KATERINA
For a second I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing.
Vika is standing behind me with a gun in her hand and that small, polished smile she uses at parties when she wants everyone to think she knows something they don’t. Except there is nothing playful in it now. Nothing careless. The smile is real in the worst possible way.
I stare at her. “Vika? Seriously?”
She tilts her head. “Hello, Katya.”
My mouth goes dry. The yard feels too still around us. Mikhail has his gun up, but he can’t take the shot. He knows it. I know it. Vika knows it too.
I hear myself say, “Why are you doing this?”
For one moment, her expression changes. Not softer. More open. As if the question touches the one place in her where the truth lives. “Because I loved him,” she says.
I just look at her.
She laughs once under her breath, but it comes out bitter. “Oh, don’t pretend to be surprised. I loved Lev. More than you ever did.”
“Sure, you did,” I say calmly.
“Shut up, bitch,” she says. The gun in her hand shakes a little.
With Vika, so much is performance that it becomes hard to tell where vanity ends and feeling begins.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I tell her.
“No?” she says. “I know exactly what I’m saying.
I loved him. I wanted him. I would have stood beside him properly.
I would have given him a life that made sense.
But you got there first, didn’t you? You with your quiet face and your good daughter act and your talent for having men ruin themselves over you. ”
My stomach turns. “This is about Lev?”
“It started with Lev.”
Her finger stays steady on the trigger. She’s enjoying this now, the finally-being-seen part of it.
She goes on, “After he died, I thought that was the end of it. Another ugly family story, another dead heir, another thing we would all step around at dinner until it became polite to forget. Then Andrei Morozov contacted me.”
My breath catches. “What?”
Vika smiles at my face. “Yes,” she says softly. “That surprised me too.”
“Drop the gun,” Mikhail says, quietly. “And this doesn’t end badly.”
“Be quiet.” She doesn’t look at him. “You’re very distracting.”
Then her gaze comes back to me.
“He wanted eyes on Roman,” she says. “That was all at first. He knew I’d help because he knew how much I loved Lev.
Men like him always know where to push. He said Roman was dangerous, unstable, still dragging old blood around behind him.
He said if Roman came near this family again, someone should be paying attention. ”
I can barely get the words out. “And you agreed?”
She shrugs one shoulder. “It wasn’t hard.”
I feel sick. Not just because she did it. Because suddenly all the little things rearrange themselves. Her interest in Roman at the party. The dress. The dance. The way she kept orbiting him like it was vanity and appetite and nothing more. It was all a ruse.
She laughs again, softer this time. “At first, he barely looked at me. That should have been insulting, but then I realized why. He wasn’t interested in me.”
Her eyes glitter. “He was interested in you.”
I close my eyes for one second.
Of course she saw it. Of course she hated it.
“When Andrei realized that too,” she says, “everything changed. Then the rumors became interesting.”
My skin goes cold. “What rumors?”
But I already know.
Her smile widens. “Oh, Katya.”
The gun presses harder into my back.
“The children.”
For one terrible second, I can’t hear anything except the blood beating in my ears.
She says it almost lazily, like she’s discussing weather. “There were whispers already. About the twins. About Lev. About timing. About how strange it all was. Andrei wanted to see them.”
That makes no sense to me at first. My mind catches on the wrong part.
“See them?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He wondered,” she says. “That’s the word he used. Wondered. Such a tidy little word for such ugly curiosity.”
My throat tightens. “He knows?”
“No,” she says. “Not for sure. But he wondered enough to care.”
I can feel my whole body going colder with every word.
Vika watches it happen and seems to enjoy it.
“At first, that was all it was,” she says.
“Curiosity. He wanted to see them. I didn’t understand why he cared so much.
They were only children. Yours. Lev’s. A scandal, yes, but still just children.
” Her mouth curls. “I thought he was indulging some old man’s obsession with bloodlines.
Men like him love to count who belongs to whom. ”
Her finger stays steady on the trigger. “So I got them to him.”
For a second, I can’t breathe. “You what?”
She smiles. “Don’t look so shocked. You were making it almost embarrassingly easy. The house was in chaos already. Everyone running around, everyone whispering, everyone too busy with their own fear to see what was right in front of them.”
I stare at her.
Mikhail is motionless a few feet away, gun raised, face like stone. He knows as well as I do that one wrong move and she could pull the trigger.
Vika goes on as if we’re discussing flowers. “I got the children to him because that was the arrangement. He wanted Roman drawn out. That was the point of all of it in the end. Not the twins themselves. Not really. Roman.”
My skin goes tight all over.
“He knew Roman would come,” she says. “The second children were involved, he knew exactly what Roman would do.”
That makes sense in a sickening, immediate way. Of course it does. Roman would walk into fire for them. For me. For his own blood, whether Andrei was certain of it or not.
I say, “Andrei used my children to lure his son.”
“Yes.”
There’s no shame in her voice. No hesitation. Only a brittle, self-satisfied certainty that makes my stomach turn.
“But then,” she says, and now something in her face changes, something harsher and more private, “he ruined it.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“When Roman got there, Andrei stopped caring about the children.” Her voice turns brittle around the words. “That was the infuriating part. He looked at them, looked at Roman, and then told me to take them back.”
