Chapter 40
Dimitri Morozov
I stood in the center of my father’s office. I could smell the scent of Cuban cigars and polished mahogany. Alexei was at my right shoulder. My eyes burned. I could not even hide it. My whole body was filled with rage.
My father sat behind his desk. He had summoned us yesterday.
I had ignored the call for weeks, ever since the last time we spoke and he brought up that fucking wedding again, the one he wanted me to use as a leash.
I had not answered his messages. I had not stepped foot in this room.
And now here I was, because the truth had finally clawed its way to the surface.
He looked me over with a knowing smile. “It’s a surprise you came,” he said. “I thought I’d have to chase you down. Alexei has been handling all your work. Is that the mark of a leader?”
Alexei squeezed my forearm in a silent warning. He could probably feel I was about to go feral.
My gaze stayed locked on the man who had given me his name and taught me that love was just another weapon.
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
My father tilted his head like a curious cat.
“You helped Daniel Walker.”
Inside my head, the pieces had already locked into place.
Daniel had been rich, but he still did not have the resources to pull off everything he did.
Ilya, the best hacker we had, had taken far too long to find him.
Money alone did not buy that kind of delay.
Only real power could slow Ilya down. So I told Alexei and Ilya to stop looking at the surface and start digging under it after Daniel died, because I was not convinced he was doing it alone.
I knew he had help. Ilya came today and delivered all the information, traces that pointed straight back to the Morozov name.
My father had been covering him and helping him.
“The video from the woods was also you,” I said, feeling my voice give in to anger. “You spread that around and hid my face, thinking I’d drop him once he was publicly humiliated.”
My father simply leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, and answered like we were discussing the weather.
“And yet you didn’t. You had to go and make a demonstration and declare him yours.”
He made me fucking sick.
He had helped Daniel Walker lure and corner the one person I had decided belonged to me.
He could have had Rei killed outright, but my father had never been interested in simple.
He adored games. The psychological knife twist. Let Daniel destroy what I cared about.
Let the public humiliation do the work of breaking him.
And watch to see if I would walk away like a good son who knew his place.
When I did not, he must have been disappointed. Or amused. Or both.
I could not stand the look on his face.
I raised my gun and aimed straight at the center of my father’s chest. The safety was already off. One twitch and it would be over.
Alexei’s hand clamped down on my wrist instantly. “Dimitri—”
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”
My father watched me. I knew he had already calculated every possible outcome and was waiting to see which one I would choose.
My finger rested on the trigger. I could end it. Right now.
“You always did have a temper,” he said softly.
I could kill him. I wanted to kill him.
“It’s time to stop playing games,” my father said, like he was discussing a business merger instead of my entire fucking life.
“You had your fun. But he’s no woman. He’s a boy with a pretty face and a weak spine.
It was amusing for a while, watching you chase something you thought you wanted. But it ends now.”
I almost laughed.
“You know, when I was small, my mother used to talk about you so fondly. She would sit on the edge of my bed at night, brush the hair from my face, and tell me stories about the great Ivan Morozov. How strong you were. How clever. How no one in the world could stand against you. She spoke about you like you were some kind of god she had been lucky enough to marry. Even when you were cold to her. Even when you barely looked at her across the dinner table. Even when you came home with blood on your cuffs and did not say a single word to her for days.”
My father’s jaw tightened, but he did not interrupt.
“She did it for me,” I continued. “She wanted me to love you. To respect you. To grow up wanting to be like you. Every time I complained, every single time I cried because you dragged me into those meetings at seven years old, because you made me watch men beg for their lives while their fingers were being pulled off one by one, she would grab my face and say, ‘Your father does this because he wants you to be strong. He wants you to survive in this world.’ She had so much faith in you. Right up until her last breath.”
The gun in my hand trembled. I forced my fingers to still.
“Until the void inside her grew too big. Until she could not take it anymore. She left a note. Did you know that? It said she hoped I would find someone who could love me the way she had tried to love you.”
I swallowed. The memory of finding her still burned behind my eyes.
“Our marriage was an alliance,” my father said flatly. “You know this.”
“I know.” My voice cracked. “But she still loved you. Maybe not the kind of love that makes poets write sonnets, but she loved you in the only way she knew how. She believed in you. She defended you to me when I was too young to understand why you never smiled at her. And I…” I let out a shaky breath.
