“You know why.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
His eyes harden. “She betrayed me. She was sleeping with Boris Sokolov. My rival. My enemy.” He leans forward slightly. “There’s a code, Sofia. You know this. Betrayal demands a response.”
“So you beat her to death.”
“It was decided by the heads. All of them.”
“You let them touch her.”
He shrugs. I don’t remember when I understood my parents didn’t love each other. Five? Six? When my mother read me princess stories, and I couldn’t see that love between my parents. They were never affectionate. I never saw love.
“You could have divorced her. You could have sent her away. You didn’t have to kill her.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“She was my mother.”
“She was a traitor.”
I move closer to his chair. He doesn’t flinch, but I see him tense. Good. He should be afraid of me. I pull the knife from my back pocket, remove the sheath and slide the tip along the papery skin on top of his hand.
Beads of red appear. He doesn’t flinch. I realize I could actually cut his throat.
The thought stops me. I will not give him the satisfaction of turning into his murderer. He wants to die. He believes his daughter murdering him is some kind of win.
I step back.
“I want you to sign over power of attorney to me,” I say. “Now.”
He tries to laugh and ends up choking. “You can’t be serious.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
I lean down so we’re eye level. “You’re dying. We both know it. You have days, maybe weeks. I can end your suffering. Sign.”
He’s thinking about it.
“I will kill Yuri,” I tell him. “My husband or I will. Maybe he’s already dead.”
He stares at me. I see him processing. Calculating. Trying to figure out if I’m bluffing.
I walk to the desk and pull open the drawer. The documents I had drawn up more than six months ago are still there. When it became clear he wasn’t going to survive, I thought he’d sign the POA. That was before I knew the extent of his evil.
I grab a pen and hand it to him along with the documents. “Sign and your suffering ends.”
I see hope flare in his eyes. He’s ready for death. He wants it.
“You’ve become just like me,” he says.
“I’ll never be like you.”
I watch his eyes move across the page, looking for loopholes, for ways to maintain control even in death.
He won’t find any. I made sure of that.
He looks at me for a long moment. "Yuri underestimated you," he says. "I wondered if he would."