mourned had been a lie?
How did he stand in front of someone he loved and say, I let you grieve me because surviving required cruelty?
How did I tell him that I had clawed my way back from death only to find out he had almost followed me there?
I turned. Slowly. And there he was.
Archie stood frozen near the door.
Not the boy I had left behind. The years in-between had carved him into something sharper. Leaner. Harder around the eyes. There was Italy in his clothes, Russia in his bones, and grief sitting between us like an unwelcome visitor.
His face had gone pale. His mouth parted, but no sound came out.
For one moment, he looked young again.
My little brother.
The one who used to follow me through these halls with bruised knuckles. He had hated being protected but looked for me in every room. The little brother who had stood beside me through hell because hell was easier when we endured it together.
Then his expression changed.
The shock cracked. Grief rose. And behind it came rage.
But I was glad, because he was alive enough to hate me. That was more mercy than I deserved.
“Hello, bratishka,” I said.
His eyes dragged over me. My face. My shoulders. My chest. My legs. Like he was looking for the seams. The trick. The wound that would prove I was not real.
“You’re dead,” he said.
The words were quiet. Wounded.
I held his stare.
“I was.”
His jaw clenched.
“No.” His voice sharpened. “No, don’t do that.”
I said nothing.
He took one step into the room, then stopped again, as if his body couldn’t decide whether to come closer or run.
“You’re dead,” he repeated, but this time it sounded like an accusation. “I saw it. I watched the footage.”
“I know.”
His eyes flashed.
“You know?”
That was the first crack in him. The first real break.
“You know?” he repeated, louder now. “You know what I saw?”
Archie stared at me. Then he laughed once. It was a terrible sound. Empty. Raw. Almost broken.
He stepped further into the office, his hands curling at his sides. “I watched guards carry your body out of this room.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
His voice snapped across the room. I deserved every soul crushing bit of it.
He came closer now, each step careful, dangerous, unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with weakness.
“You let me think you were dead.”
His face twisted. Grief and resentment moved behind his eyes, and there was no clean way to erase that.
“You let me mourn you.”
“Yes.”
“You let me bury you in my head every day for four fucking years!”
My throat tightened.
His hand lifted, then dropped again, like he wanted to shove me, strike me, reach for me, maybe all three. He looked furious enough to kill me and devastated enough to collapse.
That was grief. Ugly. Confused. Starving.
“You were alive,” he said, and now his voice was lower, which was worse. “All this time, you were alive.”
“Not all of me.”
His gaze hardened.
“Do not dress this up for me.”
“I’m not.”
“You were breathing.”
“Barely.”
“You could have sent word.”
“No.”
His head tilted slightly.
“No?”
“If I sent word, Viktor would have killed us both. Again.”
His laugh was bitter.
I looked at him then. At the shadows beneath his eyes. At the place where his body still held the memory of injury. At the thinness beneath the expensive clothes. At the proof that my little brother had not escaped untouched.
I took a step toward him. He took one back. The rebuff stopped me in my tracks.
“I did not leave you because I wanted to.”
Archie’s mouth tightened.
“You left me anyway.”
He stared at me for a long moment, breathing harder now.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything. And don’t you dare leave out the parts you think will hurt me.”
A strange pride moved through me.
There he was. My brother. Not begging for mercy, but demanding the truth. Even when truth came with heartache.
I turned slightly, looking down at the floor where Viktor had put me.
“He shot me in the back before I could turn.”
Archie went very still.
“I know.”
I glanced at him.
His eyes had dropped to that same place on the floor.
Of course he knew. He had watched it. Maybe a hundred times.
“He made one mistake,” I said.
Archie looked back at me.
“He had men who loved me more than they feared him.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, but there was no humor in it.
“For once, that worked in my favor.”
I took a slow breath.
“The bullet lodged near my spine.”
His expression changed. Just a little. Rage faltered under his horror.
“I don’t remember much after the shot. Pieces only. Hands on me. Someone cursing. Someone saying I was dead. Someone else saying I wasn’t. They carried me out like a corpse because that was what Viktor ordered them to do.”
My jaw tightened.
“They were supposed to dispose of me.”
Archie’s face drained further.
“But they didn’t. Instead, someone took me to Mama Marushka.”
