2. Alina
ALINA
A day later, the news story breaks.
“They’re saying it was extremists,” I say over breakfast. My voice sounds too thin, too far away, as if it’s traveling through cotton instead of air.
Not that my father notices. Or even responds.
I haven’t eaten a single bite of the food Evgenia placed in front of me nearly half an hour ago.
The eggs have gone cold, the toast is stiff, and the tea beside my plate has lost all its steam.
I stare at the food instead of the television because every time I look up, the images on the screen crawl under my skin and make it difficult to breathe.
Footage of the blast, aerial shots of the wreckage, reporters standing in front of the cordoned-off ruins with grim faces.
Students are sobbing into each other’s shoulders as they tell their stories while body bags are lined up along the courtyard’s walkway like punctuation marks at the end of a sentence that never should have been written in the first place.
“They say a radical group claimed responsibility,” I add, my voice hitching slightly. “They’re calling it a political statement.”
Still nothing from him.
His eyes refuse to tear away from the massive TV mounted on the wall of the breakfast nook, his preferred seat in the mornings. He leans forward in his chair as though proximity will change the story, make the facts rearrange themselves into something more useful, more understandable.
His expression is carved from stone.
His hand is wrapped around an untouched mug of coffee, fingers tightening and loosening around the ceramic with restless energy at each passing image that flicks across the screen.
The other grips his phone so tightly that I genuinely expect it to crack in half.
His knuckles are chalk-white, tendons standing out sharply.
It’s rare for him to ignore me this blatantly. Even rarer for him to look this… afraid.
When the phone vibrates in his hand, he flinches hard enough to jostle the entire table, sending a clatter of silverware echoing throughout the room. Then he freezes, just for a beat, as his eyes flick down to the caller ID.
Whatever he sees drains the color from his face. His jaw clenches so tightly, I can hear the faint click of his teeth meeting.
“Papa?” I ask quietly.
He rises from his chair abruptly, the legs scraping against the marble floor with a harsh metallic screech. He mutters something under his breath that’s too soft for me to catch then steps away from the table, his movements brisk and tense.
I twist in my seat, watching him disappear through the open doorway.
As soon as he’s out of sight, his voice floats faintly back toward me from the hall in a low and urgent tone that sounds almost frantic.
Something cold settles in my stomach.
I’ve never seen him look like that. Extremist acts like this never have him this rattled. In fact, more than a few times, he’s used it to his political advantage. He’s never been one to scramble or waste time fumbling over an opportunity to look like a hero in the eyes of the Moscow people.
Political optics don’t make him look like that. Guilt does. Fear of someone more powerful than him coming around to collect some kind of bargain he never intended on honoring.
His footsteps fade as he retreats deeper down the hallway to the private study wing where his office is, his voice growing fainter until it disappears altogether behind thick, soundproofed walls.
The news anchor continues droning in the background: “ Authorities have not released details of the explosive device but sources indicate precision and planning consistent with ? — ”
I press my trembling fingers to my temple, trying to ease the pounding ache that’s been there since the blast.
A part of me wants to follow him and put my ear to his door to hear whatever truth is hiding behind it, to understand his terrified silence this morning, but another larger and stronger part of me already knows.
I don’t need to hear the conversation. I don’t even need confirmation of who had been calling because that text message yesterday had been proof enough.
My father has had dealings with the Devil for a long, long time. Dealings whispered about in hallways I was never allowed to walk down, sealed behind doors I was never meant to open or listen against. Secrets traded in currencies far darker than rubles or political favors.
These were the kind of arrangements that lived in the shadows, that slithered through the cracks between legitimate power and the monsters who made the real decisions in Moscow’s underbelly.
Ones he’d rather die than admit to. Ones he’d rather get buried six feet under than ever let touch the pristine surface of his public life.
My hand tightens around my fork until it rattles against the porcelain plate.
The metal shakes so violently that for a moment I think I might snap it cleanly in half.
I force myself to set it down before I do something stupid like fling it across the room out of frustration or let it slip from my fingers entirely and clatter onto the floor, drawing even more attention to myself from the waitstaff.
