Flashback - Archie
The estate looked unchanged when the car rolled through the gates, but grief alters architecture in ways stone cannot conceal. The air felt wrong. Too quiet, too staged. Like the whole place had been caught in the act of pretending.
No one met my eyes.
A maid nearly dropped the tray in her hands when she saw me. One of the older guards stepped aside so quickly his shoulder clipped the wall. Even the silence in the foyer felt curated, stretched too tightly over a darkness I could not adequately understand.
I found my mother first.
She stood in the great room with one hand braced against the mantel and the other wrapped around a handkerchief she had twisted into a ruin. When she turned at the sound of my steps, I almost didn’t recognize her.
I had seen her afraid. Many times, I had seen her bruised, quiet, empty. But I had never seen her look so distraught.
My pulse lurched.
“What is it?”
Her mouth opened, but no sound came.
Something inside me dropped.
It wasn’t him. If it were, she’d be breathing again—finally free of him.
Which meant…
There was only one other person in this world who could do this to her. The only one she loved just as much as she loved me.
My chest tightened, sharp and sudden, like something reaching in and closing its fist around my heart.
And before she said it… before I let her say it—I already knew.
I crossed the room in three strides. “Where is he?”
Her eyes flooded instantly.
“Archie—”
“Where is Rasputin?”
The handkerchief slipped from her fingers and fell soundlessly to the floor.
“He’s gone,” she whispered.
The room tilted.
It is strange, the mind in moments like that. How it will grasp for any interpretation but the right one.
Gone where? Gone how? Gone for how long? Gone in what sense?
Men in our world were always leaving. For meetings. For collections. For punishment. For funerals that would never be public.
But not like this. Not with the inconsolable face she wore.
“No,” I said.
She reached for me. I stepped back before I even knew I’d done it.
“No.”
“I’m so sorry, Archie. That I couldn’t protect him…”
“No!”
The word fractured on the way out.
Then my father entered.
I turned toward him with murder already moving in my blood.
“What happened?”
He wore grief well. That was one of the many things I learned to despise about him. He knew how to assemble the face required for public loss. Knew where to set his mouth, how much solemnity to place in his eyes, how to make tragedy look dignified enough to survive scrutiny.
He had likely practiced it for years.
“Your brother is dead,” he said.
The sentence cleaved me in two.
“How?”
He paused, reluctant to respond. It was tiny, barely there. But I noticed.
“He took his own life.”
Everything in me rejected the words at once.
“No.”
“It appears—”
“No.”
“He was found near the forest boundary after—”
“You’re lying.”
My father’s expression cooled, but only slightly. “Mind yourself.”
A laugh tore out of me. Horrible. Sharp. “You expect me to believe Rasputin killed himself?”
My mother made a broken sound behind me.
Viktor looked at me the way one might regard a difficult subordinate rather than a son coming apart in front of him. “Men break,” he reminded me.
“Not Rasputin.”
“You would be surprised what pressure can do.”
“Not him.”
I was shouting now. I did not care. Let the whole damned house hear. Let every servant and guard and sycophant know exactly what I thought of the lie being laid at my feet.
Rasputin. My invisible brother. Because that’s how our father treated him - as though he wasn’t even there.
My brother who endured everything in silence. My brother who stood in doorways and took blows and made choices built entirely around the survival of others. My brother who would sooner have put a knife through his own heart than leave me alone in that house.
No.
I looked at my father and saw only evil. There was no sorrow. No devastation.
“How?” I asked again, quieter this time, because sometimes rage turns so cold it stops sounding like itself.
He held my gaze. “It doesn’t matter. He was laid to rest.”
I went still.
“You buried him?”
“There were circumstances requiring discretion.”
Discretion.
The word burned clean through me.
I was across the room before anyone could react.
One fist in his collar. The other buried in the front of his shirt. I drove him backward into the drinks cabinet hard enough to rattle the crystal.
“You buried him without me?”
Hands were on me instantly—guards, coming out of nowhere, dragging at my arms. I threw one off and elbowed another hard enough to hear a bone crunch.
“You buried him,” I snarled, lunging again, “without me?”
My father straightened his jacket with infuriating calm once they’d pulled me back.
“Take him out,” he said.
They locked me in the east study.
I demolished it.
The first chair went through the glass cabinet.
Then the lamp. Then the decanter. Books followed, then framed photographs, then whatever else my hands could find.
It was not enough. Nothing was enough. The room remained standing when it should have come down around me.
My chest still held breath when it should have given out.
I remember very little except the aftermath.
My knuckles split open and throbbing. The floor littered with wreckage. My body shaking hard enough I could feel it in my teeth.
And beneath all of that, something uglier was forming.
Because once the first disbelief cracked, another thought slithered in where grief had torn the skin open.
If he had truly done it—if Rasputin had put a bullet into himself and walked away from this life—then he had left me.
He had left Anna.
Left us with Viktor.
For several monstrous minutes, I hated him for it.
The shame of that has never left me.
But grief is not noble. It is not graceful. It does not sit prettily in candlelight and mourn with dignity. It claws. It accuses. It lashes out at the dead because they are safer to hate than the living when the living are still holding a knife at your throat.
Late that night I broke out of the study by forcing the inner latch with the iron poker from the hearth.
No one stopped me.
Either the guards had been dismissed or someone had decided not to interfere with a grieving man carrying enough rage to light the curtains if he breathed too hard.
I found my mother in the chapel.
She knelt in the first pew, her head bowed, candlelight softening the gold in her hair. For a moment she looked less like a living woman than something painted onto the place—one more beautiful sorrow trapped beneath stained glass and unanswered prayers.
I sat beside her.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Finally she said, “He loved you, more than anything.”
The words gutted me. I let out a jagged laugh and bowed my head.
“Not enough to stay.”
She turned so sharply I almost recoiled.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because that is not what this was.”
I looked at her then.
Her face was wet with tears. Her mouth trembled around truths she was too frightened to say.
“If he did this,” I said, the words scraping me raw, “if he really did this, then why?”
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, there was terror in them. Old terror. Well-practiced terror. The kind built from years of living in captivity.
“You must survive this,” she said.
I stared at the altar ahead of us, at the carved saints with their blank wooden mercy.
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
Her hand found mine and gripped hard.
“Do not let him take both my boys.”
Take.
Not lose.
Take.
The word rang through me like a struck bell.
I turned toward her sharply, but whatever she had almost given me had already disappeared behind fear and silence and all the habits women build to stay alive beside violent men.
I should have pressed her.
I didn’t.
Maybe some part of me already knew the truth and wasn’t ready to hear it in her voice.
Three days later, my father spoke to me of succession.
I said yes.
Not because I wanted the throne.
But because grief had soured into rage, and I needed somewhere to stick the blade.