“She’s in the truck. She said she’ll drive me home if you don’t want to.”
Fuck that. Like hell that bitch is gonna go sneak her way into my life. “No,” I say, sitting up. “I’m coming. Give me a few minutes to clean up, OK?” I smile at my niece because she looks worried. She looks… she looks like she doesn’t know me.
She doesn’t. None of them do.
“I’ll wait in the truck,” she says, then pulls the door open and closes it, leaving behind a rush of cold air.
Winter in Montana. Probably the thing I hate most about this place.
And yet… here I am.
I wash my face, doing my best not to look at myself in the mirror, then decide my rumpled pants and wrinkled shirt aren’t appropriate and change into my blue suit. The black is for tomorrow. For the funeral.
Fucking Luc.
The truck smells like food when I get in. My stomach rumbles in a painful way when Mandy offers me a burger wrapped in foil. “It’s still hot,” she says. “We just picked them up before I woke you.”
Nadia is in the back seat. So when I look over my shoulder to back the truck up, I ask her, “Did you have fun today with my niece?”
“Yes,” Nadia says, smiling at Mandy in the front seat next to me. “She sent me on eight errands.”
I raise my eyebrows at Mandy. She just shrugs. “I had a grocery list from Mother. And Lettie needed medicine.”
Yeah. This is gonna be a fucking blast.
“I hope it’s not too much trouble to feed me tonight,” Nadia says.
Mandy laughs. “We won’t even notice you, Nadia. Until you tell everyone you’re a famous ballerina, that is.”
“I’m not famous,” Nadia says, her face lit up with a smile. She seems more at ease with my niece than she’s ever been with me. “But it is kinda cool.”
“My sister Becca wants to be a ballerina. She studies at a school in Seattle.”
And then the conversation takes off from there and requires no more input from me.
By the time I pull down the long driveway to the house—if you can call that monstrosity of logs a house—Nadia and Mandy are practically best friends.
Why not? They’re almost the same fucking age.
What the fuck am I doing here?
Luc is dead, Elias.
Right.
No one comes outside to greet us when I pull into the snow-covered field we use as a parking lot. Way too fucking cold for something like that.
I was just home last summer. I come home every summer for the Labor Day family reunion. But I haven’t been here in the winter in more than ten years. That’s when I stopped coming for Christmas.
The last ten winters have been great ones. No yelling, no crying, no sick kids, no fighting parents. There’s no talk of who will wash the million dishes piled in the three kitchen sinks. There’s no mound of wrapping paper being carefully refolded to use again next year.
But there’s been no sleigh rides either. Or chestnuts. Or cookie-baking.
Don’t do it, Elias, I tell myself. Don’t let the good memories outweigh the bad. Because it’s a trick.
Just like this thing I have with Nadia. It’s a trick.
Nadia and Mandy are already out of the truck by the time I gather myself and get out. My dress shoes sink into the snow several inches, soaking my socks. I look at my watch. Dinner in an hour, then maybe some small talk. I can be out of here and back on the road by ten. At the motel at eleven. Sleeping…
I want to go home. This place is not my home.
I get a sick feeling in my stomach when Mandy opens the door and Nadia files into the house behind her. I almost turn back.
But fuck it. I’m here. She’s here. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. I’m so fucking tired of keeping this secret.
I go inside and close the door.
Five faces stare at me. Smiling, if you can believe it.
Sylvia. Charity. Megan. Donna.
“Nadia,” I say, looking down at her confused face as she takes in my family, “these are my mothers. And this,” I say, nodding my head to the man between them, “is my father, David Bricman.”
She’s silent for a count of five. Five long seconds as it all sinks in. She looks up at me. I shrug. “We’re a plural family,” I say. “And now you know more about me than anyone in the whole fucking world. Because now you know both sides to me. Elias from Great Falls, Montana. And Bric from Denver, Colorado. Did you get what you came for? Hmm?” I ask. “Did you ever think winning would be so… so fucking sweet?”
I don’t even hear my moms as they reprimand me for language. I’m thirty-six years old. I can say fuck any time I want. I do not even care that there’s fifteen little kids hanging on my legs at the moment. I just don’t care.
I walk towards the liquor cabinet—some of them sitting on my feet, gripping my knees for dear life, letting me take them for a ride—and pour myself a drink.
“Cheers,” I say to no one in particular. “It’s time to get drunk.”
I do get drunk. I say nothing else the entire night. My moms all look at me like I’m sad. My brothers all send me disapproving looks, even Felix and Isaac, who have no room to talk because they left home at eighteen and never came back at all until this very day. Not for Christmas. Not for the reunion. Never.
But tonight, the only black sheep in this house is me. Disappointing Elias. Drunk Elias. Dark Elias.
I like it.
And then I smile, that’s how much I like it, and raise a glass to my fucked-up family. “Thank you,” I whisper to the dim, empty room I’m sitting in. “Thank you for reminding me what I am.”
Nadia drives us back to the hotel. I fell in the snow, twice, as we walked to the truck so she had no choice but to fight me for the keys. I’m surprised she knew how to get back to town, to be honest. But I’m too drunk to give a fuck.
She disappears into the bathroom as soon as we get back in the room and I collapse on the messed-up bed I was sleeping in earlier.
I don’t hear her come back out. I don’t help much when she undresses me. I don’t protest when she climbs into bed next to me. But here she is. Her hand on my waist. Her soft breath on my now bare back. Her voice low when she whispers, “Thank you,” into the darkness.
“You don’t want to thank me yet, Nadia,” I say, slurring my words. “Because I’m gonna make you pay for this.”
She’s silent. No response. Until I’m just about passed out. And her words barely drift in as the darkness takes over.
“You earned it, Elias.”
I did earn it. I earned every bit of what she has coming. And she’s gonna be sorry when I get her home.
Because I’m going to break Nadia Wolfe. I’m going to snap her in half. I’m going to drag her secrets out of her and use them to make her think about things she never wanted to face again.
I’m going to make her feel something.
It’s time for a new game and I’m going to win this one no matter what.
And when I’m done… I’m gonna make sure she’s begging for more. I’m gonna fuck her head up. Fuck her life up. And I won’t even feel bad about it.
I won’t feel anything, ever again.
So no… thank you, Nadia. For letting the man I’ve kept prisoner all these years out to play again.