“I really wasn’t asking, plemyannik.”
That, of all things, stops me cold. Afon hasn’t used my patronymic, my father’s name nested inside my own, since I was a boy. Not since the night he hauled me out of that alley with my father’s blood on the front of his shirt and showed me how to wash my hands in a puddle.
I look him in the face for the first time in a long time. Up close, I can see the gray in his stubble, the broken capillaries at the corners of his eyes, the deep line that’s been carved between his brows for fifteen years. The toll that time, grief, and hard work has taken on him. The price he’s paid.
“You listen to me,” he growls, low. “You think I did the things I’ve done for the last decade and a half just to waltz off into the sunset when my kin needs me? You think that is wh
