Under any other circumstances, I might have laughed.
Nikolai stays quiet a little longer. “Are you going to tell him?”
I look at my son and feel the whole shape of my life pressing in from every side.
Five years ago, I thought I could bury the truth and keep it buried.
Now I can’t answer a child’s question without feeling the ground shift under me.
And somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the guilt, beneath every reason not to, one impossible certainty is rising anyway.
Yes.
I’m going to tell him.
23
ROMAN
They findOleg’s body just after dawn.
A harbor patrol drags him up half a mile downriver, caught against a line of rotting pilings like garbage the tide got tired of carrying. By the time Mikhail gets the call, I’m already awake, sitting in the safe apartment kitchen with coffee I haven’t touched and a headache that started somewhere behind my eyes and never left.
He comes in, shuts the door behind him, and says, “They found him.”
That’s all. He doesn’t need to say who.
I look up at him. “Alive?”
He gives me a look. “No.”
For a second I just sit there staring at the grain of the table under my hands. Then I push the chair back and stand.
Something in me has been holding itself together on the ugly little hope that maybe Oleg survived the water long enough to be dragged out somewhere else. Maybe he would wash up half-dead, lungs ruined, useful for one more hour if I found him first. Maybe I still had time to force the name out of him.
I didn’t.
The old bastard is dead.
And with him goes the one man I had finally cornered after five years of false starts, dead leads, men who swore they hadn’t seen him and meant it because they’d only seen what he wanted them to see.
Mikhail puts the report on the table between us.
I don’t pick it up.
Then I laugh once, under my breath. There’s no humor in it. Just disgust.
Of course, Oleg would die exactly like that. Slipping away half-broken, still useless at the end, still finding a way to leave me with blood and fragments instead of anything I can actually use.
I walk to the window because if I stay standing still in the middle of the kitchen, I’m going to start breaking things.
The city outside is gray and flat under the morning weather. Trucks. Taxis. Men walking dogs they maybe don’t particularly like. It all looks normal from up here, which only makes me angrier.
Mikhail stays behind me for a moment, then says, “He gave you something.”
I turn my head enough to look at him. “Not enough,” I say.
“No.”