Chapter 38 #2
Arseniy walks forward now, the crowd parting for him because even five years gone, even stripped of position by absence, he is still Arseniy Dragovich, and the old instincts recognize him before politics catches up.
He stops in front of me and looks at the papers in my hand like he’d rather burn them than touch them.
“I’m not taking this because you’ve decided to bury yourself while still breathing,” Arseniy says.
“You don’t have a choice.”
He lets out a bitter chuckle. “There’s the family disease.”
“Duty is not a choice,” I say.
He recoils slightly, which is satisfying for half a second and then not at all. “That is not what that means,” he says.
“It means whatever the men in charge decide it means. That was the point, wasn’t it?”
His face darkens. “Do not use that on me.”
“I’m not using anything,” I say. “I’m giving you what should have been yours if our families didn’t turn the eldest into the family’s blade so the youngest could become the crown.”
Arseniy’s mouth tightens. “And you think this fixes that?”
“No.”
“Then what does it fix?”
I look around the hall.
At Tatiana, furious and hurt. At Kai, calculating too fast because he thinks if he finds the right argument, he can still stop this. At Maksim, pale under his tan for once, jaw tight. At the men and women waiting to see whether their world is changing or ending.
Then I look back at Arseniy. “It removes me before I hollow the whole thing out, trying to keep myself standing.”
No one speaks because they know what I mean. My grief will destroy the family if I keep being its head.
“Nikolaj,” Arseniy says carefully, “this is not something you decide in the middle of grief.”
I laugh once, and the sound is dead enough to make several men look away. “Careful, brother. You abandoned your position because of grief. Don’t lecture me on timing.”
His face tightens as if I hit him. “This is different,” Arseniy says.
“Yes, it is. I’m leaving the structure intact behind me.” I continue, because they need to hear it and because saying it once means I don’t have to spend the next year letting them watch me become a corpse in a chair.
“I don’t care anymore. Not enough. Not the way this needs.
I can still kill. I can still punish. I can still make men afraid, but that is not leadership; that is appetite with a title.
If I stay, this family becomes nothing but the shape of my grief.
Every decision will be blood first and structure second.
Every enemy will become him in my head. Every slight will be a grave I dig too deep because I need somewhere to put this. ”
Tatiana is crying now and pretending she isn’t. “Then let us help you,” she says.
I look at her, and this time it hurts. “You can’t,” I say.
Her face crumples, and I nearly break with it.
“I love you,” I tell her, because if I’m leaving tonight, she deserves to hear it without having to dig through my brutality for proof. “You are the best of us in every way that still frightens me. But you can’t help me stay where everything sounds like his last breath.”
She presses both hands to her mouth.
Kai’s expression has gone still in the way it does when emotion reaches him too directly to be useful. “Where are you going?” he asks.
“Isle Lucia,” I whisper, so only they can hear me. “I’m leaving tonight, and I’m not coming back.”
Kai steps toward me. “Do not say that like it’s decided.”
“It is.”
“You’re still being hunted. Reyes still has loyalists, and Byrne’s people are unstable. If you disappear now—”
“Then Arseniy handles it.”
Kai’s face hardens. “And if they come for you there?”
I smile faintly. “Then they’re welcome to try.”
“That is not funny, Nikolaj!” Kai exclaims.
Arseniy drags a hand over his mouth, and for one second, he looks exactly like Ruslan. That old exhaustion. That terrible knowledge that love creates more ruins than enemies ever manage.
“Kolya,” Arseniy says, quieter now. “You go there alone, you will die there.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t say that!” Tatiana snaps.
I look at her. “I’m not going there to kill myself.”
No one believes me, and that’s fair. I’m not sure I believe me, not in the way they want me to. But there are different kinds of dying, and I have been doing one of them in my office for a month.
Isle Lucia may not save me. It may only give me a better view while I rot. But it is the only place left where Vincenzo is not ash, not a report, or a ring recovered from a body.
On that island, he is in the villa window trying to learn calm. He is laughing in the bath. He is calling me ridiculous for buying land because I missed him too much to keep using hotels. He is sitting at dinner under an open sky.
He is alive in every room because the island was built from the insane belief that we might get time.
I want to be where he is still alive. That is the only truth left.
“I can’t stay here,” I say, and my voice is quieter now.
The room leans toward it because I never say can’t, not unless it’s already killed something in me.
“If I stay here, I will turn into something none of you can follow. And I am tired. I am so fucking tired of becoming worse just because the world keeps taking things and waiting to see what I do with the hole.”
Arseniy looks at me for a long moment, then he looks down at the papers. I hold them out, but he does not take them.
“You hated me for leaving,” he says. “And now you’re doing the same.”
“No,” I say. “You left because I took something from you. I’m leaving because there is nothing left of me to give this place.”
His eyes close briefly, but when they open, something in them has changed. Not acceptance. Nothing that generous. But recognition. He understands grief enough now to know when it has stopped being a storm and becomes a climate.
He takes the papers.
Tatiana makes a broken sound. “Arseniy.”
He doesn’t look at her; he looks at me. “If I take this, you live.”
I almost laugh. “That’s not a condition you can enforce.”
“It is the only one I have.”
I think of Vincenzo’s ring in my pocket. I think of Tatiana on my bedroom floor telling me not to decide how to live that night. I think of Kai in the car shouting, “Stay useful,” while the line was dead. I think of Vincenzo saying, “No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
Arseniy’s jaw tightens, but he nods because he knows that is the only honest promise I can give.
Kai looks like he wants to argue another hundred points and knows all of them are already dead. “I’m coming with you,” Kai says.
