Which made me narrow my eyes, a familiar unease prickling the back of my neck. Dad only used his completely reasonable tone when he was closing in for the kill.
“But you know, that team’s already got so much star power with your cousin at the forefront,” Dad added in the next breath,confirming my suspicion that he believed this situation to be the start of a deal. “I’d love for you to come see the kind of spotlight a team in need of a power player could put on you. Also, if your brother and your cousin got all that attention just for facing off for the Stanley Cup last year, imagine what kind of marketing we could doallseason around having two Rustanovs in the Western Conference.”
As someone who found talking coherently hard even on fully medicated, good brain days, I couldn’t help but be impressed by Dad’s deft transition from small talk into wheeling and dealing.
“I will not come to visit your facilities on Lydia’s birthday,” Yom answered.
But, of course, Dad couldn’t just accept Yom’s hard no. “Well, consider this, son?—”
“I am not your son,” Yom said before Dad could finish. “Yet.”
Ugh.Being used as leverage for Dad’s pitch made my skin crawl. I opened my mouth to tell him no meant no when it came to Yom signing with the Minnesota Raptors. But then I got hung up on that last word.
Did Yom say yet?
“I will not come to your facilities on Lydia’s birthday, but I will consider doing so the day before or after that day,” Yom amended while I tried to wrap my head around thatyet. “I must check schedule, but I am open to giving your team my consideration.”
Dad’s birthday wasn’t until August, but his face lit up like it had come early.
My heart twisted. Dad was clearly thrilled by Yom’s offer, yet all I could feel was confusion. Why was he doing this? The number-one reading comprehension question from my English 101 class loomed in my head:What is this character’s motivation?
“You don’t have to do that,” I told Yom, trying to steady my voice.
“I wish to do this,” Yom threw me a half-smirk. “I like this idea of staying close to you in Minnesota. Perhaps my path has curve in it after all.”
What?
So Yom hadn’t just crashed my brother’s party. Now, he was insinuating that he might join the Minnesota Raptors. For me?
The air felt too thick, pressing in on me from all sides. I was aware that men, especially, were transactional. But this didn’t feel like a power play—at least not one I could understand.
The world blurred, canting dangerously around me.
“You alright, sweetheart?” Brick Swain asked somewhere in the distance.
“I have to...” My throat clogged with a rising panic, but somehow I managed to squeeze out, “Excuse me. I need to powder my nose.”
I could feel the burn of Yom’s eyes on me as I rushed away, pushing through the party guests to the hallway outside the venue.
Thankfully, the women’s room was empty. There was no one there to see me rush to the sink and splash water on my hot face, trying not to hyperventilate.
My dad was a shark, sure. But sharks could be avoided if you chose not to swim in the ocean.
Yom felt like a different predator—a wolf, stalking me through the dark woods of my soul.
What did he want? What was his plan? Men always wanted something.Always.
But I couldn’t figure out which box to put Yom in, and that terrified me. Not knowing made it feel like there was a cartoon bomb in my chest, its wick burning, ready to explode.
“What the fuck, Lydia?!” came a slurred voice. “This your idea of some kind of sick joke? Bringing that Russkie asshole here?”
I looked up, and my heart stopped when I found Paul standing before me in the women’s bathroom. His hands were clenched into fists at his side, and his face was beet red. From the drinking. Or maybe from the anger.
After years as his adopted sister, I still couldn’t tell.
But my stomach dropped with memories of how, by high school, I’d learned never to be in the same space as him when he got like this.
Yet here I was. And my drunk, angry brother was standing between me and the door.
