“To gain everything I don’t have,” he says with his signature smirk.
“You do realize your family would have eventually been cut in on the El Paso deal if the truce had continued, right?”
Granted, it would have been a last resort with me aspakhan.But I know my father. That was where he was headed.
“Fuck my family,” he says. “I don’t give a shit about any of them either. Not the ones who are alive anyways.”
“What about Jenica?”
“Jenica is… leverage.” He keeps staring ahead, but doesn’t quite meet my eyes as he says that. “Sure, she’s the closest thing I have to someone who understands me, but worst-case scenario, I’m loyal to no one.”
We aren’t duking it out, but we are turning in a slow circle. I think we both feel the need for movement, but neither of us are making any sudden moves. Not yet.
“What about Dmitry?” I ask. “He’s your uncle.”
“Dmitry is a fat, senile waste of space. These old men are losing their edge. You know that as well as I do. He may have taken me in when my own father died, but he didn’t have a choice.”
“Bratvais founded on family,” I argue. “Loyalty.”
“And look how fucking far that’s gotten us. Two families at war for generations all because neither family has ever had the gutsto end all the truces and make one manpakhan,” he spits out. “That’s the way it should be. Onepakhan. And it was never meant to be you.”
There is no smile. No snake-like smirk. Just pure, unadulterated hate.
I know what he’s talking about. I knowwhohe’s talking about. Hate surges through my own veins too as he goes on.
“Nik had twice as much potential as you did,” he says, forcing my memory back to the no-trespassing zone that is my brother. “That’s why I lured him into the car scene.”
“We both loved cars.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t have any guts.” He sneers. “No moxie. But Nicklaus, he had potential. And drive. And you know what’s funny? I actually thought that he and I could be friends. Team up. Take over. Two futurepakhaniwith way more capacity than Dmitry or Anton.” His expression sours. “But then he got cocky.”
“He was better than you,” I snarl. “On every level.”
“Maybe,” Tristan actually admits with a shrug. “Which is why I challenged him to a race.”
“His last race.”
Tristan’s lips crawl into a leer. “His last race. You know, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t an accident.”
“I know it wasn’t.” My jaw works. “Question is, how do you?”
“That’s easy.” He smirks. “I pulled his breaks before the race started.”
My blood turns to ice. My stomach twists.
I knew.
Somehow, inside, I always knew it was him.
And now that I have him standing in front of me, admitting to being the source of the single most painful memory I have, I waste no time reaching for my gun.
There’s a million ways I’d love for Tristan to die. Screaming, begging, leaking blood from every orifice. But more than I want to torture him for hours, days, years on end, I just want him dead.
I want this fucking nightmare to be over.
But my gun isn’t there.
I reach around my body, patting myself down, though I’m not really sure why. I never put it anywhere else.
