5. Mikhail

A trail of water and mud follows me through the mansion. Normally, I'd try to clean up after myself for Stella's sake, but she's dead, so fuck it. The mess stays.

It takes all the energy I have left to lumber up to my office anyway. My clothes are heavy and my muscles ache from too many hours in the gym. I should go to bed, but even as weary as I feel, I can't imagine sleeping.

My office is dark when I push through the door and head to the bar cart. I need a drink more than I need clean clothes or a shower. I need to clear my head for a few blessed hours and?—

My senses kick in all at once and I whirl around in the middle of the room. "You must have a death wish," I snarl.

"And you must be distracted," my father remarks, stepping out of the shadowy corner. "I could have killed you if I wanted."

I wish you would have.

I'm in front of him in an instant, my soaked sleeve barred across his throat. "You missed your chance. I won't miss mine."

"You want to kill me?" he rasps through his closing windpipe.

"Honor demands it after what you did." I punctuate the point with a hard shove into his throat. "You sent a spy into my house. You kidnapped my wife and child."

"I gave Dante back!" he points out like it matters.

It doesn't.

"You betrayed me and you deserve to die. Plus," I add, leaning all my weight on his chest, "it would be fun for me."

He stretches onto his toes to suck in a desperate breath. Then, unbelievably… he smiles. "You're finally ready, Mikhail. I'm so proud."

I'm still drunk and tired enough that the words throw me off balance. I stumble back.

"Really, I knew you were ready when I heard you sent Viviana away," he continues. "I spent years preparing you and I wasn't sure it would ever be enough, but here you are: the leader I knew you could be."

I shake my head, but his words rattle around, refusing to fall into any meaningful order. When he takes a step towards me, I shove him back against the wall. "You raised Trofim to be pakhan. He was always going to be your heir. The only reason I'm here is because I took it for myself."

"There are some things in life that even we can't control, Mikhail… like which son is born first." He gives me a knowing look, but I stare blankly back at him. He sighs. "As a father, my duty goes beyond helping my children survive. I need to help you thrive. There's a reason animals kill the weak offspring to help the stronger survive. Humans like to think we're more evolved, but you know as well as I do that it's survival of the fittest out there. It's why I cut Anatoly loose when he was young. I needed to focus my energy on you and Trofim."

"Anatoly would have made a better leader than Trofim."

"But he didn't have the lineage," he insists. "His entire reign would have been questioned. He would have been dodging assassination attempts left and right. I didn't want that for him."

I snort. "Don't act like you did him a favor."

"But I did," he argues. "Everyone has their faults. Anatoly's is that he was born to the wrong woman. And Trofim… well, he had more than most. But the one I needed to correct the most is that he let his pride cloud his decision making. The same way your heart clouds yours."

I dig my fingers into his chest as if I'm going to tear into him and come back with his own still-beating heart in my chest. I'm tired, but I might be able to summon the energy for that.

"I spent all of my time shaping both you and your brother for leadership," he explains. "You weren't just the spare. You were always a very plausible Plan B. If I could make you ready for this world."

"I was always ready," I growl.

He shakes his head. "If that was true, you never would have married Alyona."

The mud from her grave is still under my fingernails. What would my father think if he knew where I was tonight? Would he still think I'm "ready"?

"She wasn't strong enough for our world, Mikhail. You knew that. It's why you kept her away from me. It's why you hid her away in that house, isn't it?"

I don't answer.

I don't need to.

We both know he's right.

Alyona was an exception I allowed myself. The rest of my life would belong to the Bratva, but I carved out a sliver of normalcy with them and pretended I could keep it secret, untarnished, untouched.

"First, it was Alyona. Then, Viviana."

"Viviana was strong enough," I spit. "She was strong enough to kill a future pakhan."

He continues on like I haven't said anything. "I could see Viviana was becoming a distraction. It's why I came to you with that evidence. With the tape of Viviana walking out of?—"

"I know what was on the fucking tape, Otets."

The footage has replayed over and over again in my head since the moment I watched it. I close my eyes and see Viviana smiling nervously on Trofim's front stoop. He pushed the door open for her and she slipped inside. The next clip showed her walking out through the same door, her hands now covered in blood.

"I needed you to see that she was your last weakness. The Bratva needed you to be able to get rid of her so you could focus on what is important," he implores. "Because Trofim will come back some day and you need to be ready to defend against his attack. You can't do that with his ex-fiancée on your arm and a bastard as your heir. You need to be focused on fortifying your position."

I can physically feel my mind buffering. I blink at my father as his words sink in and register.

"Trofim is—He can't come back." I grab the front of my father's shirt, holding onto him as much as I am holding myself up. "He's dead."

