“Then I’ll use knives.”
That got the faintest shadow of a smile from him, but it vanished almost at once.
When he looked back toward the stable yard, his face had shuttered again.
“My mother hated him too,” he said.
I turned.
He almost never spoke of her.
“When I was young,” he continued, “I used to think if I was quiet enough, he might leave her alone.If I did well enough.If I pleased him enough.”His mouth twisted, bitter and brief.“He never leaves anything alone.Tragically, his hobby is obliterating things.”
The horse kicked up dirt at the far end of the paddock.Somewhere in the stable, a groom laughed too loudly at something which didn’t seem quite funny in the moment.
Rasputin’s gaze had gone distant.
“They said she fell,” he murmured.“From a horse.It was a clean break.A tragic accident, they said.”He looked at me then, and there was something in his eyes I still remember too clearly.Not grief.His grief had long since calcified into something denser, heartbreaking.“But I remember her screaming the night before.”
Cold moved through me.I said nothing.
“I know what he is,” Rasputin said quietly.“Even when no one says it out loud.”
I swallowed hard and stared at my hands.At how young they still looked then.At how useless.At how much damage they had yet to learn to do.
“My mother looks miserable every day,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I hate him.”
“There’s that, too.”
“I can’t stand that he makes her so miserable.”
Rasputin dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his heel.
“Then learn to be a better man than he is, Archie.And learn to recognize cages,” he added.“They don’t all have bars.”
That stayed with me.
In the years that followed, I saw it everywhere.
Not just in locked doors or split lips or women moved across borders under different names—though I saw those too.I saw it in silk dresses and careful smiles.In wives who spoke only when spoken to.In girls pulled into rooms by men old enough to know better and rich enough not to care.In places polished enough to pass for respectable, where the violence didn’t need to shout because money had already done the work.
It wasn’t hidden.It was an evil sitting there in plain sight.And no-one did a damn thing to stop it.
I started interfering.
Quietly at first.A maid whose makeup sat too thick over one side of her face.A girl no older than sixteen tucked into an apartment that didn’t belong to her, paid for by a man old enough to be her grandfather.I moved them when I could.Paid for rooms.Forged papers.Made problems disappear.
And when quiet didn’t work, I became louder.
I broke hands that reached too far.
I broke jaws that spoke too freely.
Sometimes I beat men bloody in alleys and left them staring at their own teeth in the snow.