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His slight smile returned, along with the painful feeling in his stomach that he had been trying to suppress since the evening of the winter ball. A well as the…
“Larik?”
He turned his head to find his surprised brother standing in the open double doors.
For a moment, he looked just as lost, trying to remember the last time his brother had called him that.
“Nick,” was all he could reply, as if it were a sentimental automatism, followed by a faint smile.
Not even these nicknames would bring back the old days. And maybe that was for the best.
The Alpha closed the double doors and the director took the opportunity to let his gaze wander outside one last time.
Anyone who grew up in Blairville quickly got used to the black birds, but it didn't escape his notice that they followed her, settling on the roofs of the buildings she entered, gathering on the wooden walkway in front of her student accommodation, perching on the power lines in front of her house, and now gathering on the lawn a few meters away.
He forced himself to turn around and watched his brother pace around his desk, hastily shoving the blueprints for yet another fruitless construction project into a black folder.
“Sometimes I wonder if Father would be proud of us.”
His brother looked up, a hint of overwhelm in his eyes. And for a moment, he reminded the director of the young, sensitive man who had had so many plans for their future, so many dreams.
Until her death...
The Alpha looked back at his folder and sighed, which the director took as a sign to let the past rest for a moment.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
He brought his folded hands out from behind his back and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, which were sticking out unevenly from the sleeves of his suit jacket.
The Alpha cleared his throat.
“You and Tania...” The director looked up immediately. “It appears as though you are avoiding her.”
His brother's expression was serious, watchful, without any judgment, just as he knew him to be. This man had never been critical. It was fear that drove his decisions.
“I don't want to give Dimitrio the wrong idea.”
His fingers wandered subconsciously to his gold signet ring, adorned with the Copeland crest. The Vanderwood crest.
“I still remember how well the two of you got along back then,” the Alpha chuckled mildly and slid the thin black folder onto the shelf between two massive binders used to manage his territory and the hospital.
Clearing his throat, the director began to turn the signet ring.
“We were friends.”
The Alpha raised both eyebrows.
“What happened?”
The director's jaw immediately tensed. Restlessness flooded every inch of his body.
“Too much.” He cleared his throat and looked down at the signet ring, forcing himself to stop twisting it, but his fingers wouldn't obey him as his mind drifted away. “Which I would like to put to rest.”
No matter how obsessed he was with bringing fragments of the buried past to light, what kind of man did it make him if he did everything in his power to hide the other part of these fragments behind decaying cellar doors?
“Well... Dimitrio made me an offer.”
The mere reminder of this man’s existence upset him.
