Chapter 20 - Anton
My own bedroom has become hell to me. I can’t stand to be in there anymore, not when Darya’s mark is all over every surface and every smell and every hour of the night I once spent alone in it—and Darya herself has been reduced to a memory and the compulsive, subsequent pang in my chest. The study isn’t half as awful to seal myself away in as that.
No matter how many aftermaths of tragedies have been ridden out within its walls.
At least her perfume doesn’t haunt me here.
I’ve slept here the past three nights, squashing my body onto the chesterfield in the corner that’s much too short to accommodate my frame. My feet hang off the end, like a body that doesn’t fit inside its own coffin.
Then again, I don’t sleep so much as I lose consciousness for intervals at a time, before I surface again, gasping, skin glossed in cold sweat. Each time, the ceiling greets me. The same ceiling. The same office. The same silence she left behind her like a bruise on the air.
What else is there to do but fucking work? The mole is still out there. Somehow, even when my world is on fucking fire, there’s another fire elsewhere that needs to be put out.
But that’s how it is. That’s life.
Work is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done when the alternative is unbearable—I put my head down and I work, because the Bratva doesn’t pause for grief or stupidity, and I’ve managed to produce a great deal of both in the span of a single evening.
I have the mole to find. I have routes to secure and men to vet and a roster of brigadiers to run blind tests on, so I can see whose information turns up in the wrong hands.
I have correspondence from three separate factions that’s been sitting unread for the better part of a week.
I have my father’s voice in the back of my head in the form of a letter I haven’t opened yet, because I suspect what it says, and I don’t have the patience for the abuse.
I have to keep my head down and do the work.
Except I can’t.
That’s the truth of it, the one I won’t say aloud to Anastasia or my mother or anyone who knocks on that door and gets nothing in return.
I sit behind this desk, and I stare at the papers in front of me.
I don’t see any of it, not really. What I see instead is her face.
The way it had contorted in agonized wrath, the moment before she smashed the glass.
But it was the disbelief it had been laced with that undoes me anew, every time it flashes in my mind.
In spite of how I’d clearly wounded her deeply, the upturn at the beginning of her shriek was born of hoping that I would not do what I was clearly about to do.
I saw it. I saw it, and I did it anyway.
You are a failure as a man.
She’s right. I know she’s right. I’ve sat here for three nights knowing it, and the knowing doesn’t ease into anything useful. It just sits on my sternum like a Sisyphean boulder I can’t roll off.
My hands won’t stop. That’s the other truth.
It started the night she left—the checking, the rechecking, each compulsion cycling through before the last one’s finished, my hands moving through the motions of a ritual that gives my body something to do while my mind refuses to settle.
I’ve checked the lock on the door four times this morning already.
I’ve straightened the items on my desk with a precision that has no bearing on anything at all.
I’m aware of what it is. I’m aware that it worsens with stress, that it’s been better these past weeks—better in a way I hadn’t named until it stopped being better—and the naming of that, too, costs me something I don’t have the reserves for.
I force my hands flat on the desk. Count the wood grain. Start over.
Needless to say, when my uncle appears in my doorway later that week, I’m neither surprised nor in the fucking mood. I’d tell him as much if he bothered to knock. But he doesn’t do that.
That’s not how he operates.
I’ve known it all my life. I’ve appreciated it most of my life because a man whose strategies I understand is the man I’ve found it easy to rely on.
I look up from the correspondence I have been staring at for twenty minutes without reading a word of it.
I’m remotely intrigued by the fact that he looks tired.
Still better than I look, but not by too vast a margin.
His stick precedes his entry into the room.
He takes the chair across from me without being invited to, which is also how he operates, and folds both hands over the carved handle of his stick and looks at me the way he’s been looking at me since I was a boy who’d done something he considered beneath me.
“You look like hell,” he says.
“Good morning, Uncle.”
He ignores the greeting. “You just let her go off? Knowing the things she surely knows about our business?”
“It was those dastardly wiles,” I say wryly.
“Mm.” He rolls the sound around in his mouth like he’s tasting it. He is not impressed. That’s fine; I’m not really laughing either. “Word is spreading, Anton,” he says.
“Word of what?”
“Word that says the new Zakharov bride has gone back to the Yuri estate, and nobody’s gone to collect her.
That the alliance is over and done with.
” He raises an eyebrow. “Is it? Will your men be left to wonder whether the alliance their Pakhan staked his reputation on isn’t as ironclad as advertised? ”
I struggle to keep my voice even and my language anything but foul. “She’s visiting her family. That’s all anyone needs to know.”
“And yet.” Boris tilts his head. “There are men, Anton, men whose names you know, who have been watching this alliance with skepticism since the beginning. Men who would very much like to see it fracture. And a wife who has left after less than two months of marriage is a fracture they’ll press on.
” He pauses. “There are also questions from Moscow.”
There it is. I’d been waiting for it.
“My father can show up and ask his questions. He can afford the plane fare, surely.”
“He is asking them through me,” Boris says, with the particular patience of a man who knows the weight of what he’s holding and is choosing his moment to set it down.
“Sergei wants to know if the union is stable. He wants to know if the investment is sound. He has never been enthusiastic about this arrangement, as you know. He would like, as he’s put it, a reassessment. ”
“A reassessment,” I repeat.
