Artem
Her words land like blows, but they don’t leave the wounds I expected. They don’t fuel the rage. They hollow it out.
For months I’ve imagined this moment. I thought hearing her speak about that night would make everything sharp again. I thought I’d feel justice in the sound of her voice breaking. But standing here, all I can feel is the exhaustion in her eyes, the tremor she tries to hide.
I turn toward the window, needing distance. The city sprawls beneath us, a river of lights bleeding into the dark. In the glass, her reflection looks pale and still, hands clasped in front of her like she’s already confessed to a priest.
I remember the call that night, my father’s voice, the way the world tilted when I realised my little brother was gone. The rage that came after was the only thing that kept me breathing. Revenge was easy; it gave me a shape, a direction. But now the shape feels wrong.
“You were there,” I say, quieter than before.
She nods. Her voice is a whisper. “I tried to stop it.”
The image I’ve carried of her, the spoiled girl who watched without remorse, crumbles too easily. I think of Lev, the way he could draw softness out of people just by listening. Of course he would have seen something in her. Of course he would have stayed out there talking to her in the dark.
“I hated your family,” I say, the truth stripped bare. “Every day since that night.”
“I know.”
Her calmness infuriates me, but it also unravels me. “And you think that changes now?”
“No,” she says. “I think you needed to tell me.”
I look at her then, really look. She isn’t defending herself. She isn’t pleading. She’s just standing there, bearing the weight of everything I throw at her.
I should end this. I should reach for the gun I left in the drawer, finish what I came here to do. But my hand doesn’t move.
Instead, I hear myself asking, “What was he saying to you? Before it happened.”
She hesitates. “Something about an argument he had had with someone. I can’t remember the details because of what came after. It’s like my brain is punishing me for what happened.”
The words steal the air from my lungs.
The argument.
Music school.
He wanted to go to music school and I told him his place was with the family.
I drag a hand through my hair, trying to force back the ache in my throat. “He died for nothing,” I say.
She shakes her head. “No. He died because of love twisted into fear. My brother thought he was protecting me. Lev wanted space to process and calm down from whatever had happened.”
The quiet stretches. My pulse is a drumbeat in my ears. I realise, with a kind of horror, that I don’t know what to do with her now. Killing her won’t bring Lev back, and letting her go feels like tearing out what’s left of my purpose.
When I meet her eyes again, the room feels smaller, the distance gone. “You shouldn’t have told me,” I murmur.
“Maybe not,” she says. “But you needed to hear it. And now I’ve said it, you can do what you came here to do.”
I take a slow breath. The scent of her wraps around the moment like fog. The world outside continues its glittering pretense of life, but here everything is suspended. And for the first time since Lev’s death, I don’t know what comes next.
She breathes like a person who has survived a war.
I watch it, counting the small, human measures of breath and heartbeat, and the anger that used to be a steady drum loosens at the edges.
I tell myself that it’s dangerous. I tell myself it’s wrong.
Still, I can’t summon the certainty I carried here tonight like armour.
“He loved you,” the thought slips out before I can clamp my mouth shut.
It is not a judgement. It’s a statement that arrives like evidence on a table, plain and undeniable.
I never allowed for that. I never allowed for the idea that my brother could have loved someone who was not part of our circle, who didn’t carry our names and our debts.
The picture I painted of him has been rigid and useful and false.
Her shoulders twitch at the word loved. She snorts softly, the sound small and almost bitter.
“We were only friends,” she says, and there is no dramatic clinging to the past in it.
It’s just fact, resigned and unvarnished.
“Lev kept his heart to himself. He always treated me with kindness and respect.”
Her reply should harden me. Instead it makes his laughter echo through my memory, Lev folding into himself with that private, crooked smile when he shared something he prized.
I remember Lev offering me a cigarette and saying something about beauty being a kind of cruelty because it always leaves you wanting more.
He would have hated that I’m here, angry and broken, and that in my brokenness I’m going to kill the person who only ever wanted his happiness.
The ache in my chest is no longer fuel for vengeance.
It’s a hand, small and insistent, pressing at a place I thought was numb.
I realise, with a clarity that is almost cruel, that she is not a faceless enemy.
She is a person who carries the same hollowing grief, who has been punished in quiet ways for a mistake that was never entirely hers.
“You’re prepared to die for what your brother did,” I say, and the words sound both like acceptance and like surrender. Saying them aloud shifts something in the room. It makes the choice I came to make more complicated by giving it a voice.
Her eyes skim over my face then, searching for the trap.
When she finds none, something very fragile relaxes in the angle of her jaw.
It is a small unmaking of the hardness she has worn like armour since that night.
For a moment she looks younger than her years, as if the grief that has mapped her face might recede.
Desire threads through the pity I feel, thin as a wire and no less electric.
It is not the blunt, possessive hunger I expected to feel.
It is quieter and more dangerous because it arrives as recognition.
I notice the way her throat moves when she swallows, the pale curve where her collarbone meets her neck, the faint tremor in her fingers when she folds her hands.
These are not the observations of a man ready to kill; these are the measurements of someone mapping another person, learning what is breakable and what might be worth protecting.
I tell myself I am only cataloguing, only preparing a case file.
I tell myself the calculation is tactical, clinical.
But the truth is that each detail is a small theft.
I am stealing knowledge of her the way thieves steal jewels, light-fingered and breathless.
That theft should horrify me. Instead it makes me unbearably alert to her, as if knowing the exact shade of her eyes will anchor me to something that isn’t rage, and that for one minute I can feel something other than white hot fury.
“I am.” She sighs again, a tiny sound that startles me into a stiffer posture.
“I have never been anything to anyone,” she says, voice stripped of self-pity.
“Not Lev. Not anyone.” The words are a confession.
A ledger, neat and final. “I was hoping I could experience that with someone before I died. But I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. ”
Hearing her say it, I understand the shape of what I have been feeling.
It is not solely vengeance unspooled into obsession.
It is hunger that has been misdirected for months, grief looking for a face.
I have captured her because killing someone felt like a way to close an open wound.
Now that wound wants something different. It wants repair. It wants company.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask quietly, because I need to hear her say something that will make the next step feel less like stumbling in the dark.