Bargains and Betrayals

  Each child in a family had a role to play; the eldest was often the leader—the alpha. For a while the role was mine. When it was necessary I shouldered the heaviest responsibility, took the greatest risks. I learned the ins and outs of the dark side of commerce. I sold my soul as much as anything on the black market to make ends meet once our parents were gone and our safety was at risk.

  Everything I did, I did for them. My brothers. My sister. My family.

  But the night of the twins’ seventeenth birthday—the night the Mafia came for them—they learned the truth behind all my years of deception: Although I was their brother in name, I was never their brother in blood. Therefore my usefulness was limited and officially at an end except as their legal guardian. That usefulness might yet conclude when Maximilian turned eighteen.

  I froze at the back door, my hand upon the knob; the lace of the small window’s curtain teased across my fingers like an ant traipsing over the mountains my knuckles formed.

  Seated on the porch, Max hung his right leg over the edge, his left tucked beneath him, so he sat near enough to shadow Amy. Her feet swung back and forth, beating an angry rhythm into the cool air, her fingers curled around the edge of the decking. Beneath the thin gloves she wore I imagined her knuckles were white in frustration.

  In the yard beyond them, leaves flew and splintered in the snapping wind of approaching winter. No snow had fallen yet, but the clouds threatened daily. The earth was brown and crisp, the bright colors of autumn’s leaves dulled.

  Max spoke. Amy heard, her head nodding at appropriate intervals. Max believed she was listening, but I knew better.

  From her closed body language I realized he was back to the same words that had so recently made her storm away and slam the basement door in his face.

  It was the discussion survivors of abuse dreaded. A discussion Max tried to have with the very best of intentions, but … how could he understand? He was the hero. She was the victim. There could be no even footing between them until she found her place in the story of her own life. Stood on her own.

  Max was new; she and her abuser, Marvin Broderick, shared a past. Max had chosen to give her an option beyond her abusive boyfriend: him. She had taken it, but still she and Marvin had a connection: They shared a town, a school, and acquaintances. Her life was a daily mix of stressful decisions.

  Max had difficulty understanding that. He made his choice. He did not realize she had to continue making choices moment by moment and day by day.

  I considered leaving my spot inside the back door, knowing well the ground being retread.

  A breeze snatched at Amy’s auburn hair, lifting it up and away from her face in snapping angles. Her eyes closed and she turned to face Max, her mouth opening to bite off a reply just as her hair struck out and blinded him.

  He choked, flailed.

  And made a greater ass of himself.

  From the door I nearly made my presence known by snickering at him—my idiotic little brother.

  Amy laughed, seeing him so off balance. She gave him a little shove, her hands flying up and shaking between them as if to say, If you weren’t sitting on top of me, you gigantic oaf …

  Or perhaps that was merely my interpretation.

  In the time it took to blink an eye, the heated discussion had fallen to the wayside and they had returned to what they did best together—flirting and teasing. It seemed years were added to his life just being around her.

  He said something. Stupid, no doubt, and she slapped him playfully—how did she phrase it?—upside the head. I would have gladly helped put words in Max’s mouth, but it was always awkward fitting them around his foot.

  He sputtered, seizing her wrist to drag her hand slowly across his stubbled jawline. In that singular moment, that heartbeat when she shivered and he straightened ever so slightly to watch her reaction, in that moment alone was more intimacy and passion than in all the flings and one-night stands he’d ever reveled in.

  Priding myself a scientist of sorts, I watched their body language: her leaning toward him, falling into the shadow he cast, him rolling his shoulders forward to envelop her more completely without even raising his arms. A subtle slide of movement, a gentle curve to her posture and the rays and angles—the lines their bodies drew—the very math that existed between their two separate figures, spoke more accurately than any words in either of our first languages.

  This was something stronger than anything he’d ever known—ever felt—before. Something deeper. Something new to both of them. It was love, made clear in geometric terms.

