The kid stared at me like I'd stabbed him. "I'm not a fucking rat."
"Better a live rat than a dead hero."
EJ shook his head.
"With respect, sir." The eye that still opened held mine. "I'm the fatherless son of a whore from the Foxhole." He swallowed. "This is the best death I can hope for."
That stupid, stubborn son of a bitch. I'd have slapped him if my hands were free.
"The best death you can hope for?" I shook my head. "You're, what. Nineteen?"
"Twenty."
Christ. The kid wasn't even old enough to drink legally, and he was going to die here for principles and oaths he didn't even fully understand.
"Twenty years old and you've already decided the best thing you'll ever do is bleed out in a garage for a man you met yesterday. You know how that sounds, kid? That sounds like somebody who was never told he was worth a goddamn thing."
The kid's jaw worked. I'd hit something. I didn't feel good about it.
"That why you did it?" I said. "Back there. The name."
He went still.
"I know your name's Renko," I said. "That's what you told me when we first met. Evander Renko." I leaned as far as the chest tie let me, which wasn't far. "So you tell me, real slow, where a Renko gets off calling himself a Laskin in front of the one man in Ohio who'd know the difference."
He held my eyes for a long time. Long enough that the generator filled the whole room.
"It’s my name," he said.
"Come again?"
He took a deep breath. "Sacha Laskin was my father."
If I hadn't been tied to the chair, I'd have fallen out of it. Once the shock wore off, though, something red hot burned in my chest behind it. "I thought you said—"
"That's what she told me." His chin came up, swollen eye and all, daring me to laugh. "My mom. Before she died. Said my dad was a Russian, big deal in the organization, name of Laskin. Said he came around the Foxhole back when, and then he stopped,and then there was me." He swallowed. "She kept his name for me. It's all she left."
I looked for my father in his face. The Laskin men all came off the same press, Niko and me both stamped out of Sacha whether we wanted it or not, and I sat there in a dead man's garage and ran this kid's face against the one I'd buried.
And the results came back inconclusive. His eye was too swollen, his lip split. Even if he'd been fully healed, he was too baby faced to tell. Put him in a lineup of a hundred whoresons and he could've been anybody's brat.
Including Sacha Laskin's.
"Lot of men passed through the Foxhole, kid."
He swallowed and shifted. "Doesn't matter right now, does it?"
"No," I conceded with a sigh. "Guess it doesn't."
We fell into a silence after that, waiting.
I closed my eyes and thought about Fin.
He'd be pissed at me for being late now, the bastard. He was probably pacing back and forth in my bedroom, planning what to shout at me when I came through the door.
Except I wouldn't be coming through the door ever again. That thought left a hole in my chest that ached worse than the one the bullet had torn through my shoulder.
At least Niko would protect him, keep him safe until he got on a plane for home. I'd left him with instructions that even he couldn't fuck up.
