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These women had not asked me to explain every bruise or justify why Demitri had brought me home. They had made room beside the fire, placed tea in my hands, and begun arguing in front of me as though I had been there long enough to understand them.

I looked once more toward the door.

Demitri was still downstairs, surrounded by the people who had loved him before he became a priest.

It wasn’t peace. Nothing about this family felt peaceful. What they had built was louder than that. Messier. Bound together by old wounds, bad tempers, shared enemies, and a devotion that left no room for moderation.

21

DEMITRI

For ten years, I had imagined my father’s study stripped bare. I had pictured strangers carrying away his books, his desk, the leather chair he refused to replace even after the springs began to fail.

But nothing had changed.

His reading glasses rested beside the lamp. A fountain pen lay across an open notebook, as though he had stepped away in the middle of a sentence. The faint smell of his cologne remained in the curtains, preserved long after the man himself had gone.

I stood in the doorway and couldn’t enter.

My father had built that room into a place of judgment. Men came through its door with secrets and left with orders. Sometimes they left with hope. Sometimes they didn’t leave at all.

As a boy, I had feared being summoned there. As a man, I had feared the day he would stop calling for me.

I crossed the room and placed my hand against the back of his chair. The leather was cold. The last time I had seen him alive, he had been sitting behind that desk. There had been blood on my shirt, though he knew it wasn’t mine. He had looked at it, then at me…

“Close the door,” he ordered.

I obeyed.

Thunder struck the windows hard enough to shake them. Somewhere downstairs, Tone was arguing with Raze. Their voices rose, then disappeared beneath the storm.

My father waited until I sat.

“You disobeyed me.”

“I made a calculated decision.”

“You were not there to make decisions,” he reminded me.

“The boy was fourteen.”

“He was carrying a gun, Demi.”

“He was terrified.”

My father leaned back, his expression unreadable.

The boy had fired at one of our men, but fear and inexperience had sent the bullet into the ceiling. My father reminded me that he had been standing beside the man who betrayed us, as if I had somehow overlooked that fact.

I had not. But the boy was still only fourteen.

My father had raised us by rules carved so deeply into the fabric of our family that no one questioned them. I had obeyed because obedience was easier than deciding what kind of man I wanted to become.

That night, I decided.

The boy had been on his knees with my gun pressed to his forehead. He’d whispered for his mother. I lowered the weapon.

His father died for his betrayal. The boy didn’t.