I shake my head. “No.”
His eyes flash. “Nikolaj—”
“No,” I say again. “You stay with Arseniy for the transition.”
“Maksim, then,” Kai says.
“No.”
Tatiana wipes angrily at her face. “Me.”
I chuckle bitterly. “No.”
“You can’t just go alone,” she says, her voice rising just shy of hysterical.
“I can.”
“You shouldn’t,” Tatiana says, and the child in her voice destroys me more than the assassin ever could.
I cross to her before I can think better of it. The room watches me move. She doesn’t step back, though she looks like she wants to hit me. I stop in front of her and place one hand against the side of her face.
She breaks instantly. “Kolya,” she whispers.
“I need you to stay alive,” I tell her.
Her tears spill over. “That’s my line.”
“I’m stealing it.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Yes.”
“You’re my brother,” she weeps.
I swallow once. “Yes.”
She grabs me hard, arms around my middle, face pressed into my chest like she’s little again and the world is too large.
I hold her with one arm, the other hand at the back of her head.
The hall disappears for a moment. Just her—my little sister.
My blood. One of the last living things capable of reaching whatever is left of me without asking permission first.
“I’ll visit,” she says into my shirt, and it is not a question.
“Fine,” I say.
“Soon.”
I almost smile. “Bossy.”
“You raised me.”
“That was clearly a mistake.”
She laughs once, wet and furious, and then pulls back before she can fall apart even more. She wipes her face with the back of her hand and steps away like she’s stepping off a cliff.
Kai is next. He doesn’t hug me. Thank God. He stands in front of me with every piece of emotion locked so tightly behind his eyes that it almost works. “I’ll stabilize the transition,” he says. “Then I’m coming.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes,” Kai says calmly. “I am.”
I look at him. “This is why people find you irritating.”
“This is why you’re alive.”
Fair.
I don’t fight him further because I don’t have enough left to fight people who love me by being inconvenient. “Later,” I say.
Kai nods once. “Later.”
Maksim steps forward and looks at me like he might make a joke, then doesn’t. That almost gets me. He claps one hand on my shoulder, hard enough to hurt, and says, “Don’t let the island make you soft.”
I look at him. “Too late.”
His mouth tightens. “Yeah. I know.”
Then he steps back.
Finally, Arseniy. The hall seems to understand and holds its breath.
He stands with the papers in one hand and the weight of the family already settling over him like an old coat pulled from a grave. He looks like he did years ago, and not at all like that.
The brother who was supposed to hold the blade. The man I ruined. The only one left who understands that duty is not a choice until one day you decide to walk away from the altar and learn whether the sky falls.
I stop in front of him. “I’m sorry, Senya,” I say.
Arseniy’s face tightens. I haven’t used that name in years, and I know what he hears. Not for this moment only, for all of it. His wife. His child. The exile. The years. The fact that I can apologize and still never undo the choice. The fact that he can accept the throne and still never forgive me.
He nods once. “I know.”
That is all, and it is enough.
I turn back to the room.
“Arseniy is Pakhan,” I say. “You will follow him as you followed me. Anyone who can’t stomach the transfer can leave before sunrise. Anyone who tries to fracture the structure during transition will be treated as a traitor and buried without ceremony.”
Arseniy’s eyes sharpen at the name. Good. Let him have something to bite.
“I have been your Pakhan for five years,” I say.
“Most of you followed me because you feared me. Some because you believed I could build something stronger than what came before—and I did. A few followed because you were smart enough to know which way the blood was moving. Whatever your reasons, you served. That debt is recognized.”
No one moves, and I lower my voice.
“The empire survives. The name survives. I don’t need to.”
Arseniy says my name then, very softly. “What do you want us to tell people?”
I think of headlines. Rumors. Illness. Strategic retreat. Private mourning. Men will make up whatever story serves them best anyway.
“Tell them that The Blade has left Moscow.”
A faint ripple moves through the hall. Not quite relief and not quite fear. Recognition. They have their structure, their new center, their line, and I have nothing left to give, so I leave before they can watch me hesitate.
My room is dark when I return to collect the only things I’m taking: the ring, a handgun, clothes I don’t care about, and the folder with the details about the last summit.
I put the folder in my bag because grief can sit beside revenge for a while longer.
They are familiar enough companions by now.
At the door, I look back once.
The room does not look different, and that feels insulting. I close it anyway.
The car is waiting in the courtyard when I step outside. Cold air bites at my face. Snow hangs in the clouds but hasn’t started falling yet. Saint Helena rises behind me, old and severe, and full of people I love badly.
At the top of the steps, Tatiana stands with Kai, Maksim, and Arseniy. They don’t come down and I’m thankful for that. If they come any closer, this becomes harder, and I have no appetite left for harder.
I touch the ring in my pocket. “Take me to the airstrip,” I tell the driver.
“Yes, Pakhan,” he says.
I pause with one hand on the car door, then I look back at the steps, at Arseniy holding papers that make the title his now, and say, “Not anymore.”
The driver’s face shutters, but he is smart enough not to comment.
I get in, and the car pulls away. Saint Helena recedes behind me stone by stone, window by window, ghost by ghost. I watch the entire time until it finally disappears. I owe myself that much. I owe them that much, too, maybe.
When the road turns, and the old monastery is finally gone from view, I take Vincenzo’s ring from my pocket and close my hand around it.
“I’m coming home, My King,” I whisper.
The word home should feel strange, but it doesn’t anymore.
Not when the only place left in the world where I still know how to be his is waiting in the middle of the sea.