The man who had murdered his own son and fed me a lie so I would carry hatred as my inheritance.
I wanted his death.God, I wanted it.Instead, I brought the gun down across his temple hard enough to send him to the floor.Then I walked away.
Bass got me out through the service corridors while the estate descended into confusion behind us.
“Anna,” I said, tugging at his shirt.
He looked at me without stopping.“I got her out.She’s safe.”
Shouts echoed through the main wing.Orders clashed with alarm.Smoke had begun to spread from the curtains in Viktor’s suite, curling dark along the high ceilings.
Snow fell thick and relentless by the time we reached the rear drive.
The waiting car looked almost black against the white.
I climbed in without looking back.
Only once the gates had disappeared behind us did I realize my hands would not stop shaking.
Bass drove in silence for a long time before he finally said, “One day, you may come back.”
I stared out at the road ahead, dark and endless beneath the falling snow.
“For what?”
He understood what I meant.
I didn’t want the land or the title.Nor the mausoleum of our bloodline.
For what?For whom?What could possibly remain of home after tonight?
Bass gripped the wheel tighter.
“I don’t know,” he said.
By dawn, Russia was behind me.
By the next night, I had crossed the border into Italy and stepped into a newly constructed life.I did not arrive there clean.I did not arrive there hopeful.I arrived like a man who had been hollowed by fire and left standing anyway.
People would later meet that version of me and think he had always existed.
They were wrong.
I had not always been that man.
But grief, when fed enough betrayal, becomes hunger.
And I arrived starving.
39
Archie
Sometimes, in the dead of night, when sleep would not come and silence turned hostile, I found myself thinking of the things Rasputin never got to say.
Not because he had lacked the words.But because no one gave him the time.
And grief, I had learned, was a strange and vicious thing.It did not only mourn what was lost.It built rooms for the missing and forced you to sit inside them.It made you hear voices where there should have been none.Made you remember a man so clearly that eventually, you could all but feel the shape of his hand at the back of your neck, steadying you as the world came apart.