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His eyes lock on me. The grim shape of his mouth contorts until it spreads apart, allowing his gritty, hardened voice to stab into my ears. “Who is Ruslan?”
Shit.
I recoil. “What?”
“The boy.” He stamps his foot down in my direction. I match it with another step back. The stairwell bumps into my hip. “The one I just met who insisted his father was Yevgeniy and that you are his sister.”
I’m torn between relief and panic. Ruslan’s still alive. Arsen didn’t kill him!
“You spoke to him …”
“What the hell is going on, Galina? Tell me right now.”
I take a moment and actually look at him. The front of his jacket is filthy, the material made heavier by slush and mud. The lines across his forehead are drawn into deep furrows. It’s as if he aged ten years in the brief time he was away.
Letting out a shaky breath, I nod. “Ruslan is my brother.”
His lips curl back. “And Katya …”
“Is his mother.”
He cringes, running his hand over his mouth like he can wipe the anger off his face. It doesn’t work. “How long have you known?”
It’s time to come clean. Put it out there. Now that I’ve started, I can’t hold the words back. “Since the day I was kidnapped.”
“Weeks, then!” he roars, advancing my way. “How could you keep this from me? You had to know how dangerous this was!”
Approaching him warily, I lay my hands on his shoulders. He tolerates it, eyeing me so intensely that I expect him to rip away at any moment. “I wanted to tell you. I swear I did, but I was scared about what happened to Pyotr.”
He wrenches away from me with a frown. “You thought I’d kill a child?”
My hands drift limply to my waist. “Can you blame me?” I ask meekly.
“Don’t try to twist this around and make me the bad guy here. You hid Yevgeniy’s son from me all this time!” He taps his hand against his chest rapidly, emphasizing every word. “Don’t you understand what this means? Ruslan allows Yevgeniy to maintain control of the Grachev Bratva. If he succeeds in killing me, then the pathway of succession becomes clear.”
I lift my chin defiantly. “And if you kill Yevgeniy, Ruslan puts your claim at risk.”
Two can play this game.
“I’m glad we’re on the same page.”
“No.” Whirling on him, I glare into his eyes. “We’re not!”
He holds my stare steadily, even though it feels like the fire in me is lashing out. How can he resist being burned?
“I hate this bullshit about legitimacy and succession. By that logic, I have a claim to the Grachev Bratva too.”
“A powerful position.”
“That’s all you care about? Power?”
“It’s not about what I care about, Galina. It’s about the fact that you hid Ruslan’s existence from me! What the hell were you thinking?” he demands.
The flames curling in my guts spark higher and hotter with each beat of my heart.
“I was thinking about the innocence of a ten-year-old boy being stripped away because a bunch of grown men care more about how they’ll rule the world.”
His frown twinges like a bowstring, and I know I’ve finally reached him.
