“Thank you.”
I follow him awkwardly back to the door. I can see a huge duffel bag of my things sitting by the foot of the bed.
“That should keep you occupied,” he says, opening the door and putting himself in the threshold. “But just in case you need a little extra entertainment…” He picks up something from the other side of the door. “This should help.”
Uri deposits the package into my hands and I realize a second later why it looks so familiar.
Eve’s Garden.
“Enjoy,” he says with a straight face while my face burns red.
Then he leaves.
18
URI
“We got an ID on the finger.”
I can tell by Nikolai’s grim tone that it is exactly what we suspected it was. “Igor?”
“Igor,” he confirms.
His breathing sounds heavy but I don’t have to ask him what’s going on to know he’s in the gym, working out his frustrations. The year after I took the mantel of pakhan, he practically lived there.
“Can you stop lifting weights and sit still so we can talk?”
I hear something heavy drop and then a second later, his voice comes through loud and clear. “Just for the record, I was doing pull-ups,” he says shortly. “This move has Sobakin written all over it. We have to do something, Uri. We need to go in and get Igor back.”
My gut twists. “This is Boris Sobakin we’re talking about, Nikolai. You and I both know that Igor is already dead.”
“What if he’s not?”
“Then it’s a trap. He’s anticipated that we’ll try to rescue Igor and he’s going to be prepared. All that will lead to is more dead bodies.”
“So your plan is to do nothing?” he asks coldly.
“My plan is to play the long game. This is not about winning the battle; it’s about winning the war. So far, Sobakin has proved himself to be cunning. Brute force isn’t going to help us here.”
“It will be a show of strength! At least he’ll think twice about moving against us.”
“Who are you kidding? He’s already decided he’s gunning for us. Returning fire with fire won’t stop him. What we need to do is lie low and wait for an opportunity to catch him off-guard.”
The silence on the other line is telling. “Is that what you’ve decided?” he asks at last.
“That’s what I’ve decided.”
“And what are you going to tell the men?”
“Exactly what I just told you.”
“Oh, perfect. I’m sure it’ll be a great comfort to them to know that, if any one of them were to be abducted carrying out our orders, you’d be sitting on your ass, ‘playing the long game.’”
I re-grip the phone in my hand. “My men will understand that sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the good of the many.”
“You are the pakhan,” he says grudgingly. “Your will, our hands.”
Even a stranger would hear the bitterness in his voice when he says those words.
I sigh as we hang up. If only Nikolai was the second brother. That one twist of fate would have solved so much about our fractured, fraught relationship.
When I go down to my bedroom, I find Lev in there, building a Lego castle three stories high.
“Where were you?” he asks, glancing towards the vintage clock on the wall.
“I had work to finish, buddy.”
“You’re always working.”
The guilt pinches away at me, same as always, but I’ve learned to ignore it. I sit down next to him but I don’t touch any of the toy bricks. I know better than to push my way into a project that’s halfway complete.
“Did you eat dinner?”
“Yeah…”
“What did you eat?”
“Mac and cheese. Mirabel tried to make me eat meat but I didn’t want to.”
“You used to love it.”
He concentrates hard on his castle. “No, I didn’t.”
Suppressing a sigh, I watch as he constructs another tower. My room is a disaster area of scattered bricks, but at least he’s calm here. Maybe I can even convince him to sleep in his upstairs room tonight.
“Can I sleep with you tonight, too?”
Blyat’. Spoke too soon.
“How about we try your room today?”
His eyebrows knit together. “I want my basement.”
“Didn’t you like the fish tank I put in there for you?” I ask, but he only shrugs. “And the wallpaper? You love blue and green. It’s like the ocean. Maybe we’ll take a trip to the ocean one day. What do you think?”
He starts shaking his head feverishly. “No… I don’t want that… I don’t want…”
I grab his shoulder, but he flinches away from me and sidles back as far as the room allows. “I want my basement… my basement… my basement…”
“Hey, it’s okay, Lev. Just breathe.”
My calm voice doesn’t work as well as it did on Alyssa. Lev just seems to get more and more agitated. It’s another painful reminder that, even all these years after the accident, his progress is fluid. It ebbs and flows, and when it ebbs, it ebbs hard.
“Basement… basement… basement…”
What an ironic twist. Alyssa is desperate to get out of there; Lev is desperate to get back in. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both driving me fucking crazy.
“You can sleep in my room, okay? It’s fine.”
Lev’s shaking slows. He peers at me from between his raised knees. “Here?”
“Here.”
That seems to placate him. He eyes me warily before he scoots back over and finishes his tower. I know better than to push him when he’s fragile like this, so I sit quietly and observe until it’s done. Only then do I tell him to go get ready for bed.
I wait until he’s tucked into my bed, then I take a seat on the armchair by the window and wait some more until he falls asleep. Eventually, his tired snores fill the room, leaving me with this stark sense of loss that I can’t quite put my finger on. A boy’s snores in a man’s body. One story twisted and broken into something it was never meant to be by a cruel twist of fate.
It’s happening everywhere I look.
Thankfully, my phone distracts me with an incoming text message from Polly.
POLINA: yo, shithead. you’ve been quiet this week so I thought I’d check in. how’s things?
I gnash my teeth together. I’m usually diligent about my texts to Polly. At least twice a week, I’ll check in to make sure she’s okay at her boarding school. But this week, between the adult child in my bed and the unassuming little siren in my basement, I’d completely forgotten.
I text her back. Forgot to text you. It’s been a terrible fucking week. Are you okay?
POLLY: is it Lev? is he okay?
URI: Lev’s fine.
POLLY: call?
Great. One more crisis to deal with. I’m in fine form this week.
Give me a minute.
I’m slipping out of the room when my phone starts vibrating. Apparently, she doesn’t even trust me to call her. “Evening, printsessa.”
“I hate when you call me that.”
“You didn’t always.”
“I was seven,” she snaps with that irritated laugh in her voice that I’ve always considered one of her best qualities.