His breath catches, just barely, but I feel it.
He takes a slow step forward, eyes scanning what I’ve made. I say nothing. I just watch him take it in.
At the center of the clearing is a small monument, hand-built from stone, earth, and time. I gathered smooth river rocks from the stream below the cliffs, stacking them carefully into a circle. In the middle stands a post, old wood I sanded myself, carved by hand with a pocket knife I stole from the kitchen drawer. Twisted ivy wraps around the beam like a crown. Draped from it:a piece of linen from an old dress shirt of his that I’d patched and repurposed.
Two stones, a symbol for two people.
His sister.
His mother.
I hadn’t known what flowers they liked, if they ever had the chance to like any at all. So I gave them all of them. I lined the base with lavender and wild rosemary, dried petals from the rosebushes at the back of the estate, sprigs of white baby’s breath and soft pine needles. At the very center, black tulips. A color that speaks only in grief.
He stares for a long time. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t blink.
Then he drops to his knees in the frozen grass.
His head bows low, and for a moment, the world is perfectly still.
When he speaks, it’s not in English. It’s Russian. A single line, whispered into the cold air like a prayer. His hands tremble slightly, resting on the stone, his knuckles white.
“I never had a place to say goodbye,” he says at last.
The words tear through me. I know that, he told me that in the very beginning, and I never forgot about it, ‘‘I had nothing to bury except my own soul.’’
I kneel beside him, resting a hand on his back, feeling the shake in him—the war between fury and grief.
“She would’ve loved you,” he murmurs. “My sister. She was all flame and teeth. She would’ve followed you like you were a prophecy.”
My throat tightens, but I don’t speak.
His eyes are wet. Not with loud, broken sobs, but the kind of tears that only come from pain carried too long in silence. He doesn’t wipe them away. Doesn’t hide from them.
And then, something changes in him.
The tremble fades. The softness hardens. His hand curls into afist against the stone, and when he rises, he stands as something else entirely.
His eyes are glass and steel.
He turns toward me slowly, chest heaving.
“Tomorrow,” he says, voice raw and guttural, “I’ll bury them all.”
I stare at him, but don’t flinch.
“I will kill them all,” he continues. “Every last one. I will carve fear so deep into their bones that they will never speak my name again.’’
The cold burns around us, but his body radiates heat like it’s fed from something ancient—something not entirely human.
“I will erase every name connected to the pain that runs through our veins,” he says, quieter now, darker. “I will not leave sons to avenge fathers. I will not leave widows to whisper vengeance. I will salt the earth where they bled us and make sure nothing ever grows there again.”
His voice doesn’t rise. It sinks. It drags the temperature of the air down with it.
“They think I am a man,” he continues, stepping forward. “They think I can be negotiated with, reasoned with, softened by the things I’ve built.”
Another step.
I don’t move.