I don’t ever want to think about any of it. Not the blast, not the chaos, not the text message that warned me minutes before everything went to hell. But the more I try to push it away, the more it claws its way back into my mind.
Because why would he , someone like that , have anything to do with a campus bombing?
His empire is built on fear and obedience, not theatrics.
He doesn’t waste time in the world aboveground with the rest of us, where the shiny, polished Moscow most people see is.
His attention is rooted in the dark places, the slums, the black markets, the ports crawling with contraband, the hidden gambling rings where fortunes and lives change hands within the same breath.
His world is rot and shadows and blood.
So why bomb a university? Why target a place full of students and professors and people who have nothing to do with him? To what end? What motive would someone like him have to pull off something like that?
There isn’t one.
Not one that makes sense, anyway.
He’s never been the type of man to concern himself with the surface world unless it threatened something he owned.
Unless someone forced his hand. And if he knew about the bombing—and that has been slowly becoming more and more likely by the second—if the message on my phone was not a coincidence or an accident and had actually been him, then the conclusion is sickeningly, horrifyingly clear. He warned me for a reason.
But why?
I’m nothing more than the daughter of a prominent politician. There’s nothing to gain from keeping me alive.
A cold sweat breaks out across my back despite the heated floors humming beneath my feet. I drag in a slow breath before flattening my palms on the table to keep them steady.
My skin tugs tight when my fingers unfurl, the cuts along my knuckles pulling as they stretch. The doctor who came late last night had spread salve across every scrape, every blister, every raw place where glass tore into me.
The ointment I put on this morning when I got up still glistens faintly under the lights, making my skin look wet even though it isn’t.
When my father finally comes back, he looks even more distraught than when he left.
It’s an expression I’ve only seen on him once, and that was at my mother’s funeral. Even then, it was muted and controlled, practiced in a way that carved my heart out because I was the only one falling apart the entire day and had no one else to lean on.
This is different, though. This is raw in a way that unsettles me.
“I’m moving you somewhere safe,” he says.
His eyes are unfocused as he scans the room. The hand holding his phone trembles ever so slightly, and when he tries to slide it into his pocket, he misses the first time.
I blink at him. “Where?”
Instead of answering me, he crosses the room in three long strides and takes my hand, something he hasn’t done since I was seven.
Back when my small fingers used to grip his as we crossed busy Moscow streets after school and on our way to stop by the ice cream shop before returning home, back before I learned what he truly was, before I learned what it meant to be a Morozov.
His palm is cold.
He squeezes once. Hard. “Do as I say, Alina. Please.”
The please is what breaks me.
Papa doesn’t beg.
Ever.
He commands.
He dictates.
He bends the world until it fits the shape of his will.
But now he looks like a man cornered and the walls are closing in on him. Whatever voice was on the other end of that call didn’t just threaten him. It has completely unraveled him.
“Papa…” I whisper.
His eyes lift to mine, and for the first time in my life, I see him the way no one else has—a powerful man who is suddenly, terrifyingly, out of options.
“You must trust me,” he says, squeezing my hand again. “You must. There is no time, Alina.”
My voice shakes. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me who called you.”
Tell me it’s not who I think it is.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving in an hour. Go pack your things. You’ll be staying there for a while. Don’t argue with me. Just do as I say.”
An hour later, I’m in the back of another SUV, this one heading out of the city.
My bags sit on the seat next to me. Two weeks’ worth of clothes sit inside them, along with my passport, my mother’s rosary, and a stack of cash I’ve had hidden under my mattress for over a year.
The sky outside has turned the color of ripe plums, that peculiar shade between dusk and a storm front coming in. Low clouds hang heavy over the skyline, pressing down on the city with a weight that mirrors the pressure in my chest.
I watch Moscow recede in the side mirror, shrinking inch by inch the farther we drive. The onion domes of St. Basil’s glow faintly beneath the grey sky before the distance swallows them completely. The towers and lights blur into a smear of memory.