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17
Delilah
I’ve been with Luka for under five minutes, and I can already sense that there’s something deeply wrong with him. I knew it before, but now, it’s painfully obvious. For somebody who has claimed to be my brother from birth, he’s been strangely intense about complimenting my appearance and my body.
“You know, Akim probably couldn’t have done better than you anyway. That guy’s ugly as fuck,” Luka says as we drive to his compound from the club. Watching the club disappear into the distance feels hollow and lonely.
I’m unsure of how to accept his comment. Is he just bad at giving compliments, or is it a backhanded insult to Akim and me?
“I don’t really understand. There were always beautiful girls at the club,” I reply, trying my best to gauge Luka’s mood and conversational parameters. I don’t know this person at all, and so far, he’s done nothing but behave in a sneaky, predatory way. Even if he’s family, I can’t say I trust him.
“Yeah, he probably just didn’t approach them because he thought they’d be too smart not to pick up on what he actually did for a living. You really exceeded his expectations,” Luka replies, laughing with the driver.
“I feel kind of insulted by that,” I say, my words cutting through their laughter and stopping it in its tracks.
“You don’t get to feel insulted by the truth, sweetie,” the driver replies.
Luka smacks him on the back of his head. “Don’t be an asshole. I was just trying to have fun with her. You took it too far,” he scolds.
I roll my eyes. If that’s his definition of a harmful joke, he must have grown up with the meanest family ever.
Oh, wait.
Right. He’s in the fucking mafia.
The thing that bothers me the most about Luka is that I can’t remember having a brother at all. I particularly feel like I would remember having an older brother, especially if we looked alike. But we don’t.
Luka’s features are much more angular than mine, though his bone structure is enviable, I will admit. I’d always been down on myself for how soft my face looks, like a perpetual baby face. My nose is also a different shape than his, and our skin tone isn’t anywhere near the same.
Of course, since I don’t have any other living siblings, I don’t have a frame of reference. I have no idea what my parents looked like. If they passed me on the street, I would probably not even notice them. It would never register to me that we were related. So how can I doubt Luka?
Even still, I have a knot in my stomach that won’t go away.
When we pull up to a large estate on the outskirts of town, I feel my fear grip me from inside.
There’s nothing about the building itself that would frighten me, but I immediately feel consumed by how much space there is when we walk inside. The walkway is normal, but I notice immediately that when we leave the front hallway, the sound of our voices is absorbed so efficiently by the walls that there’s no echo at all.
Is this place soundproofed?
For what?
“Um, where will I be staying?” I ask, interrupting Luka’s continued rambling with his driver.
“Oh my god, you are so fucking annoying. Just don’t say anything else. I’ll show you where you’re going when I want to. Jesus,” Luka snaps, turning around and glaring at me with an intensity that I would have never expected from him.
Luka seems to shift between moods often in a way that strikes me as unstable. At the club, he projected an underconfident, meek persona in order to keep Akim’s ego happy. Now that Akim isn’t here, Luka has become a loose cannon. He’s impatient and mean with a streak of pettiness that I can only translate as insecurity.
Insecure men are dangerous.
This much I already know.
But would my own brother try to hurt me? He seemed so adamant about proving that we’re siblings. From the documents that he gave to Akim, it would appear that he’s been looking for me for a very long time. That knowledge alone is all that’s keeping me from turning around and making a run for it.
After leading me through the house with seemingly no purpose or direction, Luka opens a door leading down to a cellar.
I pause, looking down at the crumbling concrete stairs that lead into a dark, ambiguous pit. I can’t see anything beyond the last step.
Luka glances at me expectantly, rolling his eyes when I refuse to follow him. “Weren’t you just asking me to show you where you’re supposed to stay? Damn, you’re so needy,” he snarls, grabbing my wrist and forcing me down the first two steps.
