Epilogue #2
Stepan came by the safe house and we went over the plan two nights ago. I knew sooner or later Ilya would find me there. And I wanted them to. Stepan told me they were moving against me, that they knew about my children.
Stepan had let it slip that I had a daughter, just once. I didn’t tell Zoya this—I knew she would never forgive me—but I had used my daughter as bait to secure my enemies. And it had worked exactly how we planned. He had already secured a rope for me. All I had to do was fall.
“I put my life in your hands,” I tell him now.
“I’ll never betray your trust, boss. Not after you saved my life,” he says.
I look at him then. We haven’t talked about that night, ten years ago, when I saved him in that alley. He had been beaten up horribly. I had brought him into my fold.
“By tonight, most of the city will believe you went over the ledge and never came back up,” he tells me.
I look at him. “Most?”
“The smart ones will doubt it. You’re our leader, Ruslan. There are many still loyal to you,” he says.
“I can’t take the chance anymore,” I say. Not with my family. “That’s not enough.”
“No,” he says. “That’s why we fixed the rest.”
I wait.
Stepan pulls the chair closer to the bed and finally sits. He looks exhausted, which tells me more than his words do.
I say nothing.
“Ilya went over with you,” Stepan continues. “Half the men there saw it. None of them saw what happened after.”
I remember enough of the fall to feel sick. The ridge. The broken branch. Ilya’s hand on my throat. Rock against my back. The look on his face when he understood I wasn’t trying to survive the fall so much as survive long enough to finish him.
“I broke his neck on the way down,” I say.
Stepan nods. “I guessed.” There’s no surprise in his voice. No judgment either. Just acceptance, like he’s confirming the weather.
I close my eyes for a second, not out of grief, just memory. The impact. The taste of blood. Clawing back up the side because there was no version of the world where I let Mila think I had chosen the fall over coming back.
When I open my eyes, Stepan is still watching me.
“You had Ilya’s body moved,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if they found him where he fell, half the city would start asking about you. I can’t exactly present your body,” he says.
That’s true enough that I don’t argue.
“Where?”
“A lime pit near the old brick kilns,” he says. “No marker. No record. No one will dig there unless they already know what they’re looking for.”
I let that sit for a second.
“You left the body unclaimed.”
“Yes.”
“No one identified it?”
Stepan’s mouth moves slightly. “No one could identify it easily. The fall helped.”
I understand. A ruined body at the base of a quarry doesn’t need a name if the men telling the story are already terrified. They see what they expect to see.
“And Pavel?” I ask.
“He thinks the body is yours.”
“Does he need to?”
“For now.”
I look at the blanket over my legs, at the hard line the bandages make under the hospital sheet, at the shape of the life that is already moving away from me.
“He was loyal.”
“He still is,” Stepan says. “That’s why he can’t know yet.”
“If Ruslan Karelin dies,” I say slowly, “then nobody hunts for the man after.”
“That was the theory.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s not theory.” He reaches into his coat and brings out a slim folder. No flourish. No speech. He places it on the bed beside my hand.
Inside is a passport.
Stepan says, “The name is Anton Melnyk.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s forgettable. That matters more.”
I flip it open. The photo is me, but not me. Hair shorter. Beard trimmed differently. The face of a man who exists just enough to pass and not enough to remember.
“There’s a bank account tied to it,” Stepan says. “A rental history. A tax number. Two years of paper movement in case anyone looks. Not perfect, but good enough.”
I close the passport and rest it on my chest for a second. “So that’s it,” I say.
Stepan reads enough of that off my face to say, “You can still stop.”
“No.”
He nods.
He knew the answer before he offered it.
I look toward the door where the girls left a few minutes ago, where I can still hear them in my head, Mila whispering too loudly, Nadia correcting her, Zoya trying to sound calm even when she’s furious.
“I started making this choice six years ago,” I say.
Stepan says nothing. That’s one of the reasons he’s still here.
I go on, because he was there for that too, though not the worst of it. “The night I sent her away, I told myself I was saving her from me. That if I cut her loose hard enough, she would get clear and stay clear.”
“And?”
“And all I did was leave her to carry the part I should have carried with her.”
He looks down once, then back at me. “You didn’t know about the girls.”
“No,” I say. “But I knew enough.”
The room is quiet again.
I look at him. “And you?”
“I stay long enough to seal it.”
“Then?”
“Then I go.”
I know better than to ask where. Men like us don’t survive by sharing final destinations.
At the door, he pauses. “You’re no longer Ruslan Karelin,” he says.
This time I don’t look at the passport. I look at the closed door and think of Zoya outside it, probably trying not to cry in front of the girls, probably already planning which clothes they’ll need, what lies she’ll tell the school, how to get through the next hour before she lets herself think about the next year.
I think of Mila on the quarry path, running because I told her to.
I think of Nadia at my bedside, wanting a promise.
I think of the woman I loved six years ago and the woman who still came back for me in the rain.
Then I look at Stepan. “No,” I say. “I’m just finally done pretending that name is worth more than they are.”
Something moves across his face. Not surprise. Not approval. Something smaller and sadder.
Then he nods once and leaves through the bathroom, the way he came.
A minute later, the door opens.
Mila comes in first, carrying pudding like it’s medicine. Nadia is beside her with two paper cups of water, careful and solemn. Zoya comes behind them, still tired, still watching everything, still somehow the strongest thing in the room.
They crowd around the bed at once.
Mila starts talking before she reaches me. Nadia corrects her before she gets halfway through the sentence. Zoya puts a hand on my shoulder like she has every right to check whether I’m still real.
And lying there with the passport hidden under the blanket, the machines humming, my daughters arguing softly at my bedside, and the woman I love close enough to touch, I understand something I should have understood a long time ago.
I may have lost the power.
But I found everything else that mattered.
The End.