21
Darina
Vadim came to Zarya that same afternoon, exactly as I'd warned Rurik he would, and I knew the moment I saw his face through the front window that whatever conversation we were about to have, it was not going to be the gentle one I'd spent all morning rehearsing in my head.
I'd spent the hours leading up to his arrival doing ordinary things with extraordinary care — restocking towels, double-checking the morning's receipts, anything that gave my hands a task while the rest of me braced for what I already understood was coming.
Rurik had offered, twice, to be there when Vadim arrived, and I'd refused both times, telling him this particular conversation needed to happen between siblings first, without a Pakhan's presence changing the shape of what either of us was willing to say.
He'd agreed, reluctantly, and told me to call him the moment it was over, regardless of how it went.
"Lock the door," Vadim said, before he'd even fully crossed the threshold, his face carrying an expression I'd rarely seen on him outside of the very worst days of our shared grief. "I don't want customers wandering in for this."
I locked it. I want to record, for whatever it matters, that my hands were steadier doing it than I expected them to be — fifteen years of secrets had apparently taught me, finally, how to face the consequences of one without falling apart in the process.
"How long," he said, once the deadbolt clicked.
No preamble. No working up to it the way he usually worked up to difficult things, circling a hard subject three times before finally landing on it.
"How long has it been going on, Darina. And don't tell me you don't know what I'm asking, because we both know exactly what I'm asking. "
"Vadim—"
"He drove to your apartment at midnight after two men threatened you.
He had men watching this building before I even finished hearing what happened.
He told me himself he'd handle the family side of things personally, back when Denis first got arrested, and I thought it was thoroughness.
I've been telling myself for months it was thoroughness.
" His voice had gone rough, the careful control he usually wore stripped down to something rawer underneath it.
"I'm not stupid, Dari. I've just been choosing, apparently, not to see something that's been sitting directly in front of me since the night this entire mess started. "
I didn't answer immediately, and the silence itself was its own confession, the kind no further words could have softened.
"How long," he repeated, quieter this time, which somehow made it worse.
"Since the night Denis was arrested. The same night, actually — he came to tell me himself it was handled, and something happened that neither of us planned for, and it's just kept happening since.
" I made myself hold his gaze, because he deserved that much honesty delivered directly, not offered sideways while I found something else to look at.
"I'm sorry. I know exactly how that sounds, and I know exactly what it means that I let it keep happening without telling you. "
"Do you have any idea what this means, Darina?
Not for you — I'll get to that — for every man in this organization who's ever trusted that their families were safe from exactly this kind of thing.
I've watched Rurik turn away considerably less than this from men with half his power.
I've watched him enforce a rule for fifteen years that he apparently decided didn't apply to himself the moment it became inconvenient. "
"That's not fair to him, Vadim. He fought that rule for months. He told me himself how much it cost him to break it, and I watched him agonize over exactly what it would mean for you specifically, for your trust in him, more than almost anything else he was risking by being with me at all."
"And yet here we're anyway." He dragged a hand down his face, some of the anger draining into something more exhausted, more frightened.
"I'm not angry because you fell for someone, Dari.
I want you to understand that, underneath everything else I'm about to say badly.
I'm angry because you didn't trust me with it.
Because I found out from two strangers threatening you in an alley instead of from my own sister, after everything we've survived together, after everything I've tried to be for this family since we were children on that floor. "
That landed harder than anything else he'd said, precisely because it was true, and precisely because it wasn't the only secret I'd been keeping from him that year, though it was the only one I had any right to confirm that afternoon.
"I'm sorry," I said again, because it was the only thing I had that was both honest and insufficient.
"I didn't trust you with it because I was frightened of exactly this conversation.
I was frightened of what it would do to your trust in him, what it would do to the whole structure we're all standing inside.
I wasn't trying to protect myself from your judgment, Vadim.
I was trying to protect what little stability this family has left. "
"That's not your job. Protecting this family's stability has never once been your job alone, and I'm tired of watching you carry it like it's." Something in his voice cracked, finally, the older brother underneath the soldier showing through.
"I lost two parents on one ordinary Tuesday, Dari.
I've spent fifteen years making absolutely certain I never lose anyone else this family loves without seeing it coming first. You didn't let me see this coming.
I had to learn it from the way a man's voice sounded telling me my own sister had been hurt. "
"You've never once lost anyone, Vadim. We're all still here. I know that's not the same as feeling safe, but I need you to hear that you haven't failed at the thing you've spent fifteen years afraid of failing at."
"Haven't I." He looked at me then with something I'd rarely seen from him — not anger anymore, but a kind of naked grief he usually kept entirely buried beneath competence.
"I've spent fifteen years building walls around this family so thick I genuinely believed nothing could get through them without my noticing first. A federal informant got through one.
The most dangerous man in this entire city got through another, close enough that I'd no idea until two strangers in an alley told me before either of you did.
I don't feel like a man who hasn't failed, Darina.
I feel like a man who's been guarding the wrong doors for fifteen years. "
"You haven't been guarding the wrong doors.
You've just been guarding them the only way you knew how — by trying to control everything, instead of trusting that the people you love might actually be capable of protecting themselves too.
" I said it as gently as I could manage, because it was true and because I understood, saying it, how much it was going to cost him to hear.
"I'm not a child anymore, Vadim. None of us are.
I think some part of all of this — the secrets, the distance, even Yegor's—" I caught myself before I said too much, before another secret that wasn't fully mine to give away slipped out in the wreckage of this one.
"I think some part of it comes from all three of us still being a little afraid to let you see us as anything other than the children you had to raise. "
He didn't ask me to finish the sentence about Yegor, which told me, even in the middle of his own crisis, he'd noticed the catch and decided, generously, not to push it.
"Maybe," he said instead, quietly. "I don't know how to be anything other than the brother who raised you, though.
I've been that brother since I was fourteen years old.
I don't actually know who I'm underneath it anymore. "
"You're allowed to find out. We're all still here to watch you figure it out, however long it takes you."
He crossed the small distance between us and hugged me before I could stop him, fierce and sudden, and I felt him resist for exactly one second before giving in entirely, his arms coming around me the way they had a hundred times across fifteen years of him being the parent none of us had asked him to become.
"I love him," I said, into his shoulder, my voice muffled against the familiar fabric of his jacket, the same jacket smell I'd known my whole life. "I know that doesn't fix anything you're feeling right now. I need you to know it anyway."
"I believe you." He pulled back, studying my face with an expression that had finally settled into something closer to grief than anger.
"That's actually the part that frightens me most, if I'm honest. I've watched that man for fifteen years.
I know exactly what he's capable of, in both directions.
If you'd told me you were simply infatuated, I could have talked you out of it eventually, the way I've talked you out of things before.
I don't think I can talk you out of this.
I think you actually love him, and I think he actually loves you, and I've absolutely no idea what that's supposed to mean for the rest of us who work for him. "
"It doesn't have to mean anything bad, Vadim."
"It already has, Dari. Two men already used it as leverage against you.
That's not nothing." He sat down heavily in one of the changing room chairs, suddenly looking older than I'd ever seen him look.
"I need time. Not forever — I'm not asking you to end it, whatever you might be bracing for me to say.
I need time to actually sit with what this means before I've to look him in the eye again and figure out how to keep working for a man who's also, apparently, about to become my brother-in-law or whatever this eventually turns into. "