Page 32 of Beautiful Ruin

I wander the halls back to my room.

When I finally return to it, it’s almost exactly how I left it this morning. Someone has been in to straighten the bed sheets and lay out fresh towels for a bath later and drawn the curtains halfway back so the afternoon light spills across the floor.

I stand against the closed door for a long moment, listening to the quiet. There are no immediate footsteps roaming outside my door, especially none that remind me of Rowan’s. It irritates me that I notice the absence of him like this.

After pushing away from the door, I cross the room and drop the wrapped bread onto the desk and dig out my laptop from my still unpacked bag. Most of my things remain trapped inside the suitcases I brought with me, folded and crushed from the frantic packing in Italy. I haven’t had the will to unpack properly because every time I tried, it just felt like surrender. I refuse to give my cage the courtesy of decorating it to feel more like home.

The laptop hums softly when I power it on.

My fingers hover over the keys for a long time before I type the name I haven’t allowed myself to think in years.

My father’s.

When the search results load, nothing meaningful appears. It’s the usual scraps of old known addresses and references in documents too vague to be helpful. I start with the basics in the form of old news articles and publicly accessible records, anything that might have survived the years of careful erasure. My mother’s obituary is brief when I find it, preserved in a digital archive with a grainy scan that looks like it was lifted directly from a newspaper.

There is no mention of the man whose DNA I share, no mention of the marriage that must have existed even if everyone has spent years pretending it did not. The obituary mentions me and my uncle and nothing more.

I dig deeper into social media archives and old forum posts next, finding a genealogy site that still has fragments of public records from before I was born, though half the links are broken and the rest lead to files scrubbed of anything that actually matters. A marriage record should exist somewhere… or a birth record. Property transfers? Photos from before his disappearance? Anything?

My mother appears in public records before her death always attached to her maiden name. It isn’t until I find my own birth records that my father finally appears. After that, it’s nothing again.

None of this seems normal.

People leave traces, even those who wish to vanish. Especially people attached to families like mine. There should be more, something to connect him to the Kuznetsov family outside of a single birth record. A photo from a gala event, a business document, even a lawsuit. Rich people produce records all the time with how much they move money around. How is it that my father existed outside of that surveillance network?

Unless my uncle purposefully erased all traces of him.

Now with my uncle connected to the Iron Pact, more of those theories are beginning to take shape inside my head.

Ugly ones.

Dangerous ones.

Could my father have known what really happened to my mother and fled because of it? Is that why Ivan refuses to speak about him? Did something happen after her death with the Iron Pact that forced my father to run for his life? Who benefited from making sure everyone believed he was nothing more than a ghost?

I push back from the desk, suddenly unable to sit still.

I think of Ivan’s face when I asked about my mother and the way the softness disappeared in his eyes when he told me some wounds do not heal better when being reopened.

Maybe they are right.

Maybe the truth is dangerous.

But so is ignorance.

Ignorance is what got me pulled from Italy in the middle of my life and put me on a plane with armed men. It’s what has trapped me inside this house, dependent on the mercy of people who have already decided that protection looks like control, with no answers and certainly no avenue to find out anything myself.

I return to the desk.

This time, I open a blank document and begin making notes. My fingers move fast as I type, the document filling with fragments of what I remember about my father from my childhood and the half-formed theories I’m beginning to cultivate. This is what Rowan warned me about, I think, the allure of asking questions I had no business knowing the answers to.

I sit back, staring at the growing document on my screen, the digital beginning of something that feels both reckless and necessary. I don’t know what I’m building yet. A timeline, a case to present to my uncle when the time is right to question him again. Maybe both.

All I know is that I refuse to give up until I find what I’m looking for.

9

ROWAN