Flashback - Archie
Grief doesn’t leave anything untouched. It seeps in, stains the edges, makes even silence feel heavy and unwelcome.
That was the state I was in when the truth found me.
It came in the early evening, carried by one of the perimeter guards. He stood in my doorway, frost caught in his beard and fear sitting too comfortably on his face.
When I told him to enter, he shut the door behind him with the care of a man stepping into a church he no longer frequented.
“I have something you need to see,” he said.
He looked sick.
I almost sent him away.
Then I saw his hands shaking.
He opened his hand and passed me a drive.
“What is this?”
He swallowed. “Proof.”
My pulse quickened.
“Of what?”
His eyes dropped to the floor. “Your brother.”
I moved before I knew I had decided to.
One moment the drive was in his hand. The next I had him against the wall, my fist knotted in his jacket, his boots scraping over the floor as plaster cracked behind him.
“What about my brother?”
“Just watch it… please.”
His fear was real. Acrid. Immediate.
“It was copied from perimeter footage before it was removed,” he said. “I hid it. I shouldn’t have. But I did.”
“Why bring it to me now?”
His mouth trembled. “Because I have children. And I have a conscience.”
Something in me loosened and I let him go.
The laptop on the desk hummed too loudly in the silence as I inserted the drive. I remember absurd details from that moment—the faint smear on the screen, the clock on the far wall ticking, the fact that my right hand would not stop trembling once I sat down.
The footage opened.
It was grainy, drained of color. Night vision flattened the world into shades of grey and green.
The footage opened on Viktor’s office.
The camera angle was wrong—high, fixed, catching only part of the room. The edge of the desk. The long window overlooking the grounds. Snow falling beyond the glass, soft and endless, like the world had decided to cleanse itself while evil lurked within these walls.
Rasputin stood with his back to the room. Waiting.
That was the first thing that struck me.
He was just… standing there, one hand braced against the window frame, head slightly bowed as if he already knew something was coming and had chosen not to run away from it.
My breath caught.
He looked calm.
The door opened behind him.
Viktor stepped inside.
He raised a gun without warning.
Rasputin never turned around, even as a conversation took place. About a minute in, there was a muzzle flash on the screen—sharp and quick.
Rasputin jolted. For a second—just a second—he stayed upright. It looked like he was saying something.
Then the blood spread. Dark. Immediate. Blooming across his back like it had a right to spread.
He didn’t even get the chance to turn.
My stomach dropped out from under me.
There were no words and no confrontation. No final look between father and son.
Just an execution which robbed the breath from my chest.
Rasputin staggered forward, his hand slipping against the glass, leaving a smear before his knees finally gave way. He caught himself once, like his body refused to accept what had already been decided for it.
Then he went down.
The door burst open.
Guards rushed in—fast and unprepared. I saw it in their movements, in the way they slowed when they took in the scene. There was shock. Hesitation. A flicker of humanity before training crushed it flat.
I knew them. Every one of them.
My chest tightened.
Viktor said something.
The audio didn’t carry—just static and the low hum of the camera—but I didn’t need to hear it.
Dispose of it.
The guards moved.
Two of them bent to lift Rasputin, more careful probably than Viktor would have liked. It was as though some part of them still recognized who they were touching, and out of respect for him, they handled him delicately. His head lolled, blood trailing across the floor in a slow, deliberate line.
And that’s when I saw him.
The guard who had brought me the drive.
He was there.
One hand under my brother’s shoulder. The other gripping his arm like he didn’t trust himself not to drop him.
His face—God. He wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t look at what my own father had done.
They carried Rasputin out of the room quickly, like if they moved fast enough, the truth wouldn’t have time to settle.
The door shut behind them.
And Viktor—my father—didn’t follow.
He stood there, alone in the office, staring at the blood on the floor like it had nothing to do with him.
Like he hadn’t just put a bullet in his own son’s back.
My vision blurred.
My brother had not taken his own life.
My father had arranged his murder, put a bullet in his back, and ordered his body destroyed to perpetuate the lie.
For several seconds, the room was utterly soundless.
Then I threw the laptop.
It smashed against the far wall hard enough to fracture into pieces.
The guard flinched. I did not look at him. My vision tunneled. My blood became something molten and ungovernable.
My father.
I could see only him.
His throat. His mouth. The shape his body would make when it hit the floor under my hands.
I was out of the office before the thought fully formed.
The first man who tried to stop me got my elbow in his throat. The second went down under the butt of my gun. By the time I reached the main hall, shouting had broken loose behind me, boots hitting floors, voices colliding in alarm.
I fired once into the ceiling.
The whole house stilled.
“VIKTORRRRRRRR!”
My voice tore through the stairwell, a roar that ricocheted off the concrete walls, raw with panic and grief, until it came back to me warped and broken.
There was no answer.
I took the stairs two at a time and cut across the upper gallery toward his private wing. A guard moved to intercept me. I shot him in the leg and kept going, barely registering the way he screamed.
I was beyond caution.
Beyond anything except the need to put my father in the ground with my hands around his throat.
