I tell myself I’m used to being with him nonstop.
It’s just that I miss him. He’s my fucking brother, and I’ve only known him a year.
Finding Viktor last year, coming face to face with him in that gloomy garage in Moscow, and feeling that instant bond of love, it was one of the best fucking experiences of my life.
I held him to me—I didn’t give a fuck that the toughest Bratva fuckers were all around, bristling with weapons and distrust of this crazy American bounding into their space.
So yeah, Viktor and I have been together nonstop since.
And I don’t like us being cut off. All those years I thought my brothers had been slaughtered just like my parents were—finding him alive was life-changing.
He needs space, I get that.
But I need to know he’s okay. He seems…too obsessed. Yeah, it’s good he’s into the mission—taking down Valhalla will weaken and distract Bloody Lazarus. But something’s off.
He’s my brother. So I fucking care about shit like that.
He speaks English amazingly well, but he goes Russian now and then. Brat, he calls me. I love that.
When we talk about Kiro, he uses the word bratik, which seems to mean “little brother.” Or “baby brother.” Because that’s what Kiro is. He was taken when he was only eleven months old. By fucking Lazarus and his boss.
Kiro is still out there somewhere. He probably doesn’t know we exist. Every second that goes by that we can’t find him, he’s in more danger.
Bloody Lazarus wants to kill him. Must kill him.
I text Viktor again. Nothing back.
Of course it’s good he got his own place. Good for Mira and me to have some privacy. And he’s making important bonds with the American Russian gang. That connection is part of how we’ll take down Bloody Lazarus, the man who helped slaughter our parents and send us brothers to the ends of the earth all those years ago.
Bloody Lazarus, who controls the empire that is rightfully ours.
Bloody Lazarus, who is hunting our baby brother Kiro as obsessively as we are.
Mira calls me from the back porch. I go out and find her in the hammock we put up. We’re living this secret suburban life, and it’s fucking amazing and weirdly wholesome.
“Anything?” she asks.
“Still waiting. Sooooo….”
She screams as I climb into the hammock. I don’t tip us, though. I fit right in. I’m getting some specifically not-wholesome ideas, but she’s trying to read. I’m fine with that. I just lie there.
My phone pings. A text. I read it. A lead on the guy who might have Kiro. My whole mood lifts. “Fuck yes.”
Mira studies my face. “Is it what I think it is?”
“Could be.”
“Aleksio!”
I smile. “It’s not for sure—just a lead—but…”
She kisses me.
I call the P.I.
I haven’t seen Kiro since the night our parents were slaughtered in the nursery where my brothers and I once played. An old hit man hid me in a dark cubby while it happened. He held me there, hand over my mouth, arms like iron.
Baby Kiro cried while it happened, waving his fat arms as the blood spurted from our parent’s necks. Viktor was there, too, a screaming toddler. Bloody Lazarus and his boss took them both away. I was just nine.
Viktor and I learned just last month Kiro was adopted after that. When his piece-of-shit adoptive father couldn’t handle him, he dumped him in the wilderness. Eight years old. And not just any wilderness—the fucking Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a vast expanse of uninhabited territory stretching through northern Minnesota and Canada.
From the story we could put together, our baby brother lived wild until he was 18, when he was found half-dead and brought to a hospital with a wound in his leg. Completely wild. The bottoms of his feet so leathery they were like shoes.
It didn’t take long for rumors to start—a handsome young man, completely wild. The media flocked to the area, salivating for photos. Getting rabid, aggressive. “Savage Adonis,” they named him. Fuckers.
And then the whole thing was shut down and Kiro disappeared. The authorities up there told everyone it was a hoax.
We know different. We believe he was taken.
We got photos of the man who likely took him, and our investigator ran them through every database he could. It was a dead end. It had been our only lead.
We were disheartened.
But the man who took Kiro from the hospital posed as a professor—this made our investigator wonder whether the guy had been a professor in the past. He took the money I threw at him and hired a team of guys to personally visit every college and university in the Midwest, showing the picture around. It was a lot of man hours.
Over the phone, my investigator tells me it paid off. A name. A location. That’s what unlimited resources gets you.
I text a few guys to meet me at Viktor’s. I can’t wait to tell them the news.