“No,” he said quietly.“You don’t.”
Frustration surged through me.I paced once across the gym floor and shoved both hands through my hair.
“Then why does he keep pushing?”
Rasputin was silent for a moment.Then, “He has named you heir apparent, Archie.You should not fight him on this, the same way I would never fight you on it.He knows if I take the throne, I will do things my way.”
I looked at him.
He held my gaze without flinching.
My brother had never been a vain man, but he knew his own worth.He knew the shape of his difference from Viktor.He knew our father saw it too, and hated him for it.Hated that the son most naturally suited to power would never wield it like a tyrant.
“He thinks he can shape me better,” I muttered.
“He thinks your anger is easier to point.”
I stopped pacing.
“He wants us divided.”
“Yes.”
“He won’t get it.”
Rasputin’s mouth curved faintly.“You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“He wants me to go to Novosibirsk to deal with a situation.”
He pushed off the wall then and came toward me, slower than usual, as though he were carrying a thought too heavy to say carelessly.
“You go to Novosibirsk,” he said.“Handle the meeting.Come back.We sort this after.”
“What does ‘sort this’ mean?”
“It means I’m trying not to kill our father before breakfast.”
The old gym felt too small all of a sudden.Too close.The air too thick with everything unsaid between our lives and the man who ruled them.
“Do you ever think about leaving?”I asked.
His face changed.Only slightly.But enough.
“Yes,” he said.
The honesty of it hollowed me out.
“Then why don’t you?”
His gaze drifted past me, beyond the windows, beyond the grounds, toward some point only he could see.
“Because families like ours do not collapse quietly,” he said at last.“They take whole districts with them when they go down.Women.Children.Men who never chose any of it.Somebody has to stand in the middle and stop worse creatures from crawling in.”
That was Rasputin.
He had always been too decent for the world that made him.