His suite was locked.
I kicked the door once. Twice. On the third strike, the frame gave enough for the latch to tear loose.
He was inside. Waiting.
Two bodyguards stood between us. I shot one before either had fully drawn.
Then everything came apart.
Gunfire. Splintering wood. Shouting from the corridor. Glass exploding inward. The thick smell of cordite flooding the room. A lamp overturning near the hearth. Velvet curtains catching a spark and smouldering at the hem.
My father moved behind the desk.
That image lives with me still.
Not him raging or commanding. But hiding. Like the coward he was. Crouching while his son came for him with a grief so heavy, my heart almost stopped beating.
I vaulted the desk and caught him by the coat, dragging him halfway upright. I slammed the barrel of the gun against his face hard enough to split his lip.
“You killed him,” I sneered.
Blood spilled over his teeth.
He said nothing.
I hit him again.
“You killed him.”
I was still met with silence.
“Say it!” I demanded the words from him.
He stared back at me, hatred and calculation warring behind his eyes. That was all the answer I needed.
I cocked the gun. Then a voice cut through the room.
“Archie.”
Uncle fucking Bass.
There are only a handful of men whose voices have ever reached me once rage had swallowed everything else.
Bass was one of them. Not my uncle by blood, but close enough that the title had never mattered.
He was a family friend. Advisor. Survivor.
The kind of man who knew how to stand in the shadow of monsters without letting the darkness stain him.
I did not turn.
“Leave, Bass.”
“No.”
The gun stayed pressed to Viktor’s face.
“If you stand between us,” I said, “I’ll kill you, too.”
“You’re capable. But it’s not in your nature.”
He stepped closer, hands empty, expression hard with pity.
“If you do this now, you die here.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should. Your brother wouldn’t want this for you.”
I was breathing like a wounded animal. My father was half folded over the desk, breath ragged through his broken mouth.
Bass said, “Look at me.”
I didn’t.
“Archie.”
Something in his tone cut through my madness.
Grief.
I turned my head enough to see him.
His face looked older than I remembered. Tired in a way only men who have endured too much can look tired.
“He wanted this,” Bass said quietly. “The aftermath. Your collapse. The fracture of the family. The blood feud that follows. He built this for your destruction.”
I tightened my grip on the gun.
Bass took another step.
“You want to honor Rasputin?” he asked. “Then live long enough to do more than die an angry man.”
Rasputin.
The footage flashed behind my eyes.
My brother, who had spent half his life stepping between me and the worst of the world, had been shot in cold blood.
Something inside me tore.
Because Bass was right about one thing.
A quick death would have been mercy.
And mercy was the one thing Viktor Popovich did not deserve.
I lowered the gun. Not because my father deserved to live. But because I suddenly understood that if I killed him then, I would not stop with him.
I would tear through the whole house. Every loyalist. Every man who knew. Every coward who had looked away. I would split the empire open and call the ruin justice while bodies piled around my ankles.
Perhaps some would deserve it. Though not all.
Bass saw the understanding land.
“Go,” he said.
I stared at him. “What?”
“There’s a car outside. Wait for me.”
My father spat blood onto the carpet and snarled, “You think if you exile him, I won’t find him? He is nothing—nothing—without me.”
I pointed the gun at him again and he shut his mouth.
Bass did not flinch. “If you stay,” he said to me, “you will die tonight. Or worse—you will live long enough to become exactly what he wants you to become.”
Exactly what he wants you to become.
I looked at Viktor then. At the architect of every wound in our house.
The man who had murdered his own son and fed me a lie so I would carry hatred as my inheritance.
I wanted his death. God, I wanted it. Instead, I brought the gun down across his temple hard enough to send him to the floor. Then I walked away.
Bass got me out through the service corridors while the estate descended into confusion behind us.
“Anna,” I said, tugging at his shirt.
He looked at me without stopping. “I got her out. She’s safe.”
Shouts echoed through the main wing. Orders clashed with alarm. Smoke had begun to spread from the curtains in Viktor’s suite, curling dark along the high ceilings.
Snow fell thick and relentless by the time we reached the rear drive.
The waiting car looked almost black against the white.
I climbed in without looking back.
Only once the gates had disappeared behind us did I realize my hands would not stop shaking.
Bass drove in silence for a long time before he finally said, “One day, you may come back.”
I stared out at the road ahead, dark and endless beneath the falling snow.
“For what?”
He understood what I meant.
I didn’t want the land or the title. Nor the mausoleum of our bloodline.
For what? For whom? What could possibly remain of home after tonight?
Bass gripped the wheel tighter.
“I don’t know,” he said.
By dawn, Russia was behind me.
By the next night, I had crossed the border into Italy and stepped into a newly constructed life. I did not arrive there clean. I did not arrive there hopeful. I arrived like a man who had been hollowed by fire and left standing anyway.
People would later meet that version of me and think he had always existed.
They were wrong.
I had not always been that man.
But grief, when fed enough betrayal, becomes hunger.
And I arrived starving.