“I always told myself that maybe, in your own way, you cared for her too. That beneath it all there was something. Respect. Affection. Anything.”
I could have sworn I saw my father’s eyes soften, but then I blinked and it was gone.
“But I was wrong,” I said. “Because if you had even an ounce of respect for her, if you had honored even one single thing she believed in, you would never have done this to me.”
I took another step forward.
“You think me being with a man is some kind of weakness. Some pathetic phase I’ll grow out of.
But he’s not a phase. He’s a human being.
He has a heart that somehow decided to beat for me, even after everything I’ve done to him.
He has a soul that I would burn the entire world to protect.
And you…” My voice was shaking. “You wanted to crush both of those things right in front of my eyes.”
The images slammed into me again, the ones where Rei was bleeding on the floor.
“Do you have any idea what that did to me? Do you know the kind of terror I felt? I had to watch the person I—” I stopped.
The word I wanted to say lodged in my throat.
“I had to watch him bleed because you decided my feelings were inconvenient. Because you thought I would eventually choose the empire over him.”
“If you continue this,” he said, sounding so cold, “you cannot be my heir.”
I think he expected me to fold. He expected me to lower my eyes and say the words he wanted to hear.
Instead, I met his gaze and let my choice fall from my lips.
“Then I won’t be.”
He did not expect that. My father’s knuckles were white where his fists rested on the polished mahogany.
For a second I thought he might actually stand up and strike me.
Instead, he leaned back in the leather chair that had once belonged to his own father, the one my mother used to polish every Sunday.
“You are really so foolish,” he mocked, “to choose him over an empire.”
I did not care if I was foolish.
He turned his head slowly toward Alexei.
“Don’t think you’re not replaceable, Dimitri,” he said. “Alexei can replace you. He’s blood. He’s been trained the same way. He knows what loyalty to this family looks like.”
Alexei did not move or show any expression, but I saw the way his fingers twitched.
“Then let him,” I said.
My father’s lips thinned into something that might have been a smile on anyone else. On him it looked like a blade being drawn.
“Very well then, Alexei,” he said, turning fully toward my cousin. He straightened in the chair, the same way he did before every important announcement. “From this moment forward—”
A gunshot exploded through the room.
I felt the vibration in my chest before I even registered what had happened.
Alexei stood exactly where he had been, arm extended, the barrel of his gun still smoking. He was staring at the man who had just been about to name him heir.
My father’s head had snapped back. A single perfect hole sat between his eyes.
Blood and brain matter sprayed across the leather chair and the wall behind him in a grotesque fan.
His body jerked, then slumped forward onto the desk.
The pen he had been reaching for rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.
Alexei lowered the gun.
“No thank you.”
My eyes widened.
Did I feel sad?
No.
Not for the man who had just died. That man had been willing to destroy the only thing that had ever made me feel human again.
But somewhere at the back of my head, in the same place where I still kept the memory of my mother brushing my hair and telling me stories about a father who loved me in ways she could not explain…
I mourned. I mourned the father I had wished for.
The one who might have understood why I would burn an empire for Rei instead of asking me to choose.
But that man had never existed.
And now the one who had was dead.
My first instinct was not grief. It was fear, for Alexei.
I rushed toward the door. I yanked it open. I did not see any guards when we came in here, but I still expected the entire fucking organization to come running at the sound of the gun.
“No one is here. He dismissed them all before he called us both in.”
“Why?” The word tore out of me. “Why the fuck did you kill him? You could have taken my spot. He was handing it to you on a silver fucking platter. You could have been the heir. You could have had everything.”
Alexei holstered his gun. He glanced once at my father’s body, then back at me.
“Not interested.”
This motherfucker.
“What the hell are we going to do now?”
Alexei walked toward the door.
“I’m sure you’ll find a cover-up story,” he said.
“Something about an assassin. A rival family. Maybe even a tragic accident. You’re creative when you need to be.
” He paused at the threshold and glanced over his shoulder, the faintest ghost of something like a smile touching his mouth.
“Consider it your first task as a leader.”
I stood frozen for a second. Then I remembered, and it made sense. It made sense why he did not hesitate to kill him when he was about to make him heir. I called out before he would leave.
“I’m sorry… about Marco.”
Alexei’s back stiffened. I watched the way his fingers curled into fists at his sides, the same way mine had done so many times when Rei was in pain.
Then he nodded and walked away.
I turned back to the desk.
The empire was mine now.