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YULIAN

Headstones flank me as I walk.

My link with death is usually more subtle than this. I feel it like a knife in the ribs every second of every day, but for others, it’s just a chill in the air that surrounds me.

Today, though, I walk with death. Beside it. Among it.

The cemetery is quiet. Unchanged since the last time I was here, a whole trip around the sun ago. There’s an unnatural stillness in the air, the leaves, everything that should be moving but isn’t.

Here, every living thing is waiting.

“Mama.” The word scrapes like sandpaper on my tongue. “Otets.” My gaze flicks from one headstone to the other, then drops to the last one. Much lower. Much smaller. “ Sestra .”

Mother. Father. Sister.

I kneel in the dirt and start cleaning the graves.

Kneeling is such a foreign concept for me. Men like me don’t kneel: we break everybody else, knock them down until their only choice is to curse me looking up.

But here—for them—I kneel.

I wet the rag in my hand and touch it to the cold, smooth stone of my mother’s grave. Grime sticks to the fabric, a year’s worth of it, staining my fingertips the color of gray earth.

“I met someone.”

No one else is here, so my words echo. It’s the crack of dawn on a Monday and not a soul in sight. Maksim is standing just a little way off, ensuring I won’t be disturbed, but he could have saved himself the walk.

“Her name is Mia.” I don’t know why I’m telling my mother this. Why my first words to her are about the woman I hired to pretend to be my fiancée. “She’s a nurse. An insufferable, stubborn nurse with zero bedside manner and the mouth of a sailor. Can’t imagine how she even got the job, really.”

I trace the letters of my mother’s name. Olga Lozhkin. The dates of her birth and death, too close together to be fair.

But this world has never been fair. That’s the greatest lie of all: fairness . Justice. Balance.

If you want balance, you have to even the scales with your own fucking hands.

“I hired her,” I confess. “To draw out the ones who did this to you.”

I move on to my father’s grave. My fingers follow the edges of his name. Yevgeny Lozhkin. Every year, they feel smoother.

“I put her in danger.” The words claw their way out my throat, leaving blood in their wake. It’s all I can taste lately—the blood I’ve shed. The blood I will shed. “Every time I walk with her, speak to her, look at her, I’m putting her in danger. Her, and her son.”

I’m a liar. That’s part of the job description. When you’re a pakhan, you can’t afford to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Hell, you can’t afford to have a heart at all.

But this is the only place where I can’t bury the truth.

Here, where I buried my family.

“It’s what I need to do,” I grit. “I have to avenge your deaths. All these years, I’ve been trying. Now, I’m finally closing in on them—the mudaki who did this to you. I can’t stop now. I won’t.”

But what if you did, Yulian?

That last thought comes in Alina’s voice. She died too young to know anything else. She never knew her toys were paid for by someone else’s blood. She was…

Just like Eli.

I banish the thought as I move over to her grave, the smallest one of the bunch. But no matter how hard I try, Mia’s son keeps crashing into my thoughts the way he crashed into her knees when she came home.

Faded memories bubble back to the surface: a marble staircase, a huge hall. The front door opening on my father’s shadow, back from yet another trip to Russia.

I’d slam into his legs, too. I’d tell him I missed him, that I wanted to come along next time.

When you’re old enough, he’d say.

Then Alina was born. My little sister, tinier than a loaf of bread, with the lungs of a fucking opera singer. She could scream all night long if something bothered her. I watched her grow, saw her turn into a two-legged creature, transform into a bright kid filled with joy.

We’ll take you both, my father started promising then. Once Alina’s older.

But she never got older.

And the sons of bitches who did it are still out there.

I rise from their graves. I place fresh flowers in fresh water, even though it won’t last. Even though it’s a meaningless gesture that can’t even soothe them.

Then I shift to the next grave.

It’s right by Alina’s, just separated enough to signal that it belongs to another family. The name etched in the stone isn’t Lozhkin, but it might as well have been.

Kira Morozova.

This time, I don’t kneel. “Hi, Kira.”

Hi, Yuli.

I can hear her voice in my head like it hasn’t been a day.

Her amused lilt, like there was always something funny to find in every conversation.

Even when she was sad, or angry, or in one of her gray spells that the weight of her birthright brought about, the ones that made her cold and indifferent to everyone and everything, she never lost her humor.

I take in the details of her grave. It isn’t as dirty as my family’s, but the flowers—camellias, her favorite—are far from fresh. They’re dried, stiff things on cracking stems.

One touch and they’d crumble into dust.

“I see your sister hasn’t been by,” I remark, touching my fingers to the thin layer of dust on the headstone. Another sign Nikita hasn’t been here in a while. “I’m to blame for that. I lost her.”

You lost my sister?

“Yes. But I’ll find her.”

If Kira was here, she would have raised a skeptical eyebrow.

But unlike her voice, Kira’s is blurry in my memory.

Indistinct. Like I’m gazing at her through water.

It should be the clearest of them all, with Nikita being a living reminder by my side, but for some reason, it’s not.

The only time I can see her again is once a year, when I stare into the eyes of her portrait.

I wonder if this is why Nikita comes by every week.

Because she doesn’t want to forget.

Fuck, what wouldn’t I give to forget?

“There’s someone else I might lose.” I don’t put fresh flowers into her vase. It’s not my place to. I was never family to her, not a boyfriend or a fiancé or anything else like that, not that her killers cared enough to ask.

“Someone who’s got nothing to do with me.” Like you.

“Someone who might die for it.” Like you.

“Someone I don’t want to lose.” Like you.

The pakhan in me is silent. Usually, it’d be sneering already, mocking my weakness. Reminding me of what I need to do and why.

But here, in front of the graves of everyone I’ve lost, even the pakhan side of me has no place.

Here, I’m simply human.

“I lied to her.” My voice goes hoarse around the lump in my throat. “I let her believe I had nothing to do with that shooting.”

The flashbacks from that day overlap with the ones from twenty years ago: the bullets, the roar, the blood. Carbon copies of each other.

“She almost died. I almost turned her son into an orphan. I shouldn’t give a shit, but God help me, I do.”

You always give a shit. Her tone is light, joking, with a note of truth underneath it. That’s why I had to look out for you. You were way too soft for a Bratva kid.

That wasn’t a bad thing, you know.

I turn deaf to that last part. I don’t want to hear all the reasons why being weak is a luxury I can afford. Not when it so clearly isn’t.

Not when it cost me what I cared about most in the world.

“Without her, I can’t avenge my family.” I clench my fists at my sides, bloodthirst mounting with every second. “I can’t avenge you. ”

Would that be so bad? Letting sleeping ghosts lie?

“Yes.”

Why?

“Because I can’t do that to you.”

But you can do that to her?

“I have to.” My teeth grit, my knuckles pop. “If I let her go, I’ll lose them.”

And if you don’t, you’ll lose her.

“I’ll lose her anyway.”

Kira’s ghost falls silent. If she were truly here, she’d know what to say. She was always wiser than me. If she were here, she would have known what to do. About Nikita, Mia—about everything.

But she’s not here.

She isn’t the one who survived.

I am.

And I’m going to hunt the motherfuckers who took her life to the ends of the fucking Earth.

No matter what it costs me.

No matter what it costs anyone.