Archie
I dreamed.
A dream that dragged me under and kept me there.
Pieces of the past. Fragments of the present. But mostly the past.
I was suspended somewhere between life and whatever waited beyond it, caught in that cold, endless stretch where nothing felt solid and time lost its shape.
Weight pressed against my chest like stone. Heavy enough to crush bone. Heavy enough to make breathing feel like a punishment.
Hands held me there—steadying me, or restraining me, I couldn’t tell.
There were voices around me. Distant. Distorted. Like they were reaching me through water.
I heard them. But none of it made sense.
And then, I saw him.
Rasputin.
He stood over me like he always had—a towering behemoth, all strength and rage—his face hard with fury.
His eyes wrecked me. Because they looked the way they used to when we were boys. When he’d drag me up after a fight, bloodied and stubborn, refusing to let me stay down.
Get up.
His mouth moved, the words striking through the dark.
Get the fuck up.
He was shouting now. Roaring at me like rage alone could pull me back. Like death was something he could force away with his bare hands.
Over and over, he said the same words. The same command.
And beneath the anger, beneath the violence in his voice, there was something worse.
Fear.
Rasputin was afraid. Not for himself, but for me.
And that broke something open inside me, because Rasputin was dead.
I knew he was dead.
I had watched him die a thousand times in my head.
But here he was, standing at the edge of whatever this was, furious that I was following him.
His face twisted, grief cutting through the rage.
“Not yet, bratishka.”
Not yet.
And for the first time since the darkness took hold of me, I understood.
He wasn’t here to take me. He was here to send me back.
But it couldn’t possibly be, because he was dead.
The memory comes back in bits and pieces, fragments of a past life. It bleeds in around the edges—grainy, flickering, like a corrupted file my brain keeps trying to reload.
I’m on my back. Or maybe I’m sitting.
No—there’s blood in my mouth. That much is real. Thick. Metallic. It coats my tongue and drips down the back of my throat every time I try to breathe too deeply. My chest burns like something inside it has been cracked open and left that way.
Voices echo somewhere close. Distant. Warped.
But none of it matters.
Because I’m back there. In Russia.
The room is dark except for the glow of the screen. There are too many men, but the silence is too heavy. It presses in on my skull until it almost splits.
Rasputin had just walked into frame, and he looked exactly the same as he always did. Big. Unmovable. Like the world would have to bend around him instead of the other way around.
My older brother. My shield. My constant.
He didn’t for one second look afraid. And that’s the part that haunts me when I think back to that day.
It’s the way he stands there—calm, steady, like he has already read the script and knows exactly how his story ends. I can see his courage, his determination to meet his father head on.
There’s shouting. Russian. Fast. Aggressive.
I remember leaning forward.
I remember thinking—this is a mistake. This has to be a mistake.
Because the man stepping into frame behind him—no.
Even now, my mind tries to reject it. Tries to rewrite it into something else. Trying to protect me, my brain tells me my eyes are lying.
But it was him. Our father.
The same man who taught us how to shoot. How to fight. How to survive in a world that would conquer us unless we conquered it first.
The same man Rasputin spent his entire life trying to impress.
And in the end… the same man who put a bullet in his own son.
The sound—it doesn’t leave me. It cracks through my head now just as violently as it did then. Sharp. Final. A gunshot that didn’t just kill him—it split something inside me clean in two.
Rasputin dropped to his knees, then fell forward, flat on his face.
Gone. Like he was never there at all.
I think I stopped breathing. I think the entire room did.
And then—something in me snapped.
I don’t remember getting to my feet. I don’t remember the chair going over. I don’t remember the men grabbing for me.
I just remember the rage. The fire and the ruin. Pure, unfiltered rage descended upon me.
It was feral. Primal.
It clawed its way up from somewhere deep and ugly inside me and took over everything else. Thought. Reason. Fear.
All these things were gone, and in their place, only one thought remained.
Kill him.
Kill him for what he’s done. Kill him for taking the only person who ever mattered to me.
My hands curl against the surface beneath me now, nails biting into wood or metal—I don’t even know what I’m touching. My body reacts before my mind catches up, reliving it like it’s happening again.
I remember the shouting. The guards. The way they held me back as I fought like a fucking animal, trying to tear free, trying to get to him.
I remember screaming. There were no words, just sound.
Because there were no words to describe that kind of betrayal.
Your own blood. Your own father.
My uncle stepped out in front of me, quieter than the others. Smarter. Always the voice of reason.
He didn’t try to fight me. He waited. He watched.
And when the moment came—when the chaos peaked and everyone’s attention fractured—he stepped in and pulled me out like he was extracting a volatile spark from a burning building.
I fought him, too. With everything in me. I remember swinging on him. Trying to break free. Trying to get back inside so I could finish what had just started.
But he didn’t let me.
“You go back in there,” he said, voice low, controlled, cutting through the noise, “and you will die.”
I didn’t care. I would have died. Happily. Because living in a world where Rasputin didn’t exist anymore didn’t feel like much of a life.
But he dragged me out anyway. He drugged me. Sedated me into submission.
The next thing I remembered, I woke up on a plane.
I was in Italy.
The air was different. They spoke a different language. Led a different life. And it was the last place I wanted to be. But my uncle insisted.
He set me up with money, security, a clean slate where I was guaranteed safety.
When all I wanted was to go back home and tear my father to shreds.
“If you want revenge,” he told me once, after I’d finally stopped trying to tear my way back to Russia. “The only way you will get it is by depriving your father of an heir. And the way you do that is by not going back to Russia until I tell you to.”
I didn’t thank him. I didn’t forgive him. But I stayed. And something in me hardened. Because grief doesn’t just sit quietly inside you. It twists you inside out, turns you into something else entirely if you don’t cage it.
So I caged it. Locked it down. Buried it so deep that most days, I could pretend it wasn’t there at all.
Most days… I could pretend I wasn’t still that boy watching his brother die on a screen, powerless to stop it.
A rough breath tore out of me. Sharp and intoxicating.
The present bled back in—pain lancing through my ribs, my lungs, my skull. My body was wrecked. I could feel it in the way everything ached, in the way every inhale felt like I was dragging broken glass into my chest.
And then—through the haze—I saw her.
She didn’t belong in that memory. She didn’t belong to that lifetime.
Her hands. Her voice.
I remember her crying. Begging for me to stay with her.
No one had ever asked me to stay before.
They’d ordered. Expected. Used.
But her? She wanted me.
Even like this, knowing exactly what I was.
A slow, broken exhale left me. And for the first time since the memory dragged me under—something steadied.
Because Rasputin’s death made me dangerously ruthless. But Tone—she’s the one person that reached past all of that. The one place where whatever was left of my humanity flickered back to life.
It was fragile and threadbare, but it was there.
And as everything faded again—darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision—I held onto that.
Not Russia, or the betrayal of the past. Not the unending rage that coursed through my body, threatening to obliterate me.
Tone.
Because if I was coming back from this—if I clawed my way out of whatever the hell this was—it wouldn’t be for revenge. It would be for her.