Alyssa blinks away sudden tears. “That’s horrible.”
“He doesn’t usually take to anyone as fast as he did with you. Especially when there’s no familiar buffer around to mediate the situation.”
She smiles with just a tint of pride. “We played video games.” Then, as if remembering who she’s talking to, her eyebrows arrow downward. “But I’m sure you already knew that.”
“It was going well. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
She shakes her head. “Such a creep.”
“It’s my job to look after my brother.”
Her eyes pique up with realization as she glances around the upper corners of the basement. “The cameras… You installed them for Lev?”
I nod. “After he has an episode, he doesn’t talk. He recedes into himself and stays down here for days until he’s worked the trauma of the experience out of his system.”
She’s back to chewing on her lip. Her voice, when it comes out, is tentative and wary. “Uri… what happened?”
I wince. It’s a fair question. But the thing is, I don’t talk about Lev with strangers. The necessary staff and security and Bratva personnel have a dry account of his condition, but it lacks details and emotion. If they have any affection for him at all, it comes from a place of professionalism. He’s a job first, a person second.
Which has worked all these years.
But here she is, this blonde bombshell who has no freaking clue that that’s exactly what she is, and she’s asking me to tell her one of my most protected secrets?
My first instinct is to lie. It’s just easier that way, especially since I’m not planning on having her here for very much longer.
But I can’t get the image of her and Lev out of my head. Every time I blink, I see them on the floor, peeking at each other from between their parted fingers. It’s not a connection he has made often.
Or at all.
And it feels selfish, even cruel, to lie to her now. Perhaps, in order to get her to trust me, I need to show her that I trust her.
It begs the question; when was the last time I trusted anyone outside of my inner circle? Am I making a huge mistake by trusting her?
Am I going to look back at this moment one day and think, That’s where it all went wrong?
Only one way to find out.
25
ALYSSA
Uri’s usually unreadable mask cracks for a split second. His eyes darken, his brow furrows, and his right hand clenches into a fist.
For the first time, I stop thinking about the politics. I forget about the fact that I’m his captive and he’s my jailer. I choose to ignore the complicated, irreparably fucked-up dynamics between us.
Instead, I speak from the heart.
“Uri… I know I’ve only just met Lev, but I do care about him. And I would never do or say anything to hurt him.”
His gaze meets mine. If he chooses not to tell me Lev’s story, I won’t push him. Because I get it. I understand the need to want to protect someone you love at any cost.
I pull at my Z charm and wait for him to decide what he wants to do. The silence drags on for what feels like an hour. Then finally—
He sighs. “Sit down.”
I walk over to the bed and perch down on the edge of it. Then I pat the empty space next to me. He saunters over and sits, leaving only a foot or two between us. It’s closer than I’m expecting. He smells like coffee this morning. Coffee and cinnamon.
He closes his eyes. “Lev was in the car accident that killed my parents.”
It’s weird. I’m expecting a sad story—a horrible one, in fact—and yet I still have a visceral reaction to hearing it. My body goes cold and goosebumps spread along my arms and legs.
“My father was driving. Lev was in the back seat. He was twelve years old at the time.”
“My God,” I murmur. “That’s too young.”
“A train derailed. A bad length of track made the railway engineer lose control. We found out later that there was an inspection oversight and the train was already en route before anyone caught it.”
I clap my hands over my mouth. “That’s horrible.”
“When it hit their car, it was going fast enough to do some serious damage. But that wasn’t it. The car tumbled over the lip of a ravine and went bouncing down. The train followed and crushed the car beneath it. It was a fucking disaster. One after the next after the next.”
His eyes are still closed. With every word, I notice little twitches in his face. As if he’s feeling the pain of every roll of the car, every twist of metal, every crack of glass.
“Seventeen people died in that derailment. Including my parents. It took days to scale down the cliffside and get to them, though. Nikolai and I went in with our father’s men and found the car, trapped in the ravine. We were sure it was over for all of them, but when we got down there… Lev was still breathing.” He stops for a moment and his face smooths over. “I should say, he was barely breathing. Another hour and he would have been dead. That’s how close we came to losing him.”
I can’t imagine it. The horror of knowing your parents are dead, but then to find their bodies? To pull them from the wreckage knowing there’s no hope anymore?
That Lev survived at all is nothing short of a miracle.
“We gave him medical attention on the spot, stabilized him before we took him to the nearest hospital. We had our own doctors fly in so they could treat him. Every single one told us he wouldn’t make it. His injuries were too severe, his brain too far damaged.”
“You didn’t believe them.” I’m not asking him a question. I know instinctively that’s what he would have believed because I wouldn’t have given up on Z until the last breath had left her body.
Uri nods. “Niko and I took turns at his bedside. He needed a dozen different surgeries in the first few weeks. His body was broken—but bodies are easy to fix. The mind, however…”
I clamp down on my bottom lip. Do not cry. Don’t make this about you.
“He was in a coma for almost four months before he woke up. But it took a while for us to figure out that he was… different. Not his normal self. He had regressed in so many different ways but the doctors said that was normal for a coma patient. That he would need to be taught certain things all over again. We were expecting it.” He exhales sharply. “What we weren’t expecting was the personality change—or rather the personality regression. Mentally speaking, it was like he had aged backwards. He wasn’t a teenager anymore. His next birthday will be his twenty-second… but the Lev I knew back then never grew up.”
I can’t stop a tear from sliding down the side of my face. “Uri… I can’t imagine…”
“There’s no cure,” he says almost defensively. “There’s no hope. There’s no getting better for Lev. This is how he’ll always be. He’ll always be dependent on other people to look after him.”
“I’m sorry.”