Page 40 of Beautiful Ruin

Smart.

Always so damn clever.

I pause and look up from the notebook, already knowing where this is going even without Sofia pointing me in the direction she’s clearly guiding me toward. The inevitable conclusion is quite obvious the longer I stare at the information she’s gathered.

“There is a possibility he’s dead, Sofia. If he knew anything about your mother’s real cause of death, your uncle would have hunted him down for answers.”

“We don’t know that,” she counters immediately. “What if my uncle is covering it up? What if he knows what actually happened and that caused my dad to run to save himself from being next?”

I hate that she has a point. I hate even more that the questions she’s raising are ones I should have asked myself years ago. Especially now that it seems the man who raised me is clearly involved.

Penetrating trauma consistent with ballistic injury.

If her father vanished immediately afterward, he was either involved, accused, or running from the same thing that killed her. If Ivan erased him from every public domain imaginable, it was not done out of simple grief. It was a decision made with purpose.

Nikolai’s warning uncoils again inside my head, patient as a snake.

Your Pakhan has already stepped into waters that aren’t meant to be tread in.

“That’s why I want to go to the coroner’s office with you,” she continues, reaching over the space separating us to tug the notebook out of my hands. “The guy who’s still there is the same one who allegedly handled my mother’s case at the time. I want to ask him questions.”

I stare at Sofia for a long, heavy moment, torn between wanting to turn us around and head back to the estate and lock her inside her damn room for the stunt she just pulled and conceding that she may be the only person who may be asking the right questions.

The anger in her face is still there, but beneath it is something rawer. In this moment, she is more than just Ivan’s niece. She is a daughter trying to understand what happened to her mother and find out whether the father she has spent years resenting was a coward, a killer, a victim, or a man erased because he knew the truth.

Finally, I exhale. “Fine. But you need to stick close to me before we go inside the coroner’s office. I won’t have you taken out from right next to me.”

Her eyes spark with excitement. “Okay.”

My eyes narrow. “I mean it, Sofia. If you step out of line, I will drag you back to the estate and lock you in a room until your uncle tells me to open the door. Understood?”

Her answering smile is immediate and wildly out of place considering the threat I just delivered. “Understood.”

Lord help me.

Actually, no. If there is a God, He took one look at this situation and decided not to involve Himself out of sheer principle.

I pull out my phone and lift it to dial Ivan’s secure line. My thumb hovers over the call command for half a second longer than usual.

That hesitation tells me everything.

I do not hesitate when calling Ivan. I do not assess the consequences in my head before reporting to him because, for most of my life, there have never been consequences worth worrying about beyond his disappointment. Ivan gives orders, and I execute them. That is how this has always worked.

But now Sofia is in my back seat, and I am about to tell my Pakhan that. I know without a shadow of a doubt the moment he finds out Sofia is gone and is with me, if he hasn’t already discovered her absence himself, he is going to absolutely lose it.

Keeping her with me may be the single most reckless choice I have ever made. There has never been a time where I have been afraid of Ivan’s anger. I have survived that before many times. I’ve stood in his office with blood still drying from a split lip while he reprimands me until his voice grows hoarse. I’ve taken his disapproval like another kind of beating, one that does not leave bruises for others to count but somehow cuts even deeper.

Ivan’s rage is not like Volkov’s.

His anger is a hammer swung through glass, loud and brutal and hungry for an audience. Volkov wants witnesses to see what happens when they disappoint him. He enjoys when the room flinches.

Ivan has never needed that.

His is colder and more intimate. More humiliating because he rarely has to raise a hand for it to hurt. It is being stared at until the room disappears and all that remains is the exact weight of your failure laid out in front of you. It is being dismantled piece by piece until all that is left standing is exactly how he has always seen you.

He strips away every title, every earned inch of trust given. Every drop of blood spent proving yourself useful means nothing, and leaves you facing the version of yourself you thought he had fixed and made acceptable long ago. With me, that has always been the worst of it—not the physical discipline, not the weeks of harder work after a mistake. Those things are simple in the same way that pain is.

Ivan’s disappointment stays long after the bruises fade. It beats me down until I am no longer his right hand, until I have been stripped of my title as his blade and reminded that beneath the fear my name carries and the respect I’m shown because of my station, I am nothing more than the street rat he rescued from underground fighting rings.