He breathes out once, quiet, like a man tasting something he’s not sure is safe to say. “Then I tell my brother that I’m done serving him. I tell him he has his guns and most of his money, but he doesn’t get your brother. And if he comes for you, he meets the part of me that doesn’t care that we’re brothers.”
There’s no promise in his words that this ends cleanly. Dominik doesn’t say we ride off into the sunset somewhere safe forever. He doesn’t promise me protection like a movie hero. He gives me violence wrapped in a reality that I can understand. I’m so tired of pretty lies I could break into pieces from relief.
“I can’t choose that for you,” Dominik adds. “I can tell you the costs.”
“What are they?” I ask even though I know Gavriil will never let Dominik walk away from him.
“You’ll live with a man who doesn’t apologize for what he is,” he says. “You’ll live with the possibility of loss in your mouth every morning you wake up. You won’t be alone or taken for granted. You’ll probably be angry with me at least once a day, but you’ll never doubt that I mean it when I say that I would risk my life to keep you safe.”
“God,” Archer mutters, disgust and fear braided tight. “He’s selling you a pretty cage with a penthouse view.”
“What does your cage look like?” I ask, turning back to my brother, angry that he’s the reason I have to make the hard choice. One that hurts me, hurts Dom. “The life where I run with you? Where we’re always looking over our shoulder because you screwed over the wrong men?”
Archer’s face softens in a way that used to make me forgive him for things that weren’t his fault and for things that were. “All we need is a car,” he says, almost smiling. “We’ll drive south. No GPS. We stop at motels where the carpet is sticky and pay in cash. We get shitty jobs that don’t ask questions. We change our names and address every time the wind blows, then we keep our heads down and mind our own business.”
“I’ve been moving since I was sixteen,” I say, my voice threatening to crack under the weight of my disappointment. Does he really think sentencing me to a life like that is fair? “I’m tired of running in circles around your mistakes.”
“Then rest,” Archer says, urgent now. “With me.”
I look at the chain between his wrists. At the crescent moon of dried blood on his knuckle where a cuff chewed skin, remembering the same wounds on my skin. He’s my older brother. He’s the boy who taught me the difference between cops and neighbors, the man who stole a loaf of bread and cried in the stairwell because he said it made him feel like a bad guy. He also sold a piece of a world he didn’t understand because he wanted more without putting in any effort. And I was the collateral he assumed he could live with.
Dominik shifts, and the air moves over my bare arms even though he’s not touching me. The heat under my skin finds his gravity and leans toward him. I can’t help but think about the bandage under his shirt that I changed with hands I tried to keep clinical and failed.
“Time to decide, Alina,” Dominik says quietly. It isn’t a threat. It is what it is—my decision.
“How long?” I ask.
He glances at the clock I can’t see. “Enough to be sure you won’t hate yourself for answering.”
“Enough already,” Archer snaps. “Just choose.”
“Don’t fucking order me,” I say. The words come out cold and sharp, and they surprise me because they land like something I’ve been practicing without noticing.
My brother flinches, then goes ugly to cover it. “Of course. Morozov’s convinced you that you have a little power over him and the rest of his world, so now you think you love him. Congrats.”
“Don’t use that word like a weapon,” I say.
“What else is it?” he asks, almost shouting. “What else have we been doing our whole lives except paying each other back for surviving?”
“I don’t want to love like that,” I say, and the truth of it is a relief that hurts. “I don’t want tolivelike that anymore.”
“So what?” he demands. “You want to be his new pet? You want to sit in this cage and pretend the view isn’t all bars?”
“I want to stand next to someone who steps between me and the bullet, not shoves me into its path whenever it suits him,” I say. “I want to decide to stay and have that mean something.”
I want to protect my brother and Dom too.
“We’ll have to leave the city,” Dominik says with a scowl as if he hates admitting that much to me, to Archer. As if he thinks I meant staying in this exact spot with him forever. “It won’t be easy, but I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
“So, either way, you’ll have to run. With him, it means you’re constantly looking over your shoulderandsentencing me to death,” Archer throws back in my face. “Can you live with that, Alina?”
The fact that he says it like a dare makes something stubborn and mean in me stand up straight. “If I kill you with my choice, it’s only because you were the one who loaded the gun and put it in my hand.”
Archer closes his eyes when my words land. When he opens them again, he studies my face like he doesn’t recognize meanymore. “I’m still your brother,” he says, and the sentence is so soft it almost disappears.
I look at Dominik because I have to know if he’ll flinch from that too. He doesn’t. He stands like he lives—weight on both feet, shoulders like a wall, eyes steady on me. If I say no to him, I think he’ll crack without showing me where. He’ll reach for a gun and a lie, and he’ll keep moving. If I say yes, he’ll be exactly what he promised, for better or worse. I want to be the kind of person who chooses the thing that makes me brave instead of the thing that makes me nostalgic.
“Say it,” Archer urges, desperate and cruel. “Say my name and we’ll leave, and you can pretend you didn’t fuck this monster.”
