Page 8 of The Pakhan's Captive
Like I would wield it tomorrow or the next.
I wouldn’t, my father’s not dying anytime soon. He has decades left.
Must my humanity be completely gone before I ever get to use what I’m learning?
I love my father. I would follow him into any room, any fight, any war this organization has ever started. I just wish his classroom wasn’t quite so?—
The door opens.
Viktor walks in and the room changes register immediately. Not because Viktor is frightening, he isn’t, not overtly, not in the way I am.
He’s sixty-eight, silver-haired, and the kind of man who makes you feel, when he’s talking to you, like you are the most important person he’s encountered all week.
He’s charming the way expensive things are charming.
But his face is wrong right now.
Something is wrong.
I am on my feet before I know I’ve moved.
“Uncle.”
He looks at me and something in his expression does a thing I don’t have a word for and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
“Sit down, Razvan.”
“Tell me.”
“Sit—”
“Viktor.” My voice comes out flat and cold and final, the voice that makes Zhukov cry. “Tell me right now.”
Viktor doesn’t look away this time. He leans forward, his hands clasped so tight his knuckles are white. “It was the meeting at thedocks. High-level, supposed to be secure. We had six men on the perimeter.”
He pauses, a muscle jumping in his cheek. “They didn’t use a hit squad, Razvan. They used a breach. Explosives under the floorboards. The ceiling came down before the first shot was even fired. It was a massacre.”
The words hit me like physical objects.Explosives. Breach. Massacre.
“He was in the center of the room,” Viktor continues, his voice cracking. “By the time the smoke cleared, by the time anyone could get to the rubble…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to. I stop hearing him somewhere around the phrasehe was in the center, and the room begins to recede. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Everything is tiny and far away.
Papa.
I am standing completely still. I know I am because I can feel the agonizing effort it takes to keep my hand from crushing the glass I’m still holding.
The amber liquid inside is perfectly still, a mocking little mirror.
The fire in the hearth pops, a sharp sound like a bone snapping, and I flinch internally.
Mike has stood up from his chair.
I can feel the heat of him close to my left side, but I cannot look at him.
If I look at him, the reality will lock into place.
