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The gun lowers further, her arm seeming to lose strength. For a moment, I believe I’ve reached her. That this might end without tragedy.

Oh, thank God!

I allow myself to breathe a low sigh of relief. Until her expression hardens, a terrible resolve replacing the momentary vulnerability.

“This,” she says, gesturing toward Maria and the children, “is something I’ll never have. And neither will you!”

The gun rises again— not toward her head this time, but outward. Toward me? Toward the children? I can’t tell, and I don’t wait to find out. I lunge forward, reaching for her arm, desperate to prevent whatever violence she’s contemplating.

The gunshot explodes through the peaceful forest, shattering the morning stillness. Polina’s frightened wail rises in response. Birds scatter from the trees in panicked flight.

We fall together, Sofia and I, to the soft forest floor, tangled in a desperate embrace that’s either salvation or destruction. I can’t tell which of us is bleeding, or if either of us is. All I know is that in this moment, I’ve found my sister only to risk losing her again.

This time, perhaps, forever.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Aleksei

The sickroom reeks of antiseptic and decay.

Sweat. Urine. The unmistakable odor of a body eating itself from the inside out. Too fucking hot in here— sweat prickles along my spine— yet my hands are ice cold.

Medical equipment surrounds the bed where my father lies, his once-powerful frame now so shrunken the sheets barely rise from the mattress. The wet, gurgling rattle of his breathing fills the silence— that distinctive sound that marks death’s approach as clearly as a sniper’s laser sight.

The death rattle. The body’s final, futile struggle.

My father is dying.

Nakonets-to, blyad.

About fucking time.

Diana stands beside me, her fingers crushing mine. We haven’t spoken since the nurse left twenty minutes ago with her quiet “it won’t be long now.” What is there to say? This ending that once seemed impossible is now inevitable, playing out on stained sheets before us.

The skeleton dying before me bears no resemblance to the monster who haunted my childhood. Yet they are one and the same. Those hands now motionless atop the blanket once formed fists that broke my ribs, split my lip, left bruises that took weeks, sometimes months to fade. That throat struggling for breath once roared threats that sent us scrambling for hiding places throughout our cramped St. Petersburg apartment.

He deserves this. This weak, pathetic death with its stench of disinfectant and vomit. No final fanfare for a hero. Just a sad old man gasping his last breaths with no one to love him.

Hurry up and die, pizda.

I’ve got better things to do than watch you wheeze.

I search my heart for what I should feel. Satisfaction? Vindication? The culmination of decades wishing to see him suffer as we suffered? Instead, I find a tangle of emotions— hatred for what he did, yes, but also an unexpected hollowness. A void where closure should be.

His eyelids flutter, then open with visible effort. His gaze drifts around the room before settling on us at the foot of his bed. His eyes are cloudy with morphine, but he’s still recognizably a Tarasov.

“Aleksei… Diana…” His voice is sandpaper on rust, nothing like the booming roar that used to make my bladder clench in terror. “My children…”

Beside me, Diana flinches as if slapped. I tighten my grip on her hand, a silent promise of protection that comes decades too late. The gold of her bracelet bites into my palm.

“Father,” I acknowledge, the word unnatural in my mouth after so many years of refusing to speak it.

Silence stretches between us, heavy with echoes of pain, abuse, abandonment. The rhythmic beep of the heart monitor pulses in my temples, counting down the seconds of his miserable life.

“I know,” he begins, each word clearly costing him, “that I deserve no forgiveness. That what I did to you both… to yourmother—” He pauses, overcome by a violent coughing fit that racks his emaciated body.

Let him choke.