For one suspended second, none of it makes sense.
“Take them back?”
“Yes.” Her mouth twists. “As if they were parcels. As if I had gone to the trouble of removing them from that house just to carry them back in through the same door.”
My heart is hammering so hard I feel sick. “Where are they?”
She ignores me. “He said they had served their purpose,” she says. “He had what he wanted. Roman came. Roman walked in. Roman chose exactly as Andrei knew he would. And then he looked at me and told me to take the children away.”
Her eyes glitter strangely in the gray light. “And I thought, no.”
The word lands like a stone dropped down a well.
My mouth goes dry. “Vika.”
“No,” she says again, quieter now, and there is something terribly calm in her face. “I can’t do that. I can’t just put them back. I can’t watch you take them home and keep living inside that lie while Lev stays dead and I get nothing.”
Mikhail says, low and controlled, “Vika, think very carefully about what you say next.”
She doesn’t even look at him.
Her eyes stay on me. “If I couldn’t have Lev’s children,” she says, “then no one else can.”
For a second I don’t understand the sentence. Not really. My mind rejects it on instinct, refuses to build the shape of it.
Then it lands.
And when it does, it tears something open inside me.
“You’re insane.”
She laughs, and this time there is no prettiness in it at all. It’s flat. Wrong. The sound of something cracked too deep to mend.
“No,” she says. “I’m the only one who has been honest about this from the beginning.”
I stare at her. “Honest?”
“Yes.” Her voice rises, but not wildly. Sharply.
Bitterly. “You never loved him. You tolerated him. You endured him. You let the whole family build that arrangement around you and still somehow came out of it with everyone wanting to protect you from the consequences. Even after he died, even after you came home pregnant, even after the whole city whispered, it was always you people looked at with pity.”
Her breathing has changed now. Faster, shallower. Her hand on the gun is still steady, but her face has gone bright with something feverish.
“I loved him,” she says. “I would have given him sons. I would have given him a life that made sense. I would have stood beside him and never made him feel trapped. But you—” Her voice breaks on the word and turns vicious. “You got his name. You got the sympathy. You got the children.”
My whole body is shaking now, though I’m trying not to show it. “They are not his.”
The words slip out before I can stop them. Vika goes still.
For the first time since this began, her expression truly changes. Not anger. Not satisfaction. Confusion.
“What?”
I hear my own breathing. Mikhail’s. The distant water behind the warehouse. The whole ruined morning hanging on one impossible second.
I stare at my sister and say it again, clearer this time. “They are not Lev’s children.”
Vika stares at me.
For one second, I think I’ve shaken something loose. Not remorse. she isn’t built for that. But confusion, maybe. A crack. Enough to throw her off the line she’s been feeding herself for years.
Then her face hardens again. “No,” she says.
The word is flat. Final.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.” Her voice sharpens, almost shrill now. She pushes me away. “You would say anything now.”
I take one step toward her before I can stop myself. “Vika, listen to me. They are not Lev’s—”
She fires.
The sound blows the yard apart.
Pain tears through my ankle so suddenly I don’t understand it at first. Then my leg buckles and I go down with a cry I cannot hold back. The gun skids out of my hand onto the gravel. For one confused second all I can see is the ground rushing up and the dark splash of blood blooming over my shoe.
Mikhail fires at the same moment.
Too late. Too rough.
His shot goes wide.
Vika shoots again.
This one hits him.
He makes a terrible choking sound, one hand flying to his stomach, and then he folds sideways onto the concrete as if someone cut the strings holding him up.
His gun clatters out of reach. He tries to catch himself and can’t.
In another second he’s flat on his side, blood already running through his fingers.
“Mikhail!”
He doesn’t answer.
My ankle feels like fire. I drag myself backward over the gravel, half screaming, half gasping, trying to get my weight off the leg and failing because everything hurts and nothing makes sense and Vika is still standing there with the gun in her hand like this is only becoming more convenient for her.
She looks down at me with cold disgust.
“You always did make things ugly at the end.”
Then she turns away from us.
The car is parked by the far side of the yard, half-hidden near the loading ramp. My whole body goes cold when I see where she’s going.
The children.
I try to get up and nearly black out from the pain.
“No,” I say, though it comes out broken and weak and nowhere near loud enough. “No, Vika—”
She opens the rear door.
Nikolai is inside.
I see his face through the glass. Pale, too still, trying not to show fear because he thinks that makes him useful. Sofia is beside him, eyes wide, mouth already opening to scream.
Vika lifts the gun.
Everything in me tears at once.
I drag myself forward with my hands, my bad leg trailing behind me, a raw animal sound ripping out of my throat. Mikhail is still down. The yard feels miles wide. The children are too far away. The gun in Vika’s hand looks absurdly small for the amount of horror it holds.
“Vika!”
She doesn’t look at me. She points the gun at Sofia.
Then blood splashes across the front of Vika’s blouse.
For one impossible second, she just stands there, blinking as if she doesn’t understand what has happened.
Then another red bloom opens across her stomach.
The gun slips from her hand.
She turns halfway, unsteady, surprise wiping everything else off her face, and crumples to the ground beside the car.
Behind her stands a man in a dark coat, gun still raised.
Andrei Morozov.