ROMAN
I wake to pain and motion.
For a few seconds, that’s all I know. My head feels split open.
My stomach turns every time the car hits a rut or broken patch of road.
There is blood dried down the side of my neck and stiff in my collar.
When I try to move, something hot and sharp goes through the back of my skull and settles behind my eyes.
I open them anyway.
The interior of the car swims into focus slowly. Dark leather. Tinted windows. The smell of gun oil and expensive cologne and old smoke worked into the seats.
Then I turn my head and see him.
My father is sitting across from me as if we are on our way to dinner.
He looks perfectly calm. Coat buttoned. One hand resting on his knee. Gun nowhere visible, which means it’s close.
For one second, I just stare at him and let the hatred settle properly back into my body.
He notices I’m awake and says, “There you are.”
My mouth tastes like blood.
I push myself up an inch, enough to feel the handcuffs bite at one wrist where it’s hooked to the grab handle above the door. Good. Useful. I’d rather know the shape of the trap than guess it.
“You hit me from behind,” I say.
“Not personally.”
Of course not.
He glances out the window, then back at me. “Your men scattered when you fell.”
I laugh, and the sound hurts. “Cowards.”
That gets the smallest change in his face. Not quite offense. Something closer to tiredness.
“No,” he says. “Confused. There’s a difference.”
I sit with that for a second, breathing through the pain.
Then I say, “End it right here.”
He looks at me.
I mean it. I can hear that in my own voice.
If this is the moment he’s been arranging for years in one form or another, then let him do it. Let him stop talking around the point and finally put a bullet where all his old disappointments live.
He studies me for longer than I like. “You think too simply when you’re angry,” he says.
“And you think too much when you should have pulled the trigger years ago.”
His mouth tightens slightly.
The car keeps moving. The city outside has thinned into long industrial roads and fenced stretches of water and concrete, but I can’t tell exactly where we are. My head is still pounding too hard to trust distance.
He says, after a moment, “I’m done running.”
I look at him and say nothing.
Because I don’t know what that means from a man like him. Done running could mean confession. It could mean surrender. It could mean he’s decided to die in a way that suits his own vanity.
He keeps his eyes on me. “I should have dealt with all of this differently,” he says.
I almost laugh again, but there’s no strength left for it. “That might be the first honest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
His jaw works once, and for the first time in a long time he looks less like the man I spent my life trying to outrun and more like an older one who has finally exhausted the idea that he can keep his sins neatly arranged.
“Moscow was a mistake,” he says.
“No,” I say. “It was a choice.”
“Yes,” he says quietly. “And then it became a mistake.”
I stare at him.
The car turns. Somewhere outside, gravel spits under the tires.
He goes on, and now there is something rawer in his voice than I have ever heard from him. “I thought I could control it. I thought I could wound the men who needed wounding and keep the damage in its proper place. I was wrong.”
“Lev died.”
“I know.”
“You let me carry it.”
His face changes at that. “Yes,” he says.
I look away from him, toward the dark window, because hearing him say it like that feels worse than all the years of silence did.
“I let you hate me for the wrong reason because it was convenient,” he says. “And then because too much time had passed, and I no longer knew how to tell the truth without making everything worse.”
That drags my gaze back to him.
“You didn’t know how?”
“No.”
I shake my head, and regret it instantly when pain rips through the back of it again. “You always knew how. You just preferred the version where everyone else paid.”
That, finally, makes him look old.
Not weak. Just old.
The car slows.
“Would it help if I say I never wanted Lev dead?” I say. “I’m not saying that to escape my fate. It’s the truth. You killed my mother, but I never wanted your son dead.”
“I’m a monster,” Andrei replies, looking away. Do I catch a hint of guilt on his face? No, that can’t be. “Would it help if I say regret what happened every day? I can’t take back what I did, but I can do something else.”
His hand goes inside his coat.
Every part of my body tightens. I think, This is it. He’s going to shoot me in the backseat like a dog and call it mercy or necessity or some other word men like him use when they’re tired of looking at what they made.
Instead, he pulls the gun and looks past me, out the window.
The car rolls to a stop.
He opens the door and gets out without another word.
For a second, I just sit there, stunned enough that the pain goes distant.
Then a shot cracks outside.
Not close to me. Ahead of the car.
Then another.
And a scream.
I twist as far as the cuff will let me and hear him say, sharp and furious, “I told her to take them home.”
Another sound. Not quite a sob, not quite a shout.
Then his voice again, harder now, carrying through the open door. “Whether they are Lev’s or Roman’s, they are still my grandchildren.”
The words hit me like another blow.
“I never wanted them harmed.”
Then he’s gone from the frame of the door.
I don’t think after that. I move.
The cuff is old-fashioned, meant for speed more than permanence. One hand jammed half numb, head splitting, body still half in the dark, I wrench at the angle until the metal bites skin and then gives just enough for my hand to tear free. It takes skin with it. I don’t care.
I fall half out of the car onto rough gravel and catch myself badly on my palms.
The world sways. Then it clears.
Katerina is on the ground near the second vehicle, curled around the children, both of them alive, both of them crying now that whatever held them frozen has finally broken. Sofia is pressed into her mother’s chest. Nikolai is white-faced and shaking but trying not to show it.
A few feet away, Mikhail is down on his side, blood at his stomach, one hand twitching weakly.
Vika lies farther out, flat and still in the dirt.
Dead.
I look for my father and see only the open dark beyond the yard gate. No sign of him. No second shot. No final word.
Just… Gone.
Katerina lifts her face when she sees me, and the sound that comes out of her is unlike anything I’ve ever heard from her. Not my name, not quite. Something deeper. Something torn straight out of the center of her.
I crawl the last few feet before I can get my legs fully under me.
“Mikhail,” she says, voice breaking. “He’s still breathing.”
I turn, grab the phone from the inside pocket of the nearest dead man’s jacket because mine is gone, and call emergency before I’ve even thought the number through.
My voice sounds strange to my own ears as I give the location, the number of wounded, the fact that there are children, the fact that they need an ambulance now, not questions.
Then I drop the phone and go back to them.
The children see me properly then.
Sofia makes a small, strangled sound and reaches for me with both hands. Nikolai doesn’t move at first, then suddenly does, throwing himself forward with all the fierce control he’s been trying to hold breaking at once.
I pull them both in.
Katerina is still kneeling there, one hand on Sofia, the other shaking so hard she can barely keep it on Nikolai’s back. I put my arm around her too and bring all of them against me, blood and tears and cold morning air and all of us trembling too hard to pretend otherwise.
For one long moment, none of us says anything.
We are alive.
That’s the only thought large enough to hold.
Sofia is sobbing into my shoulder. Nikolai is trying not to, which means he’s shaking even harder than she is. Katerina presses her face into the side of my neck, and I feel her crying there, silently now, spent past sound.
I hold them. I hold all of them.
And for the first time since this began, since the message and the warehouse and the old grief dragged up into daylight, something in me unclenches enough to let the truth in.
These are my children. This is my family.
Not in some polite, careful sense. Not in any way the world would call easy. But real all the same.
I hear sirens in the distance at last.
Katerina lifts her face just enough to look at me. Her eyes are swollen, terrified, relieved, disbelieving all at once.
“He saved them,” she whispers.
I know who she means.
My father.
The man I have wanted dead for so long that the shape of my hatred became part of me.
I look past her, toward the open yard, toward the place he disappeared into the morning, and say nothing.
Because I do not know yet what to do with that.
All I know is this: he was here, they are alive, and when the world finally split open, he chose them.
The sirens get closer.
I keep my arms around Katerina and the children and don’t let go.