22
NATALIA
Idon’t think I’ve ever seen Leks nervous, but a shadow passes over his face. When he looks back at me, he’s deadly serious.
I start to feel a hint of his nerves as I think it through. If I don’t believe his story… If there is no story and he just made that up to get my agreement to the marriage… Then the past month has been wrong.
I don’t know if I’ll ever look at Leks the same way again.
Not if my father’s story is true, and he did kill my brothers in cold blood, for political motivations.
The alternative, that my father is a liar, doesn’t make any sense to me either.
I look away from the nervous tension in his square jaw, the unnerving deep blue of his eyes. He’s ready to tell me the truth. I just don’t know if I’m ready to hear it.
“Before you tell me what happened…” I press a hand to his chest. “Tell me about them. My brothers.”
Leks squeezes my waist.“You remember them, don’t you?”
I lift a shoulder. I do remember them, but only through the eyes of a child. They were tall, and funny, and always willing to piggyback me around the corridors of the house.
While my parents were serious and boring, Fyodor and Pyotr showed me a side of the Bratva that I wanted to be a part of. One where teenagers could sneak out at night, where you could have fun, where being from our family wasn’t a burden but a kind of power over everyone.
I never did get to experience that. And for them, it was short-lived. As they became adults, my father placed a lot of pressure on both of them.
They were twins, so in his eyes they had to compete to show him who was the most worthy heir.He was vocal about how neither of them met his standards. I remember family dinners where my father would point out how neither of them had tied their ties correctly, or some other small details, which he would berate them for. They were no longer fun and raucous but irresponsible and lazy.
My father had the highest standards for everyone.
“What do you want to know?” Leks tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Anything. Everything. How did you know them?”
Leks laughs. “I fucking hated them at first. My dad worked here for a long time, at the port, and he had a chip on his shoulder about your family. ‘Never trust a Bryusov,’ was one of his favorite sayings.”
“That’s catchy.”
A smile spreads across Leks’s face. “We started middleschool together. So, once I found out who your brothers were, I punched Fyodor in the face one time at lunch, Pyotr stepped in to defend him, and we all ended up in detention together.”
I will never understand men. Leks is talking about this like it’s a fond memory.
“Our friendship formed quickly after that. We were inseparable. We would get in trouble together. Twins can pull the best pranks, and we were always jealous of them for that. I didn’t exactly get invites to their birthday parties?—”
“Because of my parents.”
“Well, yeah, but that didn’t stop your brothers once they got older. They’d be down here every Saturday buying drugs like all the other Bratva rich kids, except they actually knew us. By the time your father decided they should take on more responsibility, everyone down here already knew their names and loved them.”
The bittersweet knowledge that I never got a chance to know these people, not really, forces hot tears into my eyes. I bury my face against Leks’s chest and he strokes my hair.
“Fyodor was great at impressions. Especially your father. He would give us all these performances, just get up there and prance around like an absolute idiot. Still, no one could look away. He could make the break room shut up for a minute and watch him. Such a show pony.”
“And Pyotr?”
“He was quieter. Good with numbers. You could ask him which ships were in on a given day and he could tell you all of them, off the top of his head. He had a wicked senseof humor, though, which people didn’t expect because he was quiet. He was better at fighting, too.”
Of course there hadn’t just been one fight.
“Fighting for fun?”
