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“I carry the shadow of that legacy with me still,” I tell her. “I am the don of the Uvarov Bratva, whether some men are willing to accept that or not.”
“You don’t need those men.”
I scoff. “I don’t have the numbers, Milana. Ravil—”
“Fuck Ravil,” she hisses. “The man is like Adrian, only with power. The two of them are cut from the same cloth. Manipulative cowards who rode on the coattails of their betters.”
The impulse to defend my brother is muted, almost non-existent. I’m not in the mood to be generous to his memory tonight. Which is not a feeling I’m accustomed to experiencing.
Maybe that has something to do with the woman he left behind.
I’ve always stood up for the little shit, even when he didn’t deserve it. That was my responsibility as his older brother. That was his right as the younger sibling. We would always be bonded by our shared childhood, by the demons we faced together and the nightmares we tried and failed to outrun.
He used to slip into my bed at night when he was a boy. Until our father found out and placed our bedrooms in separate wings of the house, with a guard outside our doors to keep us apart.
“You are not helping him by protecting him, Kolya,” my father had snarled at me after a night in the cellar with the rats to make me more amenable to his lessons. “You are ensuring his failure.”
Was my father right? Is that why Adrian hadn’t been able to resist the allure of the bottle? Is that why he’d become a selfish, short-sighted flight risk, the kind of man who left scars on his woman’s throat and tears in her eyes? Had I turned him into a coward by standing in between him and everything he was frightened of?
Is all of this my fault?
“It’s not, you know,” Milana says softly, breaking into my thoughts. “You didn’t do this. You’re not to blame for Adrian’s mistakes. He was a grown man.”
He may have been, but I take my promises seriously. And I’d made him one a long time ago. When he was still climbing into my bed at night, trembling head to toe from terrors only he could see.
“I’m scared,”he used to tell me. I was the only one he ever admitted that to.
“Sometimes,”I’d whisper back under cover of darkness,“I’m scared, too.”
“Really?”he asked with wild, shocked eyes.
I nodded.“Everyone feels scared sometimes.”
“Not Otets. He’s not human.”
It certainly felt that way when we were growing up. The first time I saw him bleed was a revelatory moment. I had no idea our father could bleed at all.
“He is human,”I assured Adrian.“And one day, you’re going to be bigger than him.”
He had laughed at that and curled his hand around my arm.“Will I be stronger than him, too?”
“Ten times stronger.”
“Maybe then he’ll stop hurting me,”Adrian ventured.
“I will stop him from hurting you,”I said firmly. I was nine years old. I had no right to make that kind of promise, but I was young enough to believe that one day I would be taller and stronger than our father. And that I would be brave enough to enforce my view of how the world should be.
It wasn’t that I was wrong to believe it; I just underestimated how much strength it would take.
I underestimated how much it would cost me.
“You promise?”
“I promise,sobrat. I swear it.”
I raise my eyes and find Milana observing me curiously. “Where did you go?”
“Back to the past.”
