“You’re still asking the wrong question.”
I’m done with that tone. Done with his games. Done with the way he thinks he can make every room bend around his timing.
I start toward him. That’s when something shifts behind me.
A heavy blow crashes into the back of my head and turns the whole yard white for a second. My gun arm jerks. The ground tilts.
I drop to one knee, try to turn, try to bring the weapon up, and get nothing but pain and broken light and the taste of blood in my mouth.
The last clear thing I see before the concrete comes up to meet me is my father still standing there, gun in hand, watching me fall like this part went exactly the way he planned.
34
KATERINA
For a second Ican’t make sense of what I’m seeing.
Vika is standing behind me with a gun in her hand and that small, polished smile she uses at parties when she wants everyone to think she knows something they don’t. Except there is nothing playful in it now. Nothing careless. The smile is real in the worst possible way.
I stare at her. “Vika? Seriously?”
She tilts her head. “Hello, Katya.”
My mouth goes dry. The yard feels too still around us. Mikhail has his gun up, but he can’t take the shot. He knows it. I know it. Vika knows it too.
I hear myself say, “Why are you doing this?”
For one moment, her expression changes. Not softer. More open. As if the question touches the one place in her where the truth lives. “Because I loved him,” she says.
I just look at her.
She laughs once under her breath, but it comes out bitter. “Oh, don’t pretend to be surprised. I loved Lev. More than you ever did.”
“Sure, you did,” I say calmly.
“Shut up, bitch,” she says. The gun in her hand shakes a little.
With Vika, so much is performance that it becomes hard to tell where vanity ends and feeling begins.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I tell her.
“No?” she says. “I know exactly what I’m saying. I loved him. I wanted him. I would have stood beside him properly. I would have given him a life that made sense. But you got there first, didn’t you? You with your quiet face and your good daughter act and your talent for having men ruin themselves over you.”
My stomach turns. “This is about Lev?”
“It started with Lev.”
Her finger stays steady on the trigger. She’s enjoying this now, the finally-being-seen part of it. She goes on, “After he died, I thought that was the end of it. Another ugly family story, another dead heir, another thing we would all step around at dinner until it became polite to forget. Then Andrei Morozov contacted me.”
My breath catches. “What?”
Vika smiles at my face. “Yes,” she says softly. “That surprised me too.”
“Drop the gun,” Mikhail says, quietly. “And this doesn’t end badly.”
“Be quiet.” She doesn’t look at him. “You’re very distracting.”
Then her gaze comes back to me.