Watch me, Daddy!
Plink. Plink.
He’s baiting me with his silence, hoping I break and beg for mercy. But I refuse to speak first.
If he wants something from me, he can fucking ask for it.
Finally, Aleksei sighs. “You know,” he says, “I never wanted it to come to this.” He stops circling and stands somewhere in frontof me. “All I ever wanted was my family together. I keep saying that again and again, but nobody will fucking listen. It could’ve been so simple! The three of us, united. The way it should have been from the beginning.” He pauses, letting the words hang in the fetid air, then starts meandering again. “Do you remember when we were boys? The promises we made to each other? Before you abandoned me for your so-called ‘legitimate’ life?”
I work my jaw, gathering what little moisture remains in my mouth, and spit a glob of blood onto the concrete between us.
“You stopped being my brother,” I rasp, “the night you locked me in that freezer and chose murder over me.”
He stops again, stunned, as if I cold-cocked him in the face. “You thinkthat’swhat it was? That I just had such an insatiable taste for killing?” He shakes his head slowly. “For God’s sake, Semyon, I locked you in that freezer toprotectyou. I got my hands dirty to keep yours clean. I wanted you to have a life that was never, ever possible for me.”
“It does sound nice when you put it like that,” I admit with a hoarse laugh. “Almost makes me wish it was true.”
“I’m yourbrother,”he rasps. “Everything I built, I built for us. For family.”
I look down at the blood dribbling from dozens of wounds on my shirtless body and laugh. “This is one hell of a way to treat family,bratishka.”
He straightens up tall and scowls at me. “You forced my hand. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Let us live our fucking lives, Al,” I say. “That’s all you had to do. But no—you needed something and so you did what you alwaysdo: spilled blood until you got it. You had choices. You’vealwayshad choices. You just chose wrong.”
“‘Chose wrong,’” Aleksei echoes. “We grew up eating scraps from restaurant dumpsters, Semyon. Don’t you remember? We slept in shifts so the other street kids wouldn’t steal our shoes. Our mother sold her body to feed her addictions and died birthing a child she couldn’t afford to raise. What ‘choices’ did we ever have?”
“We had the choice not to become like the people who hurt us.”
His lip curls. “Easy to say from your billion-dollar ivory tower. Butsomeonehad to climb through the shit so you could stand on clean ground.”
I meet his eyes, the same blue as mine, and see nothing but a stranger wearing my brother’s face. “You spent so long climbing through shit that the smell is embedded in your nose, Al.”
His face degrades into a hideous, enraged mask. Then he passes a hand over his eyes and, like some perverted magic trick, suddenly, he’s calm and collected again. “Choices, yes. Choices, choices, choices. Well, let me talk to you about choices.” He turns away from me, laces his fingers together behind his back, and wanders over to the table of torture tools. “While you’ve been hanging here, I took a little trip out to Skokie. Lovely neighborhood. Very quiet.”
My heart stops.
“I found a charming house out there,” he continues. “Red front door. White picket fence. Cracked step on the front porch—you really should fix that, by the way. It’s a nasty hazard to those amongst us with disabilities. And inside?” He smiles. “Quite the little family you’ve assembled, Semyon. The best friend, themother-in-law, our dear baby brother.” He pauses before he concludes, “And of course, your pregnant girlfriend.”
The blood drains from my face so fast I nearly black out.
“Congratulations, by the way.” His smile is a wound. “Ababy. How wonderful! Such a shame you’ll never get to meet them.”
“What did you do?” I whisper.
“I left them in Brandon’s capable hands. He worked so hard to find them; it seemed like the least I could do.” Aleksei turns to face me again. “He seemedveryeager to reconnect with his ex. I’m sure he’ll take good care of everyone else there, too.”
The sound that tears from my throat is utterly fucking depraved.
It’s primal, feral, savage, raw, ripped from the deepest part of me where I’ve buried every fear I’ve ever had. I thrash against the hook, feeling stitches pop and scabs crack and fresh blood pouring down my arms, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except getting free, getting to her, getting tothem.
“Let me go!” I howl. “Take me instead—do whatever you want to me—just call him off!Call him off!”
Aleksei doesn’t move. He watches me flail and scream and tear myself apart without so much as blinking.
Eventually, my body begs me to quit. “Please,” I croak. “Aleksei,please. She’s pregnant. Sage is just a kid. They didn’t do anything. This is between us…”
My voice breaks. My body breaks. I hang there, spent, gasping, blood dripping steadily onto the concrete below.
