So I don’t sleep. I work. It’s better that way.
“You should take a night off,” Aleksei suggests. “You’re no good to me burned out.”
“I said I’m fine.”
He looks at me for one more long moment, then shrugs. “Suit yourself. The Korean situation needs handling as soon as possible. After that, we’ll talk about next steps.”
I close the folder and stand. “Anything else?”
“Nyet.” I pick up the folder and make toward the door, but Aleksei’s voice stops me. “Oh, wait—there is one more thing, Semyon.”
I pause, but I don’t turn around yet.
“I’ve arranged new accommodations for Sage.”
At that, I turn. “What?”
“Your penthouse is too exposed.” Aleksei taps ash from his cigarette, not meeting my eyes. “I’m moving him to a place on the West Side. He’ll like it—very nice, very private. My men will look after him.”
My men.Notourmen.Hismen.
“He’s fine where he is,” I growl.
“He’ll be better where I’m putting him.” Aleksei finally looks at me, his face half-obscured by the tendrils of smoke. “Unless you’d prefer I leave him vulnerable…? After everything that’s happened, I’d think you’d welcome the extra protection.”
I understand immediately what this is. He makes it sound like a nice offer, a brotherly favor, but it’s not that, not at all.
Sage isn’t being moved for safety.
He’s being taken hostage.
Fucking hell. I can still see my little brother the way he was when I came home that night. Lying on the floor beside his overturned wheelchair, tears streaming down his face. How long had he been there? An hour? Two? I’d locked him in before going to kill a man, and when I finally came back—blood still under my fingernails, Eliana’s horror still fresh in my mind—I found my brother crumpled on the carpet like discarded laundry.
I’d dropped to my knees beside him, reaching out, but he’d flinched away.Flinched.From me. The person who’d spent eight years making sure he never had to be afraid of anything again.
“Don’t touch me,”he’d whispered.“Don’t you fucking touch me.”
I’d never felt so low. Not in the freezer at Tolstoy’s, not in any alley with blood on my hands. Nothing compared to seeing Sage look at me like I was the monster he’d always been protected from.
He hasn’t spoken to me since. We’ve coexisted in the way that a tenant coexists with a ghost in their house. He looks right through me as if I’m not there. Won’t answer when I speak, won’t move when I walk by.
But at least he’sthere, goddammit. At least he’s alive and I can see every day that my sacrifice to keep him safe was worthwhile.
Now, Aleksei is taking even that away.
I didn’t think I was capable of losing anything else. But Aleksei knows better. He’s always known better. He understands that the human capacity for loss is bottomless. There’s always one more thing that can be stripped away, one more wound thatcan be inflicted. And Sage, broken, furious, silent Sage, is the last tether keeping me from floating off into the void entirely. If Aleksei disappears my brother into some concrete bunker on the West Side where I can't even confirm he's still breathing, he’ll control the final link between me and this world like a leash in his hands with the other end around my throat.
He sees all of this playing out across my face. His smile widens just slightly.
And all I can do is nod.
“Good. That’s settled, then. Also, I meant to ask you: What ever happened with the blind girl?” Aleksei asks. “What was her name again?”
I grind my teeth together. “Eliana.”
“Ah, yes.Eliana.” Her name is nails on a chalkboard. Every hair on the nape of my neck stands at attention. “Have you heard from her?”
“No.”
