Chapter 8 #2
He offers me a look so cutting that I am painfully reminded of his youth and how much of it I wasted ensuring he became useful. “And what exactly am I meant to do with that, Pappa?”
There is no mockery in the title now, and that somehow makes it feel heavier.
“You are not meant to do anything with it immediately,” I say. “This is not an instruction, and I am not here to order you away from or toward him. That would be pointless.”
His eyes grow narrow. “Then why are you really here?”
I take a breath.
Because I do not know how to save you from this, but I know exactly how impossible it is to survive it without at least one person naming the wound correctly.
Because I could not save Ruslan or Lucia.
Because, perhaps, I have spent enough of my life mistaking power for usefulness, and I would like, before I die, to fail at least one of my sons less thoroughly than I failed the rest.
Because I am sorry.
“Because you’ve seen him again, and I know what seeing a lost love can wake up in a man. I am here because if I say nothing now, then I am not merely cold. I am a coward.”
That must hit him harder than anything else I have said, because he rises then.
For one sharp second, my body braces as if standing means anger, departure, or dismissal.
Old instincts, I suppose. However, he walks around the desk and goes to the sideboard, pouring himself a drink from the decanter there with a hand that looks steady until one watches closely enough to see the minute tension in the wrist.
“Did you ever regret loving Ruslan?” he asks finally.
Even now, the name moves through me like lightning.
I think of his laugh when it was still easy.
The softness he only ever allowed when we were alone enough to pretend the world had ended outside the room.
The betrayals. The exile. The years. The fact that even now, after all the blood and all the silence, there are still moments when I hear a certain turn of phrase in Russian, and my entire body remembers before my pride can intervene.
“No,” I say, because there is no point lying to my son now. “I regret what it cost. I regret what I became trying to survive it. I regret the people who paid for it. But loving him? No. That part was never the mistake.”
He says nothing, but I see the answer matters to him regardless. There are only so many questions a man can ask about a doomed love, and most of them sound like other things when spoken aloud.
Vincenzo walks back over, braces his hands on the edge of his desk, and drops his head.
He looks back up and studies me again, this time the look is almost unbearably familiar.
It resembles Ruslan’s, thirty years ago, on the nights when he had decided to trust me against all good sense and was still waiting to see whether I would make him regret it before dawn.
He sits back down opposite me. “You told me to be careful once. What does that mean, exactly?”
I answer with the truest version I have left. “Do not confuse suffering for devotion or make pain a shrine and kneel to it because it resembles what you’ve lost. Men change, and years change them more. You know this better than anyone.”
Vincenzo holds my gaze, and for one terrible second, I see the answer there before he speaks it.
“What if it’s too late?” he whispers.
There is no good fatherly reply to that, not from a man who has built his whole life on the consequences of failing that exact question.
So, I stand. It’s abrupt enough that he blinks, and for a moment, we are simply two men in a room, one older and full of ghosts, the other young enough to mistake inevitability for choice because he still has the energy to fight it.
I move around the desk before I can talk myself out of it.
Vincenzo rises out of reflex, uncertainty crossing his face so quickly it barely has time to settle.
I stop in front of him, close enough to see the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes, close enough to smell the smoke on his shirt and the bite of whatever cologne he grabbed this morning without really thinking about it.
Then, because apparently age has made me dangerous in brand-new ways, I reach out, hesitating only a fraction before I set my hand against the side of his face.
It is such a small thing, yet I know from the way his whole body locks, that I could have slapped him and surprised him less. It’s just a father’s hand where it should have been placed more often and much sooner.
“I have never been good at showing concern. I cannot go back and be the father you should have had,” I say. “But I can regret that you needed one and mostly had me instead.”
Vincenzo’s throat works once, and he looks at me with an expression I cannot fully read—a combination of pain, tenderness, and old suspicion does not have simple names.
“That,” he says after a moment, “might be the closest thing to affection I’ve ever heard from you.”
I let my hand fall before the moment becomes unbearable.
“Yes,” I say. “Which is why I’ll leave before I ruin it.”
That earns me the faintest smile, and I take it for what it is: a small step.
“Be careful,” I tell him one last time. “Because men like that do not leave you in pieces that fit together the same way afterward.”
His jaw flexes once. “I know,” he says, and because I have finally done as much damage as honesty can do in a single morning, I turn and walk toward the door.
At the threshold, I pause, glancing back once. “If you need…” I start, then pause, irritated enough with my own uncertainty that I force the rest out without elegance. “If you need me before I am dead, use the direct line. Not a secretary, not one of the guards. Come straight to me.”
I hold his gaze and let him see that I mean it. It changes nothing of what came before, but there are some things a father should say, even if he only learns how to after the ruin is already complete.
“You don’t have to say anything now. I know this is not…” I search briefly for a word and dislike all of them. “Simple.”
“No, it isn’t.” He looks toward the drawer once more, then back to me. “But I heard you, Pappa. Thank you.”
It is not acceptance or forgiveness; it is simply acknowledgment. Yet from him—from a son I have taught too well how not to need—it feels like more mercy than I deserve.
I nod once, then I leave him alone with the bullet in the drawer and the warning I should have given years earlier, or perhaps not at all.