Also, only my brother could get away with calling me kid.
The man was five foot ten, about forty to forty-three, mildly thinning blond hair greasy with the sheen of Rogaine, hazel eyes that blinked with astigmatism or too much alcohol the night before, twenty-two to twenty-five pounds overweight, and with a small crease in his earlobe that indicated possible heart problems due to his body’s inability to cope with his diet. He glared at me over the top of sunglasses he hardly needed on a typical Oregon day in the Falls and tossed down three dollar bills and two carefully fished-for quarters. He snorted and flicked the tip jar with a finger. “Like you caffeine pushers do anything worth a tip.”
He made his way down to a cardboard cup of coffee, still steaming, that was waiting for him, grabbed it, and headed for the door. I could do something worth a tip, quite a few somethings, if that was his complaint, but I doubted he wanted to experience any of them. Although, making him impotent on his honeymoon would be a poetic punishment. . . .
I shook my head, clearing it. Simply because I could do certain things didn’t mean it was right. I knew right from wrong. My brother, Stefan, had commented on it once—that I knew right from wrong better than anyone raised in a family of Peace Corps pacifists descended from the bloodlines of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Considering how I’d actually been raised, what I had been molded for and meant to be, he said that made him proud as hell of me. Proud. I ducked my head down to study my book again, but I didn’t see the words, only smears of black ink. Stefan was proud of me and not for what I could do, but for what I refused to do. It was a good feeling, and while it might have been almost three years since he’d first said it, I remembered how it felt then—and all the other times he’d said it since. It was a feeling worth holding on to. I concentrated on that rather than on what I wanted to do to the rude tourist.
Stefan also said that despite his former career, he knew right from wrong too, but before he found me, he was beginning to lose his tolerance for it. It was a lie—or maybe a wish that he could do away with his conscience, because what he’d once done had to weigh on it. He’d worked for the Russian Mafiya. He’d done bad things to . . . well, probably equally bad or corrupt people, but the weak too. The weak always got in over their heads in dark waters. What Stefan had done, he didn’t want to tell me and I didn’t push, but I did my research. You didn’t work as a bodyguard in the Russian mob as Stefan had without doing some serious damage to people who may or may not have deserved it.
Regardless of that and regardless of the things Stefan had done for me, under that ruthlessness to protect, and the willingness to kill if that was what it took to keep me safe, there was a part of him that wanted to believe in a world that was fair. He wanted to believe that concepts like right and wrong could be viable. Despite all he’d done and had been forced to do, he wanted to believe, though he knew better. Stefan had a heart and he didn’t realize it. Why else would he search for a kidnapped brother for ten years when his—our—own father had given up?
Older brothers, especially ex-mobsters, weren’t supposed to be more na?ve than their younger ones, but Stefan . . . sometimes I thought he was. We had both been trained to be killers, but I thought I’d learned far more than Stefan. He would deny it, but he was wrong.
If he hadn’t spent almost half of his life looking for me and doing what was necessary to finance that search, I wasn’t sure what my brother would’ve been. Not what he was, I did know that. When I had been taken—such a simple word—it had ruined lives, and when it came to Stefan, when I had been abducted, it had done more than ruin. It had done things I wasn’t sure there were words for. And when it had happened, it had changed my brother as much as it had me—which wasn’t either right or fair. But true as that was, we were both alive and free now, and that was a thousand times more than I’d ever expected or dreamed. Where I had spent most of my life, freedom wasn’t a concept, only a meaningless word to be looked up in a dictionary.