“He was, but you’re my brother.” He wrapped his arm around my neck and pulled me close enough to rest his forehead against mine. After all this time, I still felt a knee-jerk reaction to tense up, but I didn’t. Stefan had taught me I didn’t need to and if I did, it would make him feel like shit. I wasn’t going to do that.
“Some family you’re born with,” he said, “and some family you’re goddamn lucky to have. You’d better know which one you are. Got it? And you didn’t screw up. Burning down our garage, now that was a screwup, but this . . . this is just family shit. Nobody gets that off the bat and it’s always messy.” He bumped his head against mine, a light knock for every word. “You . . . did . . . not . . . screw . . . up.”
“Burning down the garage was a possible side effect of my experiment. An acceptable risk,” I muttered, trying to sound annoyed and failing, before straightening to hand him the Three Musketeers. “Comfort food,” I explained.
He accepted it and curled his lips. “You’re a good kid, Misha. The goddamn best.”
I could’ve said, again, that I wasn’t a kid, but this time I was a little smarter and kept my mouth shut.
And I didn’t burn down the garage—only half of it. Big brothers—they couldn’t let the little things go. I almost managed to smile to myself at the thought. Life I might not ever get a handle on, but the brother thing—that I would. I refused to believe anything else.
People are strange.
That’s a polite way of saying people are nosy, snooping, and meddling. I didn’t consider myself those things merely because I’d used the Internet to gather a file on every citizen in town. It was a small town, so it didn’t take long, and I had an excuse. It was a good excuse. People wanted to kill me.
Other people though, those without targets on their backs, they didn’t have that justification for their why, where, who, when, what, and on and on. Stefan had rented the small house on Fox Creek Road because it would be hard to explain how a handyman could buy it outright and worse trying to pretend we needed a mortgage. Saul Skoczinsky in Miami, Stefan’s link to all things convenient and criminal, sent us good fake IDs. I’d since learned to make better, but banks like their background checks as much as I did. It was best to just rent the run-down ranch house with no neighbors in sight, but that didn’t stop our landlady—Adelaide Sloot’s doppelganger, only with bleached-blond hair—from asking where we were from. Why had we moved? How old was I, because Cascade Falls had a woooonderful high school. There had been so many o’s in that “wonderful,” I automatically knew she had a relative who taught there, a grandchild who went there, or received a commission for every teen she scooped up and dragged clawing through their doors.
That was one subject the Institute had been somewhat dead-on about: psychology. People walked around turned inside out. If you knew enough to look, everything you wanted to know about them was there to see—things you didn’t want to know too. The way she clutched Stefan’s arm and hung on every word of his made-up story; the way her eyes didn’t leave his, not once, as she led us through the house on the showing. She’d lost someone who looked like my brother. Maybe they had just had dark hair and an olive complexion, maybe only the brown eyes. They might have died or left her just because people leave. If Stefan had wanted, he could’ve gotten her to rent the place to us for half or maybe a third the price. He could’ve used the woman’s loss, as I’d been taught to use weakness against others. But he didn’t.
Mr. Ex-Mob paid full price and even painted the place, because it could use it. Patches were peeling off everywhere. I called it the Leprosy House until he finished painting it yellow—yellow paint was on sale that week. Then I called it the Bumblebee House and eventually the Bumble for short. “Are we going back to the Bumble for dinner?” On the inside, I called it home, but home was another word that made the universe notice and then crush you. There was no saying that aloud either—no tempting fate.
When we pulled up out front on the patch of gravel that was the driveway, Stefan passed through the door first. If we were together, he always did—a somewhat less than bulletproof vest. He was my own Secret Service, only without the cool wardrobe.