A vein throbs on his forehead. “You understand what you’re refusing, yes? What you’ll suffer if you turn this down? Prison, Semyon.Disgrace. Your child growing up with a father?—”
“—whofoughtfor them.” I meet his gaze without flinching. “That’s more than you and I ever had.”
Aleksei’s face curdles.
I watch my brother as he processes. It’s like an optical illusion—for a split second, the tailored suit and cigarette smoke disappear, and behind them, I see the scrawny seventeen-year-old boy who used to steal bread for us when our mother was too strung out to remember she had children. The brother who taught me how to throw a punch. How to survive.
We came from the same hell.
We just chose different doors out of it.
And I won’t be going back.
Bit by bit, Aleksei’s mask cracks. It doesn’t shatter all at once—he’d never do anything so abrupt or dramatic. But I watch the fissures spread across his composure like ice breaking over a frozen lake. Beneath it, a dark fire blooms.
His jaw works. His hands, those surgeon-steady hands that have orchestrated a hundred deaths without trembling, curl into fists at his sides. He turns away from me, facing the grimy window again, but this time, his shoulders are tense. The cigarette between his fingers has burned down to the filter, forgotten. As I watch, he drops it to the floor and grinds it out beneath his heel.
“Itried,” he says, and his voice?—
Christ.
His voiceshakes.
“Itriedto bring us together. I tried to give youeverything—power, money, family. A legacy worth having. Something to pass down to that kid of yours someday. What the fuck else could you want?” He laughs, but I’ve never heard such a horrible sound before. “But you keep choosingthemover your own blood.”
What I’m hearing stuns me. He’s pissed, righteously pissed, of course. That’s what I expected. But he’s alsowounded. He’s got a rotten, gaping wound in some deep, festering place that goes back much further than the Bratva. The roots of that black blood reach all the way to a mother who died with a needle in her arm, a father who for all intents and purposes never existed, and two boys huddled together in a roach-infested apartment, promising each other they’d survive…
… until I walked away.
“Al—”
He wheels around, and the look on his face stops the words dead in my throat. He crosses the distance between us in long, frenzied strides. His hand shoots out and grabs my jaw, wrenching my face up toward his. This close, I can see the bloodshot threads in his eyes, the gray stubble he missed while shaving. He looksoldsuddenly. Worn down in ways that have nothing to do with age.
“You were supposed to be my partner,” he hisses. “Mybrother. We were going to— Oh, fuck it. Fuck all of it.”
He releases my jaw and steps back. His hand flies to his hip. He draws, aims, fires.
I don’t even have time to flinch.
The bullet punches into my abdomen, and everything, everything,everythinggoes white. Pure, screaming white. Pain explodes through my core, radiating outward in waves that make my vision swim and my lungs seize. I double over as an awful sound tears from my throat.
Aleksei holsters his weapon. “Goodbye, little brother,” he spits without looking at me. “I hope she was worth it.”
Footsteps recede the same way they came in. The warehouse door clangs shut. An engine growls to life outside, then fades into the distance until there’s nothing left but silence and the ongoing drip-drip-drip from somewhere behind me.
I’m alone.
Blood-orange morning light creeps across the concrete floor, inching toward me like a slow tide. It touches my toes. My shins. My waist. Up my blown-open stomach, my chest, my throat, my chin. It washes over my face.
That’s the last thing I see before the world whites out.
I get one more taste of the light.
42
ELIANA
single cover /'siNGg?l 'k?v?r/: noun