“Of the alliance. Of the terms. There may be a cleaner arrangement to be made with the Yuris, if—”
“Would he say the same if he knew there was to be an heir?” I cock a brow.
The words come out before I’ve decided to say them.
Boris says nothing for long enough that I feel every second of it. “That changes things,” he sighs. “But not the part where that woman needs to be back in her place. Which is here, beneath your watch.”
My watch. As if she’s a criminal, and I’m her warden. I feel sick. I feel sicker than I’ve felt in four days of sitting in this office, grappling with Darya’s absence and her words and my own unforgivable face staring back at me from every reflective surface.
I said ‘heir’, because that is the language my uncle will understand. But it’s a baby. And it’s a baby, whether I deserve it or not, am guaranteed it or not, is one I want more than I’ve wanted anything. And I want it with her.
The truth pummels me with the force of something I’ve been refusing to look at directly, like staring directly into the sun.
I want our baby. The wanting is so immediate, so unqualified, so entirely separate from every fear that’s been colonizing my chest since she said the words—it nearly knocks me sideways.
I want this baby, and I want it with her, and those two facts sitting together in my chest are the most terrifying thing I’ve experienced since the last time someone told me Anfisa—the child Irina and I would’ve had, the daughter who came too soon, who Irina died for—hadn’t survived the night without her mother.
“No,” I say. My voice doesn’t waver.
Uncle’s eyes burrow into me. His voice carries a warning. “Anton.”
“No,” I say again, and the repetition is less for him than for me. To hear it. To know it’s the word I’m choosing, clearly and without caveat.
My uncle leans forward, the stick shifting in his grip.
“I want you to hear me. I say this not as a man with an agenda. I say this as a man who has watched you hold this organization together through circumstances that would have broken a lesser leader. The mole is still unidentified. The alliance is visibly strained. Sergei is asking questions, and your father’s questions don’t stay questions for long, as we both know.
This is the moment, if there is one, to step back from the ledge. ”
“And do fucking what?” I ask. “Blow up everything I’ve built in the past two months to satisfy a man who hasn’t been in this country in eleven years, except to attend his bastard’s wedding, but not mine, and to mourn at his mistress’ bedside before she finally fucking died?”
“To protect what you’ve built over a lifetime,” Boris corrects. “Before one infernal fucking woman undoes it.”
The accusation is calm. Clinical. I think that’s what makes it so easy to answer.
“She isn’t undoing anything.” I lean back in my chair and look at him steadily.
“I am the one who nearly did. Four days ago, in this office, I was handed the best possible news, and I met it like a man who deserves nothing, which is approximately what I am right now. That’s on me.
Not on her. Not on this alliance.” I pause.
“And not on you, Uncle. Which is why I’m going to say this once, and I’m going to say it with all the respect I have for you, which is considerable: your role here has always been contingent on your loyalty to my judgment.
My trust in you is a privilege I’ve extended.
It is not a mechanism for my father’s will.
It is not puppet strings. And it will not be used as either. ”
Boris stares at me.
There’s something in his face I don’t often see there. It isn’t anger, exactly. It’s the look of a man recalibrating—deciding which version of this conversation he wants to have.
“She has you bound up in puppet strings, and you don’t even see it. You’re pussy-whipped, nothing more than that. But you can’t set your legacy on fire over it. You can control her, instead of letting her control you.”
“If she wanted to use anything against me,” I say, “she’d use the baby.
That’s leverage. That’s power. That’s the kind of move a person makes when they want to win.
” I think of her. The way she’d said, You can have the evening to be surprised, when she told me she was pregnant—calm, and measured, and giving me the dignity of a reaction she had no obligation to offer.
“Instead, she left. She took herself out of the equation entirely. She walked away from leverage she didn’t choose to use.
” I hold my uncle’s gaze. “A woman running a game doesn’t do that. ”
Boris is quiet.
“The alliance isn’t fracturing,” I continue.
“My wife is at her family’s home because I gave her a very good reason to be there, and I’m going to fix that.
My father’s questions will receive my usual answer: the Zakharov Bratva is mine to run, and I run it as I see fit.
If that’s ever insufficient for him, he knows where to reach me. ”
I watch my uncle absorb this. His jaw works once, like he’s chewing on a response he’s decided not to give.
“You think she wouldn’t use the child? What do you think Milena did? She used Viktor to keep her hooks in Sergei. And look what havoc it’s wrought,” he says finally. “Don’t be na?ve, Anton. You are smarter than that, usually.”
“Yes,” I admit. There’s no point in denying it. “But what the fuck has that ever done for me? Look at me. Am I everything my father hoped I would be? What you want me to be?”
He looks at me for a long time. Then he picks up his stick and pushes himself to his feet with the deliberate effort of a man who won’t let you see the effort it costs him. He straightens.
He’s still formidable, my uncle. He always has been. “Your father won’t let this go,” he says at the door.
“My father never lets anything go,” I say. “I’ll be sure not to lose my beauty sleep over it.”
When Boris shuts the door behind him, he slams it with more force than I’d thought he was capable of.
My hands find the desk again. The grain of the wood.
I count it and then stop counting it, deliberately, which is its own kind of work.
I’ve been doing this for four days. The management of my own mind, the shepherding of thoughts from one corridor to another, closing doors on the rooms I can’t afford to stand in for too long.