34. Roman #2
Pavel does. “People.” He turns another page. “Women.” Another. “Children.”
Silence settles across the table, heavy and ugly. There are rules even men like us obey: lines that separate criminals from animals. Pavel slowly raises his eyes to Konstantin. “Did you know?”
Konstantin leans back in his chair. “Dmitri ran his own affairs.”
Not a denial. I see several elders notice it, too, and so does Vera. She lets the silence expose him before she goes on. “Dmitri wasn’t working alone.” She nods toward the ledger.
Pavel flips farther through it himself. His finger stops. “Anton Grishin.” He reads the name aloud, and another elder reaches for the page.
Pavel keeps going, quieter now. Anton’s initials beside transfers, dates, payments, instructions. Fabricated evidence, planted. Witnesses paid off.
I know these entries without needing to see them. I lived the other side of every line.
Pavel looks toward me. “These dates...”
“Are the weeks before I was accused,” I finish.
Konstantin’s mouth tightens, but he doesn’t break. Of course he doesn’t. My father has spent a lifetime watching other people bleed without allowing so much as a wrinkle in his suit.
“This proves Dmitri and Anton conspired against Roman,” he says. “Nothing more.”
For a moment, nobody contradicts him. And there it is.
The problem with truth is that it doesn’t win just because you put it on a table.
These men have followed my father for decades.
Some owe him their positions, some their lives, and a few probably owe him bodies buried where no one will ever find them.
Pavel closes the ledger, and my stomach drops. Konstantin sees it, and smiles.
“You came here expecting a book written by a dead man to overthrow thirty years of leadership?” he asks me. “Siberia has made you more foolish than I thought.”
I say nothing, because for one terrible second I wonder whether he’s right.
Then Vera speaks. “There’s more.”
Konstantin’s eyes slide toward her. “Of course there is.”
She takes the ledger from Pavel and opens it near the middle. But she still doesn’t read it aloud. Instead, she turns the book around. “Look at the margin here.”
Pavel leans closer, his eyes narrowing. Three words sit beside one of the entries, in Dmitri’s handwriting. Father approved it.
Konstantin laughs, actually laughs. “My son’s private notes are hardly evidence of my involvement.”
“You’re right,” Vera says.
That catches him off guard. She places another bank record beside the open page. “That’s why we checked the transfer.”
Pavel picks it up. The money didn’t come from Dmitri’s account. It came from one controlled by Konstantin.
Nobody speaks. Vera looks directly at him. “You knew. You knew what Dmitri was doing, and you funded it anyway.”
“I funded hundreds of operations.”
“Then explain this one.”
He doesn’t. For the first time, his silence works against him.
I lean back carefully, my side screaming. “You pitted us against each other,” I say.
His gaze snaps to mine.
“You let Dmitri frame me.”
“Roman—”
“You knew.” The words come out quieter than I expect, and that makes them worse. “You knew he planted evidence in my room. You knew the witnesses were bought. You knew Anton helped him do it.”
I look at him across the table, and suddenly I’m not here anymore.
I’m barely twenty-five again, hauled out of my bed in the middle of the night by men I’d bled beside, the cold of the marble biting into my bare feet as they march me into my father’s study.
Dmitri is already there, waiting. Konstantin’s fist twists in my shirt as I try to tell him I’ve done nothing.
Stand straight. Stop embarrassing yourself.
It never once crosses his face that I might be telling the truth. He’d already chosen which son mattered.
“You dragged me from my room like a criminal,” I say. No one moves. “You sent me to Siberia knowing I was innocent.”
Konstantin’s eyes harden. “You survived.”
A laugh escapes me. It hurts my ribs. “That’s your defense?”
“I made you strong.”
There it is. The justification I’ve been waiting half my life to hear. Vera goes completely still beside me.
“You came back harder,” my father continues. “Smarter. Dangerous. Everything you are now was forged because I refused to indulge your weakness.”
Something inside me finally goes quiet. For years, some stupid part of me wanted an explanation. Maybe even an apology. Instead he gives me pride. He thinks destroying me was good parenting.
“No.” Vera’s voice is low, and Konstantin’s attention shifts to her as she stands. “Roman became who he is despite you.”
My father gives her a contemptuous look. “You know nothing about my son.”
“I know enough.” Her voice doesn’t rise.
It doesn’t need to. “You couldn’t control him as a child, so you punished him.
You couldn’t control him as a man, so you exiled him.
And when he came back anyway, you tried to take everything from him again.
” She holds his eyes. “Dmitri wanted your approval. Roman wanted your respect. You never understood the difference.”
The words land. I see them land. For the first time since we walked in, my father’s composure cracks. Not much, just a small twitch beside his mouth. But it’s enough.
Pavel opens the final pages of the ledger, and his face changes.
“What is it?” another elder asks.