Chapter 14
fourteen
Nikolaj
By the time we reach the villa, dawn is still hours away. The property comes into view slowly, through skeletal trees and a narrow stone road that has existed longer than some governments.
There are no grand gates here, not by Dragovich standards.
No monumental columns, no sprawling compound with men patrolling like decorative threats.
Just a modest iron gate, old brick walls softened by age and ivy—a small villa set back among winter-bare gardens, olive trees that should not be here, and dark cypress.
The exterior is pale, worn, and dignified without trying to impress. Warm light glows in two downstairs windows and one upstairs. Ruslan is awake, then. Of course he is. The man sleeps like guilt pays rent in his skull.
The car stops near the front path, and Kai turns from the passenger seat. “Do you want me inside?”
“No.”
He nods once, then adds, “I’ll be near the gate.”
“I know.”
He hesitates, which means there’s something else. “Nikolaj. Don’t go in there looking for permission.”
That sentence pisses me off because it is useful, and I get out before I can add to it.
Cold air bites at my face as I walk toward the villa.
The garden smells of frozen earth, pine, and old chimney smoke.
It’s strange how small the place looks every time I return.
As a child, it seemed larger, not physically but in atmosphere, charged with adult secrets and the weight of things I wasn’t meant to know.
Now it is just a house. A modest house where an old monster has retired to drink vodka, tend grudges, and pretend his heart died decades ago when every conversation with him proves otherwise.
He opens the door before I knock, and stands there in a dark sweater and wool trousers, hair silvered more than he likes to admit, one hand braced against the frame.
There’s age in his face now. Real age, not weakness but weathering. He is still broad, still dangerous, still capable of making the air change around him with one look.
But the first thing I notice is the tension near his left eye, that subtle tightening he gets when the old ache has returned. I think absurdly of the scar over my own, the jagged line that makes us resemble each other more than either of us ever wanted.
He doesn’t look surprised to see me. That means either Kai called ahead or fatherhood does occasionally come with instincts worth mentioning.
“You look like shit,” he says in Russian.
I step past him into the warmth of the house. “Always good to see you too, Papa.”
He closes the door behind me. “This is not a social hour, then.”
“When have we ever had one?”
“A father can dream.”
I snort despite myself and take off my coat, hanging it on the peg by the door because this house has pegs by the door instead of servants appearing to take things from your hands. It always feels faintly absurd. Domestic, almost. I don’t know what to do with that.
Ruslan watches me with the same assessing look he has given me my whole life, but there is less command in it now. More caution. Maybe even concern, though he’d sooner drink poison than label it that. “Vodka?”
“Obviously.”
He leads me toward the kitchen instead of the study, another sign that he knows this is not business.
The kitchen is old but clean, with dark wood cabinets, white tile, and brass handles polished by use rather than staff.
A kettle sits on the stove. A loaf of black bread rests under a cloth.
There’s a small table by the window where he has clearly been sitting alone, a newspaper folded beside the vodka bottle and two glasses now, because he has already reached for another before I answer.
I sit, and he pours. For a while, we don’t speak. That is the thing about my father: he understands silence better than most men understand language. He doesn’t rush to fill it because he knows silence always confesses eventually if you let it sit long enough.
“I assume you didn’t drive out here for tea.”
“No,” I say. “I drove out here because I’m tired of everyone making decisions about my life and calling it mercy.”
His posture changes by less than an inch, but it changes. The old ease around his shoulders tightens. Not in fear; the old Pakhan doesn’t show fear in ways others can see. Recognition, though. He knows the subject before I say it plainly.
Finally, I say, “You hid Vincenzo from me.”
Ruslan does not deny it. “Yes,” he says.
The clean honesty of it catches me harder than an excuse would have.
“You knew what he was to me, and when I woke up without that part of myself, you decided not to give it back. You let me build a life over a grave I didn’t know existed.
You let me look at my own history as if it belonged to someone else.