The name moved through the room like an old ghost.
Mama Marushka.
She had not birthed us, but in the ways that mattered, she had helped raise us.
She had fed us when our mother was locked in sadness and our father was locked in power.
She had cleaned blood from our faces and slapped the backs of our heads when we behaved like animals.
She had taught us which herbs brought down fever and which men in the household could not be trusted.
Archie’s throat shifted.
“She was alive?”
“She still is.”
His eyes sharpened.
I knew what that meant to him. Another ghost returned. Another grief undone.
“She had been hiding outside the city for years,” I said. “Bass knew. A handful of others knew. When Viktor ordered them to get rid of me, they took me to her instead.”
“And Bass?”
“He knew by morning.”
Archie absorbed that like another blow.
“Bass knew.”
“Yes.”
“And he didn’t tell me.”
“He was protecting you, Archie.”
Archie’s eyes flashed again.
“Everyone keeps saying that, but you can’t keep protecting me from the truth!” He roared.
I said nothing.
He looked at me with open hurt now, and there was no enemy in the world I had faced that frightened me more than that expression.
I could take rage. Rage had shape. Rage gave a man something to fight. But this? This was a brother looking at me like I had joined the list of people who had abandoned him. I had no defense against it.
“I lay in Marushka’s house for months,” I continued. “On my stomach. Unable to move. Unable to feel my legs properly. Unable to do anything but breathe as my hatred towards our father grew.”
Archie’s stare locked on mine.
“The doctors came at night. Men who owed Bass. Men who owed me. They cut into my back and pulled out fragments where they could. They left what they had to. Infection nearly took me twice.”
His face tightened. I kept going because he had asked for everything.
“And when death didn’t take me, my own body tried to finish the job.”
I looked down briefly at my legs.
“They told me I might never walk again.”
The room went quieter.
Outside the window, wind pressed against the glass.
Inside, my brother stood with his hands clenched and his grief bleeding into something neither of us knew how to hold.
“For a long time,” I said, “I believed them.”
His eyes glistened, but no tear fell. Popovich men were raised to bleed before we cried. Our father had made sure of it.
“I fell more than I walked. Marushka used to beat my legs with towels when they wouldn’t answer me.”
His brow twitched.
“She said if I planned to die, I should stop wasting her soup.”
For half a second, something almost like memory crossed his face.
Mama Marushka, five feet of fury, terrifying enough to scold corpses back to life.
It vanished quickly.
I continued.
“I learned to sit up. Then to stand. Then to take one step without collapsing. Then two. Then across the room. Then down the hallway. Every inch was war. Every day I pictured you.”
His eyes lifted.
“You were the only reason I stood again.”
His anger faltered. I hated that too. I didn’t want forgiveness because I had suffered.
Pain was not currency. It did not buy absolution. But he needed the truth, and the truth was that every movement had been made toward him.
“I went to Italy,” I said.
Archie stilled.
“What?”
“I went to bring you home.”
His expression changed again.
“When?”
“Too late.”
He watched me. I hated the next part.
“I arrived after the attack.”
The room shifted. All the air left it. Archie’s face closed. He knew exactly which attack I meant. The one that had nearly killed him. The one that had brought him close enough to death that maybe, somewhere in that darkness, he had heard me.
His eyes widened slightly.
“You were there?”
“Yes.”
He stared at me.
I saw the memory move through him. Maybe not clear. Maybe just a shadow. A voice. A presence at the edge of death.
“You…” His voice dropped. “I saw you.”
I said nothing.
His face shifted into something shattered and furious all at once.
“I thought I was dying.”
“You were close.”
“I thought I imagined you.”
“You didn’t.”
He dragged a hand through his hair, turning away from me, then back again.
“I had spent years thinking I would recover, find you, and bring you home so we could take him down together. That was the dream that kept me alive when my body did not want to be. You and me. Shoulder to shoulder. Ending him the way we should have done from the beginning.”
My voice hardened.
Archie stared at me.
“I came back to Russia,” I said. “I walked into this house. I stood in front of our father. And I killed him.”
There was only silence as Archie’s eyes held mine.
“You killed Viktor.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
I did not look away.
“With my own two hands, looking right into his eyes, I squeezed the life out of him.”