"What are you going to do about it?" Lex asked, once his father's confession had settled into the room, heavy and unresolved. "Now that you've said it out loud."
Nikolai didn't answer right away. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring at some point past Lex's shoulder, and for a long moment he looked less like the controlled, calculating man Lex had grown up fearing and more like exactly what he was — a man in his late forties finally confronting a decision he'd made at seventeen, and finding, thirty years too late, that the weight of it hadn't lessened at all with time.
"I can make the scholarship problem disappear," Nikolai said, finally. "Quietly. A phone call to the board chair, a word about an overzealous review process, the anonymous tip quietly discredited. Sokolova's fa
