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“Sascha…” Mishka murmurs, remorse in his eyes.
“I don’t want your pity!” Sascha snaps. Then he composes himself to resume the story. “I screamed and screamed, but no one came. You never came. And by the time enough of the wardrobe had turned to ash that I could lift it, I was covered in flames. It’s a different kind of pain, feeling your skin melting. A horrible way to die. I barely made it out alive, and I passed out again as soon as I made it onto the fire escape.”
“How…?”
“Damien found me,” Sascha says resentfully, answering Mishka’s unfinished question. “The blond who went into the Sakharov house tonight. He’s the only one who came back to look for survivors. Meanwhile, my own brother didn’t even bother.”
Mishka swallows hard, pain flashing across his face. He looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. And it breaks my heart that he doesn’t defend himself. It’s cruel, really. How Sascha lays into him, placing the blame squarely on his shoulders. If only he knew what Mishka went through for him…
“I woke up in the hospital a week later,” Sascha finishes, his wrist twitching convulsively and making my heart flutter nervously as the blade brushes against my throat. He’s so close to losing control, and I’m terrified he’ll kill me and our baby accidentally.
Fighting the panic that rises inside me, I suck in shallow breaths, hovering near hyperventilation but desperate not to attract Sascha’s wrath. Mishka’s eyes flick toward me, the anxiety in them making my pulse pound harder. He sees it too. Sascha’s a loose cannon. Mishka doesn’t trust his brother any more than I do right now. But what can he do about it?
He’s as helpless as I am right now.
If he moves, Sascha might choose to kill me, and he wouldn’t be fast enough to stop it.
“Why didn’t you come back for me?” Sascha snarls, fury ripping through his voice. “Did you even look back? After everything I did for you, after all the years we stuck together, you just… walked away?”
“Of course not!” Mishka insists, his eyes snapping back to his brother, his expression filled with guilt and anguish. “I tried to loop back around. I intended to go up the back stairwell and try to catch them by surprise. But when I reached the front of the building, they were already leaving?—”
“And at that point, it was just too much trouble to check and see if your older brother survived?”
“No.” Mishka’s pained look is plagued with the ghosts of bad memories. “They had prisoners—seven—and I thought… I could have sworn you were one. I followed them to Sergio’s house. I was going to find a way to break you out.”
“You were going to?” Sascha mocks. “Then what? You decided to offer Sergio your services instead? You offer to suck his cock while you were at it? Or just fill his daughter’s holes? I hadn’t realized that was something he’d be so interested in.”
I can see the fire flash in Mishka’s eyes, the way he tenses to come to my defense. But the last thing that would help this situation is for him to antagonize Sascha. And he seems to understand that championing me is not the best tactic right now.
“No!” Mishka objects angrily. “I… I got arrested before I could even get inside the house. The neighbors must have seen me skulking about, searching for a way in, and called the police. They knew right where to find me, and they slapped me with attempted robbery right there on the spot. When that didn’t hold, they tried hard as hell to pin something else on me. I spent six days in lockup, but when nothing stuck, they had to let me go.”
It breaks my heart to hear the devastation in Mishka’s voice. This man holding a knife to my throat is the person he grew up with. He was the closest person in Mishka’s life—the only one he felt truly close to. And they’ve both suffered so much tragedy through little to no fault of their own.
I wish I could say something to ease their tortured souls. But I can’t. I can barely hum around the cloth in my mouth, and I’ve stopped trying to communicate because that only seems to aggravate Sascha.
He waits silently now, finally seeming willing to let Mishka finish his story without a backhanded remark. But he doesn’t lower his knife. He might be willing to hear Mishka out, but he’s no closer to letting me go.
“I spent weeks searching for you, trying to dig up any scrap of news. And when no one could tell me anything about you, I asked around about what happened to the men who disappeared into the Sakharov house. The answer was always the same—a slow and painful death, torture until their hearts quit or the poor bastards bled out. A strong man might survive three days at best. And I was in jail for almost a week.”
Mishka shakes his head, letting it hang, though he never takes his eyes off Sascha and the blade at my throat. “As far as I could determine, you were already gone. No one from the Nezhit survived that night—no one but me. I swear, Sascha, if I had known, I would have been there in a heartbeat. I did everything I could think of to try and help you. And I never stopped thinking about you. It destroyed me to think you'd died for me.”
A long silence follows, and my heart throbs to see the torment in Mishka’s eyes. Here he is, learning that his brother is alive, a brother he has mourned every day I’ve ever known him. And rather than getting to celebrate their reunion, he’s having to defend his actions. He’s supposed to take the blame for Sascha’s suffering when Mishka clearly would have stopped it if he could.
I’m so engrossed in their story, so desperate to ease Mishka’s pain and guilt, that my tears have stopped. I wait with bated breath as I turn my eyes to Sascha.
It’s impossible to tell what his emotions are, his paralyzed facial muscles making each expression twisted and foreign. I hate that my father is responsible for what happened to him—to both of them.
Finally, Sascha speaks again, and his tone is measured, his hand steady. “And how long did it take you to sell out? How soon after I died did you go to Sergio with your tail between your legs, asking for a job?” he asks, his rasping voice flat and deadly.
“Sascha, I?—”
“You cared more about saving your own skin than you ever did about me!” he bellows, cutting Mishka off. “And it would seem you didn’t take long to make yourself at home in the Sakharov family, either.”
“Sascha—”
“My name’s not Sascha anymore. It’s Kryuger! Your brother died the night you abandoned him to die in that fire!” As Sascha’s anger rises, the knife in his hand jerks, the blade biting into my neck.
And I gasp as searing pain lights my skin on fire.
