23
Darina
Rurik called all of us together the next evening — Vadim, Gleb, and me, gathered around my grandmother's old desk in the back office at Zarya, the same desk that had already held one devastating piece of paper this year and was apparently about to hold another.
He looked like a man who hadn't slept, because he hadn't, and he set a single folded page on the desk between us with a care that told me, before he'd said a single word, exactly how much it had cost him to bring it here at all.
"I need you to read this before I say anything else," he said. "All of you. Together."
The office felt smaller than usual with all four of us crowded into it, the late evening light through the small window gone amber and strange, the building below us emptied of customers for hours already.
I'd lit a single lamp rather than the overhead light, some instinct telling me that whatever was about to happen deserved a gentler illumination than fluorescent honesty would have offered it.
Vadim read it first, his face going through a transformation I will never fully forget — disbelief, then something colder, then a grief so total it seemed to age him five years in the space of four paragraphs.
His hands were shaking by the time he reached the final line, the same hands that had stayed perfectly steady through fifteen years of every other crisis this family had survived. He passed it to Gleb without a word.
Gleb read it twice, his hands perfectly steady in a way that frightened me more than shaking would have, a certain stillness of a man who'd been braced for exactly this confirmation for so long that arriving at it finally felt almost anticlimactic.
When he finished the second read, he set the page down very precisely, squaring its edges against the desk like the small, ordinary motion might hold something larger together.
"I knew," he said, quietly, to no one in particular. "I've known for weeks, the shape of it if not every detail. I don't know why actually seeing it written down in someone else's hand makes it feel like learning it for the first time all over again."
He passed it to me last.
Tolik Yermak's handwriting was cramped and old-fashioned, the careful penmanship of a man who'd learned to write in a different country, in a different decade.
I read every word of it, the brakes, the address, the money, the photograph kept on a desk for fifteen years — and felt something in me go very quiet, the specific quiet of grief finally arriving at a shape solid enough to actually hold.
My stomach dropped, a cold, physical lurch that had nothing to do with the tea I hadn't drunk.
"He kept a photograph of me," I said, when I finally found my voice, the detail that had lodged itself deepest landing now with its full, sickening weight.
"On his desk. For fifteen years. He looked at a picture of a grieving twelve-year-old and called it whatever he needed to call it to keep sleeping at night, while he taught Vadim how to be careful and gave Gleb his first real responsibility and complimented my borscht every single Sunday he ever ate it. "
Vadim's hands had curled into fists on the desk, the knuckles gone white, and his voice came out quiet enough that it took me a second to register he'd spoken at all.
"I'm going to kill him." The quiet was somehow more frightening than if he'd shouted it.
"I've spent fifteen years calling that man family.
I've trusted him with everything — with you, with Gleb, with Yegor, with every soldier under my command.
I'm going to kill him myself, and I don't particularly care what that costs me afterward. "
"You're not going to do anything tonight," Rurik said, his voice carrying an authority that silenced even Vadim's fury, at least temporarily.
"I need all of you to understand that whatever happens next has to happen carefully, deliberately, or we risk losing the only confession we have and the only man brave enough to give it.
Tolik is under my protection. Bogdan doesn't know we have this yet.
That's the only advantage we currently hold, and I'm not willing to throw it away to anyone's understandable rage, including my own. "
"Understandable rage." Gleb's voice had gone flat, dangerous in a way I'd never once heard from my quietest brother.
"He's been a father to you, Rurik. I watched you give him a toast at his last birthday.
Are you certain you're capable of being careful about this, or are you simply telling yourself that because being careful is easier than admitting you don't actually know what you're capable of yet? "
"I'm not certain of anything where Bogdan is concerned anymore, Gleb.
That's precisely why I need everyone in this room to let me move carefully instead of running toward whatever feels satisfying tonight.
" Something in Rurik's voice cracked, just slightly, the first visible fracture in the composure he'd carried since walking through the door.
"I loved him. I want to say that plainly, in front of all of you, because I think pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie.
I loved him completely, and I'm going to have to find a way to destroy him anyway, and I need a few days to figure out how to do that without destroying everything else this organization protects in the process. "
"What does careful actually look like." Vadim's voice had calmed slightly, the soldier in him reasserting itself over the brother, though I could see exactly how much effort the calming required.
"Walk us through it. I need something concrete to hold onto instead of just sitting here wanting to put my hands around his throat. "
"I need to understand exactly how much of the organization's loyalty currently runs through him directly versus through me.
Bogdan has thirty years of relationships I don't have full visibility into — men who trust him specifically, favors he's owed, arrangements I've never needed to ask about because I trusted him to handle them honestly.
" Rurik's voice had settled into the careful, methodical register I recognized from every other crisis I'd watched him navigate, except this time I could hear how much it cost him to maintain it.
"If I move against him carelessly, I risk a fracture in this organization considerably larger than one man's crime — soldiers forced to choose sides, old loyalties tested in ways that could get people killed who have nothing to do with any of this.
I need days, not hours, to map that out before I do anything irreversible. "
"And in the meantime, we all just have dinner with him. Pretend nothing's changed." Gleb's voice carried an edge of disbelief, though I could see him already working through the logic even as he objected to it.
"In the meantime, yes. Exactly that. Every one of us, including me, has dinner with him and pretends nothing has changed, because the moment any of us slips, even slightly, we lose whatever advantage Tolik's confession just gave us.
" Rurik looked at each of us in turn, something almost pleading underneath the authority.
"I know what I'm asking. I'm asking it of myself too. "
The room went quiet, the silence of four people each holding a version of the same impossible grief.
"What do we do," I asked, finally, because someone needed to say something that wasn't strategy.
"We wait. We plan. We make absolutely certain Bogdan never suspects, for even a single day, that any of you know anything beyond the ordinary.
" Rurik looked at each of us in turn, his gaze finally settling on me longer than the others.
"And Darina — I need to talk to you alone, after this.
There's a piece of this that concerns your safety specifically, and I'd rather discuss it with you directly than in front of everyone. "
Vadim and Gleb left eventually, both of them carrying the conversation's weight visibly in their shoulders, Vadim pausing at the door to grip my shoulder once, hard, an unspoken promise I understood without him needing to say it aloud.
I locked the door behind them and turned to find Rurik standing very still, the stillness I'd learned, across these past months, to read as the prelude to something he'd already decided and wasn't prepared to negotiate.
"I want you to stay at my house. Starting tonight.
" He said it plainly, without preamble, the same flat certainty he'd used announcing he loved me, except this time the certainty landed differently.
"I've men I trust completely. The gate, the grounds, all of it considerably more secure than anything I can offer you here.
I've already had your things collected from your apartment. "
"You've already had my things collected."
"Yes."
"Without asking me."
"I'm asking you now." Something in his expression remained immovable, a certain calm of a man who believed, completely, that he was doing the only reasonable thing available to him.
"Darina, you're the daughter of the man Bogdan murdered.
The moment he suspects we know anything, you become the single most obvious target available to him, considerably more obvious than Vadim or Gleb, because you're the living proof of exactly what he did and exactly why he did it.
I am not willing to risk you while I figure out how to handle this. "
"So you decided. For me. The same way every man this year has apparently decided things for me without bothering to actually ask.
" I felt my voice climbing, the grief of the last hour curdling fast into something sharper, more immediate.
"Do you have any idea what it does to a person, having her own safety negotiated by men who love her, repeatedly, as though her input is a luxury they can't afford to include in the planning? "