“I heard. That’s why I came to the house. We were in town getting some supplies, but I’ve been staying here for the past few days.” That explained the odd pattern of superficial cleanliness. “I knew you’d eventually show up here if you were in trouble.” His hand touched my leg and came away stained with blood. “I also heard about Lev,” he said with a smile etched out of ice. “My good and loyal friend Lev. I’m sorry to say that in the future, retirement isn’t going to agree with him.” Wiping his hand on his pants, he touched Michael’s arm. “And who is this?”
“Lukas.” It was a bizarre lightscape of ebony and silver that surrounded us. I shouldn’t expect him to recognize his lost son in those conditions, but unrealistically enough I did. “It’s Lukas. I found him.”
“Stefan. My God, Stefan.” He leaned back in shock, wiping blood and sand absently on his pant leg. His hand shook. In all my life I hadn’t once seen his hand shake. “Stefan,” his response bleak and implacable, “he’s not your brother.”
It stunned me, that he didn’t see it . . . didn’t believe me. “He is,” I countered sharply. “He’s Lukas. I know my brother. It’s him.”
“Ah, what an esportet.” He ducked his head to rest it in his hands for a moment; then he raised his face to me. It was a mask, a jangled combination of sagging grief and ruthless angles. “Stefan, you saw him. I looked up as we were getting in the car. Your face was in the window. You saw.”
I saw?
I saw. . . . God, I had.
I had seen it.
How could I forget that? How could I forget the small figure swathed in a blanket? Blond hair showing beneath a flap of wool, the thin arm hanging limp. Hours after my brother had disappeared, I had looked out my bedroom window to see my father riding away with his body cradled in his lap.
I remembered the weeks after Lukas’s disappearance being hazy, distant. I just hadn’t remembered precisely what had triggered those layers and layers of shock. I thought it had been Lukas’s being taken in front of me. I was wrong.
“When you . . . forgot, I thought it for the best,” Anatoly offered with a thread of pain even he couldn’t hide. “No one could know inside or outside the business. No one, and you were young, hurt. . . . You might have said something.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I buried him with your mother, in secret of course. I let the police go on thinking he was still missing. I let everyone go on thinking that. Because if anyone knew how he had died, they would know whom to come to when I put every one of those bastards into the ground. Which is what I did.” Satisfaction was a cold comfort, but apparently he still embraced it. “The entire Gubin family paid for what they did to Lukas. Every last one of them, from grandfather to the last son.” And no one was the wiser. No one came to arrest Anatoly and none of the other vors, Mafiya bosses, came looking for a vigilante father out of control. “And in the years after, you didn’t seem to want to remember. You refused to remember.”
Nothing more than a snatching gone wrong. It was a common way to negotiate between rival factions. Lukas had died on that beach. I should’ve known it from the sound his skull made when it hit the rock. I should’ve known. His kidnapper had probably dumped his body not far from the beach when he realized Lukas was dead—when he realized my brother was dead. My brother . . .
Michael’s breath hitched and slowed even further. Lost to the world, he felt light in my arms . . . insubstantial as a ghost. Lukas’s ghost, long gone. “Misha, I’m here,” I whispered, but his eyes remained closed.
The eyes . . . and then came another memory, this one not as old. It was a sickening flight back to a dark hallway and a little girl named Wendy. There had been something about her eyes, barely seen in the dim light of the hall. When I’d told Michael that he had Lukas’s eyes, he’d gone still—distant and still. And when he’d talked about his friend John’s resemblance to their captor, he had said that of course his eyes were different from Jericho’s. Of course. Why hadn’t I picked up on that? All the children had bicolored eyes. It had to be an unforeseen result of the genetic manipulation. I couldn’t believe Jericho would’ve wanted such a visible marker on his product if he could avoid it. Assassins should be anonymous.
I’d pointed out to Michael that he had my brother’s eyes, and he had known it wasn’t the proof I thought it to be. He’d kept trying to tell me and I’d kept cutting him off. Or he’d cut himself off . . . because wouldn’t it be nice to believe it was true, for a little while, before ruthlessly dragging himself back to reality? But in the end it hadn’t mattered. When it came down to the wire, he hadn’t been able to deny me.
I’d told him over and over. I’d inundated him with stories and so-called evidence he didn’t want to hear. I’d given him a life and a family he had never asked for. I’d given him a hope he didn’t even know he wanted, a hope he didn’t know he desperately needed. It was up to me to decide if what I had done would save him or destroy him.
Michael believed now. And, by God, so would everyone else.
“He’s my brother,” I said with finality. Where the hell was that doctor?