I watch realization dawn on my father's face. His eyes go wide as he understands what he said.

What he revealed.

"Viviana stabbed him," he says, nodding too aggressively. "I showed you the video. You saw it."

"And she killed him. That's what you told me. Trofim is dead."

He regretfully meets my eyes, a weary sigh loosing from his chest. "Not… exactly."

I throw him back against the wall hard enough that he bounces. "You told me he was dead. A coroner told me he was dead! He is dead."

He shakes his head. "He would be… if Viviana had been able to stomach the job. But she couldn't finish it. She stabbed him and ran. Twenty seconds after the tape I gave you cut off, Trofim came stumbling out with his hand over a wound on his stomach. He called a doctor and?—"

"You lied to me!" I roar, driving him back into the wall. A frame rattles free of its nail; the glass shatters on the floor. "You manipulated me to get what you wanted."

"I was the only one who told you the truth," he fires back. "Viviana was a distraction and I was the only one who could see it. I had to make the hard call, the same way I did when I ended the war with the Colombians."

"That wasn't a hard call. The cartel murdered my family—an innocent woman, an innocent baby. You had to retaliate."

He nods slowly. "I did. All of our allies were outraged. Almost like someone masterminded the whole thing to drum up sympathy and rally our allies behind the cause."

Suddenly, I'm back in that bullet-riddled house. I can smell gunpowder everywhere. I see the trail of blood leading from the panic room to the bodies of my wife and child.

"You… you let them die," I breathe, still not really believing it. "You left Alyona and Anzhelina vulnerable on purpose."

I expect him to deny it. But my father points to the pakhan's signet ring on my finger. "The reason you are wearing that today and Trofim isn't is because I removed the obstacles in your way. I helped you become the ruthless leader you needed to be. You wouldn't be here if you were trying to balance being pakhan with being a husband. You can't be both—not the way you wanted to do it. You can only be loyal to one. You have to choose."

I let go of his shirt and step away. Everything I thought I knew is shifting around me. The foundations of my life are collapsing like wet clay.

Every day since Alyona and Anzhelina were murdered, I've blamed myself. I thought I should have done more to protect them. I felt naive for believing the Colombians wouldn't target them.

Now, I know the truth. The Colombians wouldn't have targeted them…

Unless my father put a bullseye on their backs.

And I could have done everything to protect them and it still may not have been enough—not if my father was going to bring the full might of the Bratva down on them. He orchestrated the single worst moment of my entire life… and now, he's telling me it was for my own good.

My father reads my shock as a good thing and moves closer. He dips his chin to meet my eyes. "Mikhail the family man never would have survived this world. You would have died years ago trying to save your wife and child. But the man in front of me? This Mikhail?" He gestures to me with both hands like I'm the final prize in a game show. "You kicked your child's mother to the curb because she lied to you. You put the Bratva over everything. And because of that, I know you'll survive."

I knew what I was doing when I sent Viviana away. I made the choice with eyes wide open. I'll do anything to protect Dante.

But protect him from what?

Viviana didn't kill Trofim. Even if she did, Anatoly was right: we should have thrown her a party. Trofim was a monster. I regretted not killing him myself plenty of times over the years since I exiled him.

And sure, the Greeks will start banging their war drums the moment this second engagement with Helen even hints towards falling through, but if I'm the ruthless man my father says I am, then I can take them on.

But if I'm the ruthless, cold-blooded man my father says I am, then I wouldn't want a family in the first place. That man could send Viviana away and never think of her again. That man wouldn't spend hour after hour beating his frustration into a punching bag and crawling through the mud.

Dante thought I was going to protect him and his mom. Viviana thought I could be different if I wanted it badly enough.

As I stand in front of my father now, the question isn't just which man am I—it's which man do I want to be?

"You're right. I will survive." I smooth the rumpled collar of my father's shirt down around his neck. Then I wrap my hand around his throat. "You, however, won't."

His eyes widen as I slam him back against the wall one last time, crushing his windpipe beneath my fingers.

"Maybe I would have exiled you the way I did Trofim, but you've made it clear that was a mistake." He claws at my hand. My thumb is buried in his pulse point. I can feel each desperate pound of his racing heart. There won't be many of them left. "I want to learn from my mistakes, as any good pakhan would."

His lips quiver around a word he can't find the oxygen for. Maybe it's my name. Maybe it's a plea.

It doesn't matter.

His knees buckle and he sinks to the floor. I follow him, letting him lie sideways in the shattered glass of the picture frame that fell earlier.

Once his eyes flutter closed, I grab a shard of glass and feel the weight of it in my hands. I take stock of this moment, of exactly what I'm planning to do, what it means, what it will change.

Then I drive the glass into his throat.