“It’s a goddamn mess, is what it is,” I sigh.
“That’s not an answer and you know it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“Well?” he demands. “And don’t even try to keep me in the dark on this one. I’m not a little kid anymore, you know.”
“I know you’re not. I… Hold on a second. I need a drink.”
I go to the bar cart and pour myself a splash of vodka. Returning to the kitchen, I sink onto a bar stool across the counter from Sage and fix him with a serious look.
“Aleksei is my brother. Yours, too, technically. Well, half. We all have the same mom. The dad situation is a complete mystery, but it doesn’t really change anything.”
Sage’s jaw is tight. Is that what I look like when I brood? He looks like he’s one sneeze away from shattering into a million little pieces, never to be reassembled. Every muscle in his face and neck is standing at rigid attention.
“Him and I grew up together,” I continue. “We had it rough. Mom was a mess, too young and too wrecked on drugs and booze to be a parent. And no money, of course. Not a damn dime.”
I close my eyes and that Glade PlugIn stench comes floating back, just like it did at Eliana’s mother’s apartment. It’s as real as if someone is wafting it under my nose, even though it’s almost forty years in the past.
“Were you close?” Sage asks, dragging me back to the present.
“We were… Yeah. Yeah, we were. We were about as close as you can get, for a while there.”
He hears what I’m not saying. “But then…?”
“But then we ended up at a crossroads, sort of.”
“Don’t talk down to me,” he warns angrily. “I’m not a little kid. I deserve to know the details.”
“I’m not, I swear. I’m just trying to find the best way to explain a whole lot of complicated shit that happened a long time ago.” I rub my chin as I think. “But, yeah—a crossroads. We both had a choice to make, and we… we chose different.”
I remember the night it happened. The bitter chill of the walk-in freezer. The man’s screams. The door swinging open and Aleksei standing there with the cleaver in his hand.
The blood on the tile.
So much blood on the tile.
“And then we went our separate ways, more or less,” I finish. “Aleksei made choices I thought were unethical, though he’d say he was doing it for good reasons. I thought it was best for us to stay in our respective worlds and not talk anymore. We didn’t, for a long time. The only time we’ve really spoken in the last sixteen years is when we found out about you. He brought youto my house and gave you to me, and then we parted again. And that’s pretty much that.”
Sage is quiet as he absorbs everything. It’s more than he used to know but not nearly as much as he deserves to know.
Still, I can’t bear to tell him everything. Not yet.
That cold, that scream, that blood, that fucking blood… Those aremynightmares.
Not his.
“I know you’re not going to be totally satisfied with that,” I tell him, “and if you’re pissed at me, I get it. One day, I’ll share more. But for now… that’s that.”
He nods. His face is still taut with tension, but he lets out a long, slow, deflating exhale. Then, without saying another word, he rolls himself down the hall and into his room.
The door clicks shut.
I stay seated at the counter for a long time, nursing a vodka that doesn’t do a single goddamn thing to improve my mood.
Around midnight, I come to a decision.
I don’t know what it is yet, exactly. I just know that wallowing in my past won’t change a single goddamn thing about my present or my future.
