Vadim
Her car pulled away while I stood beside mine, still holding the second picture the nurse had printed.
A sudden gust of wind made me clutch it tighter.
I hadn’t expected the moment to land the way it did. I had been there to confirm the investment was progressing. To verify the vitals. To file the result and move on.
But there it was. Inside her.
Moving. Breathing. Existing.
My child.
I watched Radovan’s car until it disappeared around the corner, catching one last glimpse of her hair through the rear window.
No matter how much I needed to fuck, I hadn’t stepped foot in her room. Not once. She had drawn that line and I had let it stand, which was its own kind of answer to a question I hadn’t asked.
What the hell did she have to be depressed about?
The question sat wrong the moment it formed. I knew the answer. I just didn’t want to look at it.
Tikhon opened the door and I got in.
I didn’t go to the office.
I went to see my father and Konstantin instead. They knew Iskra was pregnant, but perhaps they would join me in my happiness at seeing my son for the first time.
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It was rare to see my father smile so openly.
Rarer still to see a glimpse of humanity in him — the warmth that most men wore naturally and that sat on Lev Dragunov like a borrowed coat.
Yet as he held the picture I saw it. Pride.
And something softer underneath it, moving briefly across his usual cold eyes before he contained it.
He held onto the picture a beat longer than necessary before passing it to Konstantin.
“We should get you married next,” he grunted, reaching for the bottle.
Konstantin’s head snapped up. He recoiled visibly, the way a man recoils from something he finds genuinely offensive.
“Tied to a woman? No. I prefer my freedom.”
Our father set the bottle on the table harder than necessary. His eyes hardened.
“I had you, didn’t I?”
Konstantin held his gaze.
“I’m fairly certain it was our mother who did the actual work,” he said.
I took my glass from my father and passed one to my brother, catching his eye with a look that said leave it.
He didn’t leave it.
“Do you really want to know what I did with her?” our father drawled.
Konstantin looked down at the scan picture in his hand.
I could remember very little of my mother. Long dark hair. The ghost of a perfume. Fragments that could have been real or invented over time—I had stopped being able to tell the difference years ago.
“She was fucking one of the guards,” he said, lifting his glass. “So I sold her. Killing her would have been too kind.” He looked between us. “Za zdorov’ye.”
My eyes met Konstantin’s as we drank to our father’s toast to good health.
We had always wondered what happened to her.
Knowing didn’t fill the void—it just gave it a different shape.
A woman sold rather than buried. A mother who existed somewhere or didn’t, and either way had never come back.
The old man had no regrets. He never did.
Regret required a conscience and Lev Dragunov had traded his in long before either of us arrived.
Konstantin finished his drink and looked at the scan picture for a long moment before handing it back to me.
“Congratulations, brat,” he said quietly.
Then he turned and left the room.
The silence he left behind had a specific quality to it.
“Idiot boy,” my father grumbled, and poured himself another shot.
The room rumbled first—a deep vibration moving through the floor and walls before the sound caught up with it. I dove instinctively, throwing myself to the far side of the room.
The blast followed a fraction of a second later.
It flung me against the wall with enough force to knock the air from my lungs, my back connecting hard with something solid. I stayed down, one arm over my head, while the roar moved through the building and then out.
Silence.
Then dust. Everywhere.
I opened my eyes. The room was thick with it—plaster and debris suspended in the air, making it impossible to see the full scale of what had happened. I got to my knees, then to my feet, moving carefully over what had been floor and was now rubble.
Plaster collapsed. Walls knocked through. A wooden beam hanging from the ceiling at an angle that suggested it was considering falling further.
My father’s armchair was empty.
I found his legs first, sticking out from beneath a section of collapsed ceiling. I moved the debris off him and knelt down.
His eyes were closed. I checked his pulse.
Konstantin came over the rubble at speed and stopped beside me.
“The Pakhan is unharmed,” he said, loud enough for the room. “Secure the house. Find them.” He waved the dust from his face and lowered his voice. “There might be more. You need to get out.”
I could hear Bogdan taking command beyond the doorway. Movement. Boots on broken glass.
The shrapnel had got Lev. Pierced through skin and bone, enough damage to be fatal. He was alive when I checked—barely—but the kind of alive that had a direction to it.
“A parcel came for him,” Konstantin said. “Left in the foyer.”
In the distance, sirens. Muted at first, then growing.
“Deal with the authorities,” I said, shaking the dust from my hair. “Make sure they compile a thorough report for us.” I looked at what remained of the room. “I’m calling a meeting. These rats are hiding on the outskirts of my city and I intend to find every single one of them.”
I climbed out over broken wood, bricks and shattered glass and whistled for Bogdan and Tikhon. They swept my car for further devices before I got in and called Tau.
He was already on top of the house security. The compound was guarded better than my father’s property had been—which was now evident—but I wasn’t taking any chances.
This was the problem in the new world.
There were no rules.
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My men needed a show of strength. After a quick shower and change of clothes I headed downstairs.
Iskra came out of the living room as I reached the bottom of the stairs. She still wore what she’d had on earlier—the camel top, the brown drawstring trousers, the long matching cardigan. She looked at the activity around the house and then at me.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, stopping beside the newel post.
There had been a flurry of movement since I arrived back—checks inside and outside, men repositioned, the kind of controlled urgency that was impossible to miss if you’d been paying any attention at all. She had been paying attention.
“There was an attack on my father’s house,” I said, straightening my sleeves with a tug.
“Is he—?”
“Dead. Konstantin confirmed it shortly before I came down.”
She frowned.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
My eyes dropped to her waistband for a moment. The slight curve. The thing I wasn’t permitted to touch.
I nodded and turned away before I said something we would both regret.