We were alone in one of the smaller sitting rooms.The fire had burned down to embers, the lamps dimmed to a low glow that softened the edges of the room without warming it.Snow pressed quietly against the windows, gathering in slow, steady silence.
“It will be you,” he said.
I looked up from the drink I hadn’t touched.
“What?”
“The succession.”
The casualness of his tone made something ugly move in me.
“It should be Rasputin.”
“He is not suited.”
I laughed once.Sharp.“For what?Cruelty?”
His gaze hardened.“Watch your mouth.”
“Or what?”
“You mistake sentiment for wisdom.”
“No,” I said, setting the glass down before I put it through his face.“He is better suited for leadership, and we both know it.”
The slap came fast enough to turn my head.
Pain bloomed hot across my cheek.I tasted blood where the inside of my mouth had split against my teeth.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.
He stood over me breathing hard, fingers flexing as though he had not yet decided whether he wanted to strike again.I looked back at him slowly.My face stung.My pulse had gone strangely calm.
There was a time when he hit me often.
That had changed as I became a man—not because he had found restraint, but because he had realized one day I would hit back.
He had not been wrong.
“Done?”I asked.
He hated when I met violence with stillness.Hated it in the same instinctive way he hated Rasputin’s quiet refusal to become him.My father understood fury.He understood fear.He even understood grief, provided it could be exploited.But stillness unnerved him.It implied a man might be thinking.
“You will never lead by clinging to weakness,” he said.
I smiled without humour.“Is that what you call loyalty now?”
“I call it burden.Your brother is too much of it.”
“He is my brother, and your firstborn,” I reminded him.
“He has limits,” my father snapped.“And men with limits are consumed by men without them.”
There it was.The gospel according to Viktor Popovich.
Take first.Kill cleanly.Own what can be owned.Break what refuses to yield.
It was not power he worshipped.It was domination.And he wanted the son least likely to challenge that religion.