Chapter Forty #2
The word makes bile rise up my throat… and rage along with it.
My finger finds the trigger’s breaking point—two pounds of pressure, maybe three, the Makarov’s pull as familiar to me as breathing.
One more pound and it’s done. One more pound and Gavriil Laurov stops existing, stops hurting people, stops being the shadow that falls across every decent thing I’ve ever tried to build.
“What did you do to her?” Yanis now, stepping forward, his weapon up. His voice carries a coldness I’ve rarely heard from him—Yanis, the diplomat, the mediator, the brother who always found the gentler path. Not tonight. Tonight, his eyes hold something I recognize because I’ve seen it in my own.
“I slapped her.” Gavriil says it the way another man might say I checked the post. “She told me she was Debra’s twin. I found that surprising.”
“You slapped a pregnant woman,” Yanis says slowly, disgusted.
“I slapped what I thought was my property.” Gavriil takes a measured sip from his glass. “My mistake. An understandable one, you’ll agree, given the circumstances.”
“Your property.” My voice has dropped to something subterranean. “Debra was never your property. She was a child when you took her. A girl. Eighteen years old. And you molested her for years.”
“I gave her everything she needed.”
“You raped her!” The words tear out of me and bounce off the wood-paneled walls. “You beat her and raped her and called it love, you sick fuck. You—”
“Careful, boy.” The command in his voice is so instinctive, so embedded in the structure of our relationship, that for a split second my body responds—the old deference, the child’s reflex to obey the patriarch. “You’re in my house. Pointing a gun at your father. Think about what you’re doing.”
“I’ve thought about nothing else for years.”
Gavriil studies me. Then he does something that surprises me, which is rare, because I’ve spent my entire life learning to predict this man.
He smiles.
“You won’t shoot me, Arkady.” Quiet. Certain. The smile of a man holding a card nobody else can see. “You want to. I can see it. Your whole body wants to. But you won’t.”
“Try me.”
“I don’t need to try. I know you.” He sets the glass down and steeples his fingers.
“You’re the boy who killed his brother with a gun he thought was empty and spent the rest of his life choking on the memory.
You think you can shoot your own father in cold blood?
You, who can’t close your eyes without seeing Mishka’s face? ”
The jab lands where he intended it—deep, between the ribs of my resolve, in the soft tissue where the old wound lives. Mishka. Twelve years old. The click before the crack. The surprise on his face. The blood.
My hand doesn’t move. The Makarov stays centered on Gavriil’s forehead, steady. But inside… Inside, something is happening. A crack, widening.
You killed your brother. You broke your mother. You’re the reason this family is destroyed.
The words are his, but the voice is mine. My own internal echo, repeating the indictment I’ve never been able to fully dismiss, no matter how many years pass, no matter how many times Yanis tells me it wasn’t my fault, no matter how many nights Mirabel holds me and says it was an accident.
The trigger sits beneath my finger. One squeeze and the hammer falls.
I can’t do it.
My arm is steady. My breathing is controlled. My sight picture is perfect—Gavriil’s head, centered, framed. Every element is in place, every variable accounted for, the execution window wide open and getting no wider.
But the command—the signal from brain to finger, the electrical impulse that should be simpler than blinking—won’t connect.
Because the last time I pulled a trigger pointed at family, my little brother died in my arms.
Mishka.
His face floods my mind. Not the blood, not the wound, not the aftermath—the before.
Mishka grinning at me across the kitchen table.
Mishka on my shoulders at the summer house.
Mishka coming to my room during thunderstorms, trusting that his brother would keep him safe from everything, always, forever.
I kept him safe from everything except me.
“Arkady.” Yanis’s voice, from somewhere to my right. Strained. “Do it.”
I look at my brother. His weapon is up, trained on Gavriil, but his arm has the same quality mine does—rigid, locked, functional in every mechanical sense but missing the human component that completes the circuit.
Yanis, who never pulled a trigger on a man who didn’t have a weapon in his hand first. Yanis, whose version of violence has always been bound by rules that I threw away years ago, but he still carries.
“You do it,” I manage.
Yanis’s mouth thins. A tendon stands out in his neck like cable. His finger rests on the trigger guard—not the trigger, the guard, and the distinction tells me everything.
He can’t do it either.
Pizdets.
Gavriil sees it. Of course he does. He’s spent a lifetime reading his sons, scanning for weaknesses, opportunities, points of leverage.
“Neither of you can,” he says. Not gloating. Stating a fact. “Because I’m your father. Because you still remember that. Because no matter what I’ve done, some part of you will always be the boys who sat on my lap and thought I was God.”
The quiet that follows is worse than the gunfire. It fills the room. Stefan stands by the door, weapon lowered, watching us with the expression of a man who understands that he cannot intervene in what’s happening between these three men and this blood and this history.
Gavriil starts to rise from his chair. Slowly. Deliberately. Testing.
“Sit down,” I say, but the command has lost its edge. He can hear it. I can hear it. We all can.
My father stands. Full height. Those ice-blue eyes level on mine.
“Put the guns down, boys.” He straightens his cuffs. “Let’s discuss this like—”
The shot comes from the doorway.
Not the suppressed whisper of our weapons—a full, unsilenced crack that splits the room in half. The sound of a civilian weapon fired by someone who doesn’t know or care about noise discipline.
Gavriil’s body jerks. Once. A sharp, involuntary spasm, the kind that happens when the brain receives information faster than it can interpret. He looks down at his chest, where a dark stain is spreading across the dove-gray suit with an almost artistic slowness.
His mouth opens. Closes.
I spin toward the doorway, weapon up, the reflex overriding every other signal in my body.
Debra stands in the threshold.
She’s wearing the blue cardigan—the soft one, the one Yanis bought for her.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her face is colorless, drained of everything except a terrible, icy clarity.
And in her grasp, held in a two-handed grip that nobody taught her and she must have learned from watching us, is a Beretta 92.
One of ours. From the weapons cabinet at Ashwater Heights.
Her hands aren’t shaking. That’s what I notice first. This woman, whose body trembles when a door closes too loudly, who flinches at shadows—her hands are steady. Rock-solid.
“Debra—” Yanis starts, moving toward her, but she doesn’t look at him. She’s looking at Gavriil. Only at Gavriil.
Gavriil has staggered back against the desk, one hand pressed to his chest where the blood is coming through his fingers.
His face holds an expression I’ve never seen on him before—not pain, not fear, but recognition.
The sudden, nauseating understanding that the thing you owned and used and broke has just stood up and bitten back.
“You—” he manages.
Debra fires again.
The second round takes him in the stomach, and he doubles over, catching himself on the desk with both hands, blood splattering across the paperwork and the crystal tumbler and the polished mahogany that witnessed thirty years of his empire.
“That’s for every night,” Debra says. Her voice is the most frightening thing in the room—flat, toneless, stripped of everything human except intent. “Every single night you came to my room.”