  Once, in Moscow, I had been able to measure the distance from a girl’s heart to mine simply by noting the few degrees of separation between our forms, the dimensions devising our expressions. I loved that girl.

  And I realized this might yet be the death of us. Not the werewolves—neither the mafiosos who called themselves werewolves nor the oboroten, living the abbreviated and violent life span that would eventually kill my siblings. Nyet. It has never truly been about werewolves, has it?

  It has always been about life and death. About choices. About love and loss.

  I made my choice and left Moscow. Left Nadezhda. My brothers have made theirs, so we stay in Junction.

  Someday soon all our most dangerous decisions, all these choices, will catch up to us and we will drink what we have brewed—reaping and sowing not being nearly as fashionable.

  Clutching the dry comfort of the cigarettes nestled in their box, my hands trembled and the doorknob squeaked.

  Without even turning to face the door, Max rolled out words underpinned with the growl that had become his normal tone when mentioning or addressing me. “He’s watching us again.”

  Amy peered over his shoulder and winked at me as I stepped past them on the porch and headed down the stairs to light up. “Then let’s give him something to watch,” she suggested.

  Behind me, I heard him growl. She giggled when he pounced.

  Perhaps leaving Nadezhda in Moscow had been a bigger mistake than I’d ever imagined. Time would surely tell, as it did in all things.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jessie

  Trapped in Dr. Jones’s office at Pecan Place for another session, being asked the same questions and getting none of mine answered, I was becoming frantic.

  “What does it matter?” she asked. Leaning back in her leather chair she watched me from behind her wide desk. “You are here. Safe. You’re already making progress with your therapy.”

  It might have been congratulations, but it rolled out of her mouth through a sneer.

  “Just tell me,” I whispered—implored—bending forward to narrow the distance between us. “Tell me how he is.”

  “No.”

  My eyes pressed shut and I clamped my teeth together to bite back a shout. Three days and no word about Pietr. No message from Dad. Nothing from beyond Pecan Place. Nothing to anchor me to my past or to the people I loved. “Damn it.” The words squeezed out from between my lips.

  Dr. Jones pitched forward and jotted a note on her clipboard. “You need to stay in control. Remember our facility’s rules against profanity.”

  Against profanity, contact with the outside world, and freedom of thought.

  Dr. Jones stood. “I’d hate for you to be placed on restriction.”

  Words curled up in my throat, spiraling around as uselessly as dry leaves. There were a few things I’d learned over the three days since I’d agreed to come to the institution to keep Dr. Jones’s guards from killing Pietr …

  … from killing Pietr …

  I struggled for focus. Of the things I’d learned in the sparsely populated Pecan Place, when to keep my mouth shut was the most vital lesson.

  But that lesson was being tested.

  “Pietr Rusakova’s situation has nothing to do with your mental health.”

  “His situation has everything to do with my mental health.” The chair was suddenly too confining, so I stood. “I’m the reaso
n he was attacked.”

  “I disagree,” Dr. Jones said, her tone level and cool while her eyes flicked down and forward. I followed her gaze to my hands—gripping her desk so hard my fingers were splotched red and white. “He is the only one responsible for his behavior and the results of that behavior.”

  “His behavior was an attempt to protect me.”

  “Protect you? From what? From achieving better mental health? He was obviously obsessed with you.”

  I twitched. Obsessed? Hardly. In love? I hoped. But the word that bothered me most in that sentence? Was.

  As if Pietr was firmly in the past tense.

  “Put me on restriction—I don’t care! Just tell me if Pietr’s okay. Is he alive, or did your guards—my guards—did they kill him?” With a growl I pried my fingers from the lip of her desk long enough to clear it with one violent sweep of my arms. Files and papers of all shapes and sizes flew off its surface and snowed down around us in deceptively slow and gentle arcs.

  She grinned and took one hard step forward, her shoe slapping the floor.

  An alarm sounded.

