That's what I want.
I push open the door.
I step into the private room. It’s bright and I suppose it’s cheery, but I smell death in the air. The soft, slow beep of a machine is the only sound in the room. That and his labored, short breaths.
He’s lying in bed, the head partially raised. His eyes are closed. I've watched him diminish over the past year, but this is different.
He’s dying. We’re down to hours instead of days.
I keep waiting to feel an ounce of sadness.
It doesn’t come. I look at this frail man and see him kicking my beautiful mother so violently it killed her.
Mikhail Baranov, who once ran half this city's underground, is weak. The man I have been afraid of and impressed by and desperate to please for twenty-one years will take his last breath very soon.
I pull the chair close, but I don't touch him. I sit. He opens his eyes. They’re unfocused and cloudy, but he recognizes me. Neither of us says anything for a moment.
"You came," he says.
"I had paperwork to sign."
A pause. I almost feel bad for him. Almost.
"Sofia," he starts.
"Don't." I say it quietly, but I mean it. "It’s too late for remorse.”
He closes his mouth.
"I'm not going to pretend the past didn't happen," I say. "I'm not going to sit here and tell you I've forgiven you. I haven't. I never will." I look at him. "You murdered my mother. You let me grieve her for eight years without telling me what you'd done. You watched me fall apart. You let me try to make you love me. You are incapable of such a thing." I pause. "Those aren't things I can make peace with in a hospital room."
He says nothing. He's listening. That's new. Mikhail Baranov has never simply listened to me. There was always the sense that he was calculating his response.
He just listens.
"I'm also not going to let what you built rot," I say. "I'm not going to let it fall to someone who would make it worse. That's not for your sake. It's for the people who work inside it. It's for the businesses that are legitimate and the ones I'm going to make legitimate." I lean forward slightly. "Parts of it are worth keeping. The rest I'm burning down myself."
The machine breathes with him.
"Yuri is dead," I say.
Something moves across his face. Grief or disappointment. I don’t know which. Relief, maybe, underneath whatever else.
"Sergei?" he asks.
"Yes."
He nods slowly.
I look at him with his dilated pupils, thanks to the strong narcotics pumping into his veins. The comfortable bed. Nurses waiting on him hand and foot making sure he isn’t feeling any pain.
I think about my mother, who died in a warehouse in excruciating pain. The woman who asked a near-stranger to protect her daughter because she knew the man she'd married wouldn't.
Rage rises. I can’t kill him, but I can add to his misery.
I get to my feet.
“My child will never know your name,” I say. “Instead, they will know all about my mother.”