God, I would have been so fucking present.
“Okay. I accept your deal.” I gulp down the sour taste in my throat. “But you have to swear you’ll honor it.”
He laughs, amused. “You’re hardly in a position to negotiate, brother.”
“Swear it on her grave,” I insist. “On our mother’s grave. Eliana and the baby stay untouched. Brandon gets called off tonight.Tonight, Aleksei. Not tomorrow, not in an hour—and he never goes near any of them again.”
Aleksei considers me.
“And Sage,” I continue. “He lives his own life. No Bratva. No ‘family business.’ You let him go to college, get married, die old and boring in some suburb. You leave him alone.”
He waits. And waits. And waits. And then…
“Agreed,” Aleksei says finally. “On our mother’s grave. All of it.”
The last bit of hope inside me—a stupid, fragile hope that’s been holding on by its fingernails for too long now—goes quiet. Calcified. There is only cold, dead stone where my heart used to beat.
I’m choosing their happiness over mine.
And it’s destroying me.
Aleksei crosses to me and reaches up. His hands work the chain loose from the hook. Carefully, lovingly, he lowers me to the ground. My legs give out, useless, as I crumple to the concrete in a heap of blood and broken promises.
The floor is cold against my cheek. The drain sits inches from my face, dark and patient, like the blinking eye of the underworld. I don’t try to move. There’s no point anymore.
“A car is waiting outside,” Aleksei intones from somewhere above me. “It will take you to a private airfield. Documents are waiting for you there.”
His footsteps move toward the door.
Then they stop.
“You were always the best of us, Semyon.” His voice is almost kind, like the brother I remember from before that freezer door closed. “That’s exactly why I could never allow you to stay.”
59
ELIANA
bone stock /bon stäk/: noun
1: broth simmered from what remains after the meat is stripped away.
2: the thing you make from wreckage.
The floor is cold against my cheek.
Glass digs into my palms, my hip, the soft underside of my forearm. I can feel the blood seeping out of me, warm and slick, mingling with whatever else has been spilled across these hardwood floors tonight. My ribs scream. My head pounds. The baby kicks weakly against my bruised abdomen.
Off to my left, Yasmin is making sounds no human being should make. A ruined, animal wail that rises and falls with each ragged breath. Wet. Wrong. Crying that comes from a body that’s been broken in ways it wasn’t designed to break.
And Brandon islaughing.
“Should’ve stayed with me when you had the chance, baby,” he croons to her. “Could’ve avoided all this unpleasantness.”
I press my palms harder into the glass. The shards sink deeper, grinding against bone. The pain should be unbearable. It should be the only thing I can think about.
But something strange is happening inside me.
The pain and the fear are burning away.
