Page 39 of Depraved Royals

He’s choosing to change. Maybe I can do the same.

15

Kal

Fyodor and I are alone.

It’s the opportunity I’ve been looking for. Brutus isn’t here, and no one else is up yet. The Pushkin patriarch is taking his morning constitutional and asked me along.

I could choke the life out of him and leave him on the cold gravel, his head in the jasmine. Leave Dani and her mother to find him. I’d make a few calls, issue a few threats, pay a few people, and that would be that.

The Pushkins would be suddenly and wholly frozen out, and I’d take the empire my stepfather had failed to seize. Easy.

But seismic shifts are taking place inside me. I can’t imagine Fyodor coming to such an ignoble end. He deserves better than that.

“You seem distracted,” Fyodor says. “Here’s a question to focus your mind on, Kal. Have you ever wondered why it was so easy for you to walk into our lives like this?”

Yes, as a matter of fact. It seems painfully naïve for a Pakhan to open his home to me, a sworn enemy, and entrust his precious daughter into my care…

“I just assumed you believed me when I said I’ve abandoned my family,” I say. “Why?Don’tyou believe me?”

“No,” Fyodor says, “I don’t, not entirely. But Marta thinks you’re considering it, and my wife is a smart woman.” He stops and frowns at the rose bushes. “These need cutting back. But seriously - I’m not living up to the hype, am I?”

“My mother gave me a different impression of you,” I say, glancing at him warily.

He doesn’t seem to be armed.Where is he going with this?

“As you know, you and I are not related,” Fyodor continues. “Your stepfather, my brother, was nothing to me. Our parents did everything possible to make Erik hate me, and I was their favorite. When Erik grew up, he found a woman with the same twisted, bitter outlook as our mother. Two of a kind, they were.”

I have heard none of this before. Luckily, Fyodor is in the mood to lay it all out.

“Even though Erik was older, my father made it known that I was to become Pakhan. When he died, I cleaned up much of the operation here, and Idina didn’t like it. She pushed Erik to pressure me into people trafficking, but I have my limits, and it became a sore point.”

Sounds exactly like her - no thought for anyone’s essential humanity. Just treat them like commodities because why not, right?

“Erik and Idina distanced themselves. Before you were a year old, they said they were through with us all, and Erik changed his name to Antonov. I never even met your brother and sister.” Fyodor sighs and looks at the ground. “Then one day, years later, Erik was back, a rag-tag group of street scum backing him. He tried to take the Pushkin empire by force, but he didn’t have a plan, and all his goons soon split when they saw we had them on the run. I tried to talk him down, but he kept trying to fight, and he lost his shit and tried to shoot Mel. She was just a kid at the time.”

Fuck.In all the times Idina sat me down and told me the story of Erik’s glorious martyrdom, she never told me he tried to kill achild.

Fyodor could be lying, but the shine in his eyes tells me otherwise.

These are memories. Bullshit doesn’t make grown men cry.

“My mother told me you killed Erik. Is it true?”

“Yes.” Fyodor’s voice is heavy with regret. “I shot him before he could murder my daughter. And not a day passes that I don’t wish it could all have been different, Kal. Erik could have made better choices. He didn’t have to destroy himself to prove he was worth something.”

My head hurts.

This information is mostly the same as what I’ve been told my whole life - that Fyodor murdered Erik in cold blood, denying him his rightful place as leader of the Pushkin Bratva. But Idina only showed me some of the picture, and with Fyodor’s lines and colors added, the image is not the one I had in my mind.

My mother made me believe in destiny, and I hung every scrap of my self-worth on achieving it. I don’t know who I am if I’m not the man she wants me to be.

Ithought I wanted to be that man, too. But the facade is crumbling away, and I don’t know what’s behind it.

Maybe this legacy doesn’t have to define me.

But what will I stand for instead?