“Leaving,” I cut in. “You were leaving. Just like you’re about to do now.”
“You weren’t joking—youarein a bad mood,” Aleksei says as he lounges against the side of the car and lights up another menthol, hand cupped to his face to shield it from the breeze. “I guess that’s what happens when things go wrong at work, eh?”
“I—” My voice catches in my throat. “How do you know something went wrong at work?”
Aleksei shrugs and exhales a long plume of smoke into the car. Sage coughs and waves it away. I grimace. “Little birdies do a lot of talking in this city. A man in my position learns to listen.”
“Bash,” says Sage, “who the fuck is this guy?”
I ignore him for now. My pulse is starting to climb and I can feel blood rushing in my ears. “What’d you hear, Al?”
He waves a finger through the air and reverts back to that nasally, high-pitched singing voice. “Problems here, problemsthere, problems every-fucking-where.” Then he drops the voice and squares up with me. “You know what the real problem is, though, Semyon? It’s that our family is so divided.”
“Bash,” Sage interrupts once again, “who thefuckis?—”
“Quiet!” I bark at him.
He recoils. I never talk to him that way. I don’t like seeing him cringe and shrink back like this. But I know Aleksei and I know that look in his eye.
I intend to keep Sage as far from this shit as possible.
I look at Aleksei again. “I think our family is doing just fine, thanks.”
“No, no, no.” He tries to touch my face again, and again, I swat his hand aside. He just chuckles. “Brothers ought to betogether,Semyon. We’d be like three little musketeers, you know? That’s how it should be. It’s what Mama would have wanted.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sage pale as he puts the pieces together. He’s no idiot, and he’s begged and pleaded with me for enough scraps of our family history over the years. He only knows of Aleksei as an estranged brother I don’t talk to because he made bad choices. A boogeyman of sorts.
If I’d had it my way, he would’ve stayed like that forever.
“Mama wanted a lot of things, and they were all at least forty-proof,” I snarl. “She certainly didn’t give a flying fuck what became of her sons.”
“Ah, maybe you’re right,” Aleksei concedes. “But then it falls to us to do things better, doesn’t it?”
“I think that ship sailed for you a long time ago.”
That laugh again. It’s menthol-tinged, smoke-infused, and it grates on my goddamn nerves.
“I think you ought to be going,” I add. “As fun as this has been, Sage and I have places to be.”
Aleksei nods, completely unbothered. He straightens up, but he keeps his hands clamped on the car door so I can’t roll up the window just yet. “Fair enough. We Izotovs are busy men by nature.” He points a thumb at Sage. “Remember that,bratishka.Ambition is your north star. Never settle for less than what you deserve.”
“Time to go,” I growl at him.
He raps his knuckles on the inside of my door. “Sure is. But hey—if you ever need a hand with those construction problems of yours, all you have to do is pick up the phone and give me a call. HVAC can be such a bitch, can’t it?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He just turns and saunters away, stopping only to crush the cigarette under his heel.
I wait until he’s gone. Then I gun the car out of the parking lot and I don’t look back.
Sage doesn’t say a word until we get home. He stays silent, eyes downcast, as we park, as we ride the elevator up, as we spill out into the penthouse.
But just when I think I might get away without having to do this miserable conversation right now, he pivots his chair around in the middle of the kitchen and looks at me.
“So you gonna explain what the hell just happened, or nah?”
I exhale. So much for ducking the hard things. Today has been a fucking doozy, and I don’t have the energy to do this justice.
But Sage deserves my best. And he’s entitled to answers about his blood and his roots. Since there’s no one else to give that to him, it falls to me.