  Behind me the door burst open and a nurse rushed in, flanked by my mountainous guards.

  The nurse paused, eyed me—judged and weighed me and pulled a hypodermic needle from behind her back. She nudged the syringe’s thumb rest slightly so a brief trickle of amber liquid dribbled down the needle’s sharp tip before slipping onto the syringe’s transparent shaft.

  “No!” I dodged to avoid the guards’ grip, but their fingers hooked into my arms like icy sausages. “Just tell me,” I begged, throat tightening, tears fuzzing my vision as they burned free of my eyes. “Tell me if Pietr’s alive!”

  But the needle was in, the plunger was down, and everything wobbled in my sight like heat waves hovering above blacktop.

  “Tell me.” My tongue slow, the words were thick, as blurred as my vision. I fought to focus, desperate for an answer …

  “What does it matter? You’ll never see him again.”

  And the darkness chewing at the edge of my failing vision finally stole my senses away.

  Alexi

  In the foyer, Pietr readied to again sneak off into the night, to hope for still winds and calm air and a few precious minutes to press his face to the thick glass that separated him from the girl he adored. To stare at her a mere moment before the dogs caught his scent. “What good comes of this? Does she want to see you—like this? Knowing the danger you put yourself in? Does she even know you visit?”

  He turned away, unmoved by my question except for the telltale rise of a single vein near his temple. “I know I’m there. Jess needs me.”

  “Jessie, even locked away in an insane asylum—did you not say she’s been sedated? She makes more sense than you,” I stated. “She would not want you there if it meant you risked your safety.”

  His hand was already on the door, his mind made up. “Maybe I’m not doing this just for her,” he said, his eyes a cool blue though I knew he seethed within, “maybe I’m doing this for me.”

  “Then you’ve finally succeeded in combining stupidity with selfishness,” I congratulated him. “You know pining over her does nothing for any of us. It is a distraction—not a solution.”

  “Why don’t you focus on the solution, then, brother,” he snarled, whipping around, “rather than your multitude of distractions?” He grabbed the pocket of my shirt and, with a quick squeeze of his fingers, crushed the box of cigarettes resting there.

  The front door slammed shut behind him.

  I dragged the crumpled box out and examined its bent and broken contents.

  Little brothers were so difficult.

  Sliding the paper from its normal place between the cigarettes and my heart, I unfolded it carefully so as to not drop the small photograph nestled within. In my grasp the letter quivered, the flowing Cyrillic script of Nadezhda’s uncompromising hand wobbling until it became nearly impossible to decipher. But I knew the words by heart.

  Part Pushkin’s “Night” and part her own words of love, the letter was a perfect example of the superiority of longhand correspondence to the stale vanilla of e-mail and text.

  She and I had been apart too long, because I did what Pietr never would. I broke a promise. A promise to the daughter of one of the most dangerous men in Russia—head of one of the largest districts of the Russian Mafia. A promise to take her away from the danger, the drug lords, the whores and violent criminals, to settle with her in a modest dacha all our own.

  To wipe clean the slate of our violent and destructive pasts and build a future—our own happily ever after.

  Together.

  What if the happily ever after we both wanted only existed in fairy tale stories? Or what if the choices that set one on the path to becoming a deserving hero had already passed me by? Perhaps I deserved nothing better than what I had.

  Just one of my “multitude of distractions.”

  Pietr had no idea.

  Jessie

  My body ached. My eyes, sticky with sleep, peeled open with a sound like masking tape being pulled from the roll. Vision hazy, I struggled to get a handle on my location. Something creaked beneath my hip as I rolled up into a seated position. A mattress. I concentrated on keeping whatever contents my stomach still held where they belonged.

  “Nice of you to join us, Jessica.”

  I squinted at the woman in the chair before me, searching the cottony mess of my brain for a name. “Dr. Jones?”

  “Very good. How are you feeling today?”

  “Groggy.”

  “That happens when we have to sedate a patient so frequently.”

