Page 70 of Nemesis

The car is silent around his subtle nod. “Okay.”

“He’s fine,” I hear my dad mutter a few feet away. “It’s barely a fucking flesh wound.”

I press harder against the wound. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Didn’t realize I spawned a doctor.”

Irritation licks across my nerves. Vas grips me closer as the car takes a hard right turn, throwing us all to the side.

“You are climbing higher on my shit list,” I snap over my shoulder, not missing the way Alex snickers beside my father. “I’m going to say it again, just in case you didn’t hear the first time. I’m not going anywhere without him,” I repeat, enunciating each word. The hand around my waist tightens.

“Octavia, you don’t understand⁠—”

“What don’t I understand?” I flip around, and Vasiliy’s arms yank me down like a belt until all of my weight is distributed on his thigh. “I don’t know you! A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to pick your faces out of a lineup, and you want me to place trust in something as arbitrary as a few fucking chromosomes?”

Dad stiffens, pressing back into the smooth leather of his seat. More secrets. The van ascends a ramp before skidding across the highway at a speed that’s definitely not community-approved.

“Unless you can give me a decent reason to believe⁠—”

“He can’t go back!” My dad explodes, smacking his knuckles into the window. Vas stiffens behind me. “That’s why he’s still hanging around by your side. The second he left his post with Solokov, he was labeled a traitor. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mikhail had already dispatched hit teams to wipe him out—it’s what I’d do, after all.”

I blink. I knew Vasiliy’s career was bad news, but…

“You think he’s still here because he cares for you, but he’s just hiding out⁠—”

“Enough.” Vas doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. “I am not hiding out. You’re the one with the hidden agenda. Why don’t you tell us who, exactly, broke into your safehouse, hm? I know you recognized their faces.”

“Alright,” Alex mutters in a placating tone. “Let’s all just calm down.”

“You want a reason?” Dad asks me, ignoring his brother’s contribution entirely. “Fine. That safehouse we’ve been staying in was a covert family asset. Do you know what that means?”

I don’t bother answering his condescending tone, opting to raise a single brow instead.

“It means there are only a handful of people who knew the location, and an even smaller few who had the opportunity to leak it to Popov’s syndicate.”

The attack—that was all Popov? I shake my head. What have I gotten myself into?

“Careful,” a low voice grounds out by my ear. That’s when I finally understand my dad’s implication.

“You’re the one treading water, boy.”

“He wasn’t the leak,” I intercede. “He’s been with me the entire time⁠—”

“Really?” Dad’s eyes cut to mine. “You can’t think of a single moment where he had the opportunity to sneak away? Not once in the past two days?”

I freeze. Not because I truly believe that Vas could have been the leak, but because I can think of several times he had the opportunity to leave. He even managed to climb out the window with no one the wiser. Why hadn’t he left? Is it really because he’s been marked as a traitor?

Would he have come back if he had the choice?

I frown, pushing that thought to the back of my mind. “He wasn’t the leak.”

A hand squeezes my upper thigh in a silent message of sorts, but I’m not entirely sure what it says. The men sitting on either side of us still haven’t said a word, eyes trained to the floor as if they’ve heard hundreds of yelling matches and remember none of them. The others don’t pay them any attention, but their silent presence makes my skin prickle. I’ve been that easily forgotten observer too many times to count.

“Sasha, we both know this accusation is unfounded,” Alex says, the calm voice of reason to our cyclone of anger. “We’ve been watching the Morozov boy’s every move, and he hasn’t even tried to establish outside contact. Without proof, all you’ll do is push your daughter away.”

Dad’s face tilts to the window, taking in the sparse fields whipping by the road. Alex is right about his outburst only serving to push me away, but he’s also wrong. I’m not sure there’s a single scenario in which I could flip around on Vas, even if they had collected every shred of proof and laid it on a table for me to inspect. We’ve been through too much shit. We’ve heard each other’s broken pleas and shared too many puddles of spilled blood. At this point, we’re an impenetrable cage of hidden secrets and sunken baggage. If we’re going to sink, we’ll go down tied together.

That’s the thought that worries me most of all.