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“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I said I didn’t want any fucking visitors.”
For a long moment, he said nothing, and my heart lurched in my chest. There were only a handful of reasons for him to be here, and none of them were good.
“Nick,” he said, his voice far raspier than usual.
My hand tightened on the receiver, and I forced out a breath to release the tension.
“What is it? Did something happen to Rixon? Molly? The clubhouse?”
Gunnar looked tormented. He shook his head, running a hand over his blond beard a few times. “Nick…fuck, I don’t know how to say this.” He cleared his throat.
Even though I wanted to scream for him to spit it out, I remained in my seat. My hand was starting to ache from how tightly I was gripping the phone, my mind spinning with all the possibilities. “Tell. Me,” I bit out.
He finally looked at me. “It’s Dimitri.”
I felt like I’d just been stabbed in the gut, my patience leaking from my body in a torrent. “What thefuckhappened to D?”
Gunnar skimmed a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands. I could practically taste his reluctance to speak to me. He must’ve drawn the short straw from the small list of people who could set foot in a place like this and not get arrested for their troubles.
“Gunnar?” I barked, seconds from going crazy. My blood pressure was fucking skyrocketing, whooshing through my ears at deafening decibels. A beat of silence passed between us. He stared at me, willing me to read in his eyes what he couldn’t bring himself to say.
I began shaking my head. “No.”
“Nick, I’m sorry?—”
My volume increased. “No!”
“D is dead.”
“You’re fucking wrong. It’s not him. It couldn’t be him…” I was shouting now, and I didn’t give a fuck that I would be punished for it.
“Nick,” he said in a gentle voice. “I’m not wrong. I saw his fucking body myself. Dimitri is dead.”
The statement was like a rock being dropped into a still pond. After the rush of shock, the ripples of disbelief were cascading outward until I couldn’t ignore their echoes. Pain radiated out from my chest, and I peered down to see whether there was a hole punched there, right through my breastbone.
I stared at Gunnar, only able to conjure up one word. “How?”
“Shot while walking home from a college class.”
Swallowing thickly, I tried to piece Gunnar’s words together. This couldn’t be real. D was studying medicine. He was going to make his goddamn mark on the world one day, so he couldn’t be…
“You’re wrong.”
He had to be wrong.Thishad to be wrong.
He shook his head, scrubbing another hand over his beard. “Brother, I went to the morgue and ID’d the body myself.”
Denial felt like a noose around my neck. Moistening my suddenly dry lips, I stared at Gunnar through the glass, waiting for him to tell me he was lying—that it was just some sick joke. When he said nothing, I added, “I don’t believe you. You’re wrong. It was someone who looked like him. Looked like… us.”
I was beginning to draw the attention of the other inmates.
And the guards.
“Sobolev, keep it down,” one of the COs said, unaware of the news that I’d been delivered.
Ignoring the fuck, I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my brother wasdead. My world was unraveling, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. My chest heavedwith my breaths, my lungs squeezing like a bellows to keep the oxygen flowing, my limbs going numb. My eyes swept the room, but I wasn’t seeing anything. I wasn’thearinganything except for my harsh breaths warring with a shrill ringing.
“Nick?”
