I follow him up creaking porch steps, noting each sound for future reference. Third step groans, fifth is silent. My fingers trail along the railing where initials are carved deep into the wood. M.V. in Cyrillic script, the cuts worn smooth from years of touching. The ghost of Mikhail greets us before we even enter.
The front door sticks, swollen from humidity. Alexei shoulders it open, and I note the lock is ancient, pickable in seconds. No security system. We're completely exposed here.
The smell hits immediately. Pine and lake water, something floral gone stale with time. Dust motes dance in shafts of morning light streaming through grimy windows. Everything is frozen, preserved, a museum to boyhood summers that ended in blood.
Alexei's shoulders tense, but he doesn't speak. He moves through the space yanking white sheets from furniture like he's unveiling corpses. Each revelation shows worn leather couches, a chess set mid-game on the coffee table, some pieces tipping over at the intrusion. The sight makes my chest tighten with guilt that's become my constant companion.
Photos line the walls. Two boys and a girl growing up in sepia-toned summers. Gap-toothed grins, fishing poles, birthday cakes and bonfires. Mikhail everywhere, laughing, building, existing in ways he never got to finish.
My body responds to Alexei's grief inappropriately, the way it always does. The controlled violence in how he tears away dust covers makes heat pool low in my belly. Even devastated, even here in his brother's sanctuary, I want him. The recognition makes me hate myself a little more.
I stop at the window where a bonsai sits, branches skeletal, soil cracked like broken promises. The ceramic pot is beautiful, hand-painted with tiny cranes, but the tree itself is beyond saving.
"Mikhail's," Alexei says behind me, close enough that I feel his body heat. "He brought it here every summer. Said the lake air was good for it."
I touch one brittle branch and it crumbles to powder between my fingers. Like everything else Mikhail touched, dead because of me.
The bookshelf draws me closer. Architecture volumes, spines cracked from use. I pull one free and sketches flutter out. Buildings that exist only in pencil and dream, impossible structures reaching toward skies they'll never touch. One photo slips free. Mikhail at maybe seventeen, laughing, his arm around someone who's been carefully cut from the frame. The cropped edge is worn soft.
"Father said architecture was weak. Impractical," Alexei says, his voice carrying that particular roughness that makes my nipples tighten beneath my dress. Even grief looks good on him, and I'm sick for noticing.
"But he kept the books."
"He kept everything that mattered. Even the things that could get him hurt."
Like me? The thought rises unbidden. Did he keep me secret even though it got him killed?
I drift to what must have been Mikhail's room, checking sightlines from the hallway. Too exposed, no cover if someone enters. Inside, it's a shrine to an eighteen-year-old's interrupted dreams. More architecture books, a drafting table with an unfinished sketch still taped to it, a half-built model of something that might have been a concert hall. The bed is made with military corners, waiting for someone who'll never mess them up again.
"He'd stay up all night drawing," Alexei says from the doorway, filling the frame in a way that makes me hyperaware of my lack of weapons, my lack of defense against what he does to my body just by existing. "I'd find him passed out at that desk, pencil still in hand, drooling on his blueprints."
The image makes me smile despite the crushing weight in my chest. "What else?"
"Everything. Nothing." Alexei moves past me to open windows, his cologne mixing with lake air. Even here, even now, my pussy clenches at his proximity. "He'd collect rocks from the shore, organize them by color. Taught me to fish even though I had no patience for it. Built a treehouse that fell down the first storm."
"And you?"
He pauses, hands full of dusty fabric, and something in his stance makes me want to touch him, comfort him, fuck him until neither of us remembers why we're here.
"I was whoever Mikhail needed me to be. His student, his audience, his shadow." He turns away. "I don't remember if I was ever just myself."
We're on the porch with coffee that's gone cold, watching morning melt into afternoon on the lake's surface. I've checked the perimeter twice. No motion sensors, no cameras, nothing but woods and water. We're alone and unprotected, and the vulnerability makes my skin prickle.
Alexei's phone buzzes against the wooden table. He glances at it and his jaw tightens at whatever name appears. He silences it.
It rings again immediately. Then again. The insistence speaks of emergency.
"You should answer," I say softly, though every instinct screams danger at unexpected calls.
He picks it up on the fourth ring, rising to walk to the porch's edge. "Katya."
I can't hear her words, but I watch his body language shift like watching a building collapse in slow motion. His shoulders draw up. His free hand grips the railing until his knuckles go white. The slight sway, barely perceptible, but I'm trained to notice everything about him.
"When?" His voice cracks.
More tinny words. His head drops forward like someone cut his strings.
"Was she… did she…"
