I thought back to the people I’d seen. “Going by their clothes, they didn’t look like they were from rich families. Even if they were, why would he be moving them from Russia to the US?” I sighed. “I asked my hacker friend to check the head of the gaming board’s bank account. She didn’t find any bribes. In fact, he could have done with a bribe; his wife’s hospital bills had almost cleared him out.”
“Maybe Grushin blackmailed him,” said Radimir.
Mikhail snorted. “I told you, the man’s a Boy Scout. He doesn’t have any dirty secrets.”
“Maybe Grushin threatened his family, then, like he did with Yakov,” I said. But it didn’t sound right. It was one thing to threaten agangster, who couldn’t go to the police. This guy was a respectable, high-up official. I looked at the web of information on the wall, feeling the case pulling me in. “There’s something we’re missing,” I muttered.
“And it can wait until morning,” said Gennadiy. “You need to sleep.” And he stood up.
I started to argue and then caught myself. He was right. And he was—I melted inside—he waslooking after me,just as I’d looked after him. I nodded goodbye to everyone and let him lead me up the stairs to his bedroom. He took my hands in his and turned me to face him. There was a look on his face I’d never seen before.What’s going on?
He squeezed my hands, struggling to find the words. “I am...violentlyin love with you. Even when we were enemies, all I could think about was having you. Now I can’t imagine a life without you in it.”
The words, carved into weighty, silken ice by his accent, resonated through me. The fragile, silvery filigree that had been growing inside me for months vibrated and sang. I tried to answer, but I didn’t have the words, and I wouldn’t have been able to get them past the lump in my throat anyway. I just nodded hard.
“I’m…” He gave a long sigh, and when he spoke, I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound more Russian. “I am not used tothis.”He gestured between us. “And even less used totalking. But…” He took a deep breath. “I want to tell you why I’m angry. Why I can’t stop. Because I’ve realized there’s only one thing that scares me more than facing this, and that’s losing you.”
I nodded and guided him to the bed. He sat on the edge, and I knelt behind him, my arms around him as I listened.
He told me what happened when they were kids, when Radimir was fifteen, Gennadiy fourteen, and Valentin twelve. How their father, a good man, had tried to expose corruption in the Russian government, and one of his co-workers, a man called Olenev, had stabbed him to death to silence him. And then he’d framed the three brothers for their father’s murder, and with the help of a corrupt prosecutor, had them sent to a brutal borstal in Vladivostok. All threeof them were tortured, starved, and beaten by the staff for three years.
I got it, then. Why the Aristovs hated the justice system so much, why they’d chosen to live outside it. No wonder Gennadiy had hated me...just as I’d hated gangsters.
“When our mother tried to visit us,” Gennadiy said, his voice shaking, “the warden raped her. When she was dying of cancer, we weren’t even allowed to say goodbye.”
I remembered the two of us holding each other beside Master Sun’s grave, and I pressed myself to him, hugging him tight. “That’s terrible,” I told him.
He nodded stiffly. “But it wasn’t the worst thing that happened to us.”
He turned his head to look at me, our faces only a few inches apart. We were close enough that he could speak in a murmur, and I think that was the only reason he could get the words out. But we were so close, I could see every bit of pain in those pale gray eyes, and it was absolutely heartbreaking.
“It wasn’t just the guards,” he told me. “The other kids were all violent offenders. There was one, called Svetoslav, eighteen, a big tattooed piece of shit, who hated me as soon as he met me. He tried to break me from the very first day. He didn’t just want to hurt me; he wanted me to crawl to him. But I wouldn’t give in. Our father—” His voice cracked. “Our father always told us that if you lose your dignity, you have nothing. So I wouldn’t give in, even when he beat me almost to death. So, after a few months, Svetoslav found another way.”
He swallowed. “They came for me after lights out. Dragged me to someone’s cell. I thought they were going to kill me.” He closed his eyes for a second. “I wish...I wish theyhadkilled me. But they locked me in there, alone. Then Svetoslav struts around the corner and I assume he’s there to beat me. I stand tall. And then I see he’s dragging Valentin.”
I could hear Gennadiy’s breathing speeding up as decades-old panic resurfaced. “I start trying to talk to Svetoslav. Telling him that it’s okay, I’ll bow down to him, to not take it out on Valentin. But hejust ignores me. He drags Valentin into the cell next to mine. I can see them through the bars, but I can’t reach them. Valentin’s trying to fight; he’s being brave, but he’s only twelve. I startpleadingwith Svetoslav not to beat him, saying he’s just a kid, but he ignores me again.”
Gennadiy stopped. Closed his eyes again. The room went silent.
“And then,” Gennadiy said, his voice like a wire drawn too tight, “Svetoslav starts pulling Valentin’s clothes off.”
I felt my stomach drop through the floor.
“I screamno,”said Gennadiy. “I keep screaming it and screaming it, until my throat is raw. But Svetoslav doesn’t stop. I promise to do anything he wants. I tell him I’ll bow down to him, I’ll be his fucking slave. I say...I say do it tome,instead. But Svetoslav isn’t interested anymore. He wants me to see what happens when I defy him. He wants me to be an example to all the other kids: don’t be proud, or this will happen to someone you care about.”
Gennadiy’s face had gone pale, and his eyes were distant. He wasthere.I tightened my arms around him, rubbed him gently, trying to anchor him here, in the present.
“Valentin’s screaming,” said Gennadiy. “Screaming in pain and... screaming for me to help him. And I’m standing pressed against the bars, reaching into their cell, fucking clawing for Svetoslav, but I can’t reach. I can’t help him. I can’t help my baby brother.”
He wasn’t crying. I think he was too focused on struggling through the story to cry. I was crying for both of us, silent tears coursing down my cheeks.
“I killed him,” said Gennadiy. “A week later, I got Svetoslav alone in the showers, and I broke his fucking neck. But it didn’t change anything.” He met my eyes, and the pain in his face was beyond anything I’d ever seen. “I let it happen, Alison. I let it happen to my baby brother. I was six feet away, and I couldn’t stop it.”
He hiccoughed and sniffed, and now the tears did come, flooding his eyes and spilling over, and I clutched him tight. “It wasn’t your fault,” I told him gently. “It wasn’t.”
I kept holding him, and after a while, I felt his body ease a little.But when he drew back so that he could look at me, the pain in his eyes was still there. “I’ve told myself that so many times. But it doesn’t help.”
I nodded slowly. “Maybe what you need is to talk about it with Valentin.”