You let me hate him for pieces of a story you knew were incomplete, and you let everyone around me participate. ”
Ruslan’s jaw tightens. “I let you live when you woke with your mind half torn open. You were violent, unstable, and full of enough pain to make every doctor in that room choose their words like they were walking through mines. You remembered Vieri as an enemy. You remembered duty. You remembered enough hate to hold onto, and nothing that softened it. If I had forced the rest on you then, do you know what might have happened?”
“No,” I say. “Because you never gave me the chance to find out.”
He stands too quickly for a man his age and turns toward the back window, one hand braced briefly on the counter. “No. I did not. Because I knew exactly what it could do to a man to be handed love and loss in the same breath.”
I watch his back. There is no victory in pressing him when he sounds like that, but I press anyway because I am his son, and mercy is not our first language.
“You knew what it did to you,” I say. “So, you assumed it would do the same to me.”
I watch the minute flinch in his shoulders, and know I’ve hit the mark. What Salvatore told me was correct—they were doomed lovers.
“So, you know what happened, then,” he says, and looks over his shoulder, blue eyes hard. “You think you are so different?”
“I think I had a right to my own ruin.”
Ruslan turns fully then, and for a second, the retired man is gone. The former Pakhan stands in his place, not as strong as he once was, perhaps, not as feared in the world beyond this villa, but still dangerous. Still my father.
“Yes, you did. That is what I have learned too late.”
The honesty steals half my anger, leaving me with nowhere good to put the rest. I hate that. I came here wanting something simpler. Not an apology, I know better. Not absolution—he has no right to ask, and I have no interest in granting it.
But perhaps I wanted the clean satisfaction of being able to hold his actions up to the light and call them only cruel.
Instead, he stands across from me in a modest kitchen in Kolomna, with pain behind one eye and vodka at his hand, and he tells me yes.
He hurt me because he was afraid I would become him.
He lowers himself back into his chair more slowly this time. I look away first, because watching him admit fault feels more intimate than watching him bleed.
“You did it because of Salvatore,” I say, turning back to him. “You looked at me after the ambush, and you saw yourself. That’s what this was. You saw a Dragovich boy ruined by a Vieri, and decided you’d rather carve the wound out than let me carry it.”
My father’s mouth flattens. “You were broken.”
“I was hurt.”
“You were compromised—”
“I was in love!”
His face goes unreadable in the way only the truly dangerous learn how to do.
He doesn’t deny it; instead, he says, very quietly, “When I looked at you after that ambush, I saw a boy who still had a chance to live. You call it theft because you’re standing here now with a crown on your head and a recovered memory making you believe pain would have been noble.
But noble pain is for poets and dead men, Nikolaj. Men like us do not survive it.”
My jaw locks. “You survived.”
His laugh is soft and brutal. “Did I?”
That shuts me up for one ugly second, because there’s the answer, isn’t it? Not in theory. No, Ruslan did not survive Salvatore. Not really. He endured it. He built over it. He turned the wound into a doctrine and called it survival because he didn’t have another word.
Which means I was right.
He did it to save me from becoming him.
I drag a hand over my mouth and look away toward the windows because if I keep staring at him right now, I’m going to say something I can’t take back.
“I get that you thought you were sparing me. I get that losing him destroyed you, and you looked at me and couldn’t bear the idea of history repeating with a different son.” My throat tightens. “And I’m still angry. Because none of that gave you the right.”
“Anger,” he says slowly, “is often the tax on understanding.”
I almost laugh at the phrasing because only my father could turn an apology-shaped moment into something that sounds like a lecture. “I wanted better than this.”
His gaze lowers briefly to his own hands, then returns to me. “That is the tragedy of fathers,” he says. “We give what we think is protection, and by the time we learn what it really was, our sons have already named it harm.”
The line should feel manipulative. Instead, it just feels true in the worst possible way. That doesn’t fix anything; it makes it harder to hate the wound properly.
I look down at my glass. Empty again. He refills it without asking.
For a while, I let the quiet hold. Outside the kitchen window, the bare garden lies under frost, all dark stems and frozen earth. It is strangely peaceful in a way that makes violence seem vulgar by contrast.
I rub a hand over my face and suddenly feel tired down to the bone. “My memories are coming back.”
He nods and takes a sip of his vodka. “What have you remembered?”