  “Sedate?” My arm stung. I looked at it, seeing tiny puncture marks marring the tender skin of the crook of my elbow.

  “Yes. You kept getting yourself so worked up.…” Dr. Jones shook her head. “You were dangerous to the staff. And to yourself.”

  My eyes slammed shut and I wondered what could have upset me that much. Me? Dangerous? I rubbed my eyes. My head hummed, but nothing stepped out of the shadowy recesses of my brain with an answer. “Really?” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay, Jessica.” She glanced at the two tall men flanking her. They wore the same long-sleeved uniform my guards had, but …

  Tilting my head to view them from a different angle was a big mistake. I clutched at the bed and waited for my vision to stop swimming. Slowly I raised my eyes from the concrete floor to the stalwart men.

  They looked like my guards but weren’t my guards.

  Dr. Jones’s mouth moved and I struggled to understand the words coming out of it. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me about?”

  I felt like I was back in Latin level one. I ran my tongue along my teeth. My mouth seemed as fuzzy as my vision.

  “Go ahead. Ask me anything. Do you have any questions?” She peered at me. “Any questions at all?”

  Although it sounded distinctly like a challenge, there was nothing I had to know—no question pounding inside my skull. I shrugged. “No.”

  “Excellent.” She stood and looked at the two giants. “I believe we can finally take Jessica off restriction. Give her a few minutes and let her shower and change. Then take her to the common room to join the others.”

  Mute, they nodded.

  Dr. Jones turned to the shadows behind the guards. “Nurse.”

  A woman stepped forward, the muted light of my room making her white uniform glow.

  “Prep her for chores tomorrow. She can at least help with the laundry.”

  The nurse gave me a fleeting look before returning her gaze to the doctor. “Are you—?”

  “—sure?” Jones nodded. “She’s under guard. She should at least be useful while she’s here. In two days your father visits.” Her voice lowered along with her eyes. “He’s a stubborn man when it comes to his children.” Rising, she brushed her hands across her slacks. Her cell phone sounded, and, tugging it out of her pocket, she glanced at it, a sm
ile stretching her lips. “Excellent. The thing we’ve been looking so forward to receiving is finally on its way in. I need to gather some paperwork and get ready to meet the shipper,” she informed the nurse. “Is room twenty-six prepped?”

  “Yes.” The nurse waited until the door closed behind the doctor before addressing me again. “Can you stand?”

  I nodded with more certainty than I felt.

  “Good. Shower. Breakfast. Tomorrow: chores.”

  The door clicked shut and I was alone in my room. With a groan I rose and steadied myself, holding the cold metal bed frame. Shower.

  Bathroom.

  There.

  A door.

  I shuffled to it and timidly bent to start the water running. Slipping out of my top and pants I stepped into the shower and let my head hang, slowly waking under the pelting sting of water.

  Beneath its roar, my mind began to clear.

  Was there a question I should have asked? I shook my head, water rolling down along my ears, threatening to plug them. “Ugh.” No answer—or, more appropriately, no question—came. Between the ache in my elbow and the emptiness in my skull, I realized there was no question I needed answered, no curiosity gnawing at my gut.

  I dried my hair, dressed in a nondescript blue shirt and pants, and joined my guards.

  “You two. You aren’t my regular guards. What are your names?” It was something I’d never figured out about their predecessors.

  A moment passed as they exchanged a slow look. Their meaty skulls swung back on their tree-trunk necks and they blinked in unison. One jerked his chin toward the common room.

  We trudged in that direction, down the hall lit with hissing fluorescent bulbs. Past the nurses’ station and the room with its whirring refrigerator locked and filled with chemically based support for almost any behavior deemed abnormal, all in handy vials and bottles with names so long they wrapped all the way around their labels.

  I took a seat at a round white table while one guard got my food. There were only a dozen other people seated throughout the broad space, but I realized that was twice as many as had been here before my forced sedation.