Page 133 of Savage Roses

“Shut it, Ivan. Don’t put on some fucking show.”

“Show? What show? I am simply wondering to what I owe the honor?”

“It’s time,” he says, a mysterious figure behind his cigar smoke. “I’ve been more than fair. But you think you’re gonna fuck me over. And it ain’t happening.Brat or no brat.”

“Fuck you over,” I repeat in my monotone voice, my accent thick. “I do not know what—”

“Cut the shit!” Alek—Lucius, as he demands to be called—slams his giant fist on my dining room table and makes the cheap wood wobble on its four legs. “I know you’ve still been plotting. You must think I’m real stupid. You think I don’t know about that visit to Adams?”

“That was to discuss a different matter.”

“Bullshit. You just came from seeing the Russian whore. You smell like fucking borscht. Now,” he says, putting out his cigar. “You’re either coming peacefully. Without all the theatrics. Or my men will take you. Since you are my only real family, I am giving you a choice. This once.”

What other option do I have? Go willingly or be dragged by force?

I have no money. No allies. No fight left.

I am middle-aged and alone.

I lost the woman I loved years ago. I have nothing.

I am nothing.

“Alright,moy brat,” I sigh. I hold out my arms for the restraints. “If this is what you want. Then I will not put up a struggle.”

He chortles, then shakes his head. “Pitiful. No wonder his face pisses me off so much. I broke his nose yesterday just for looking at me the wrong way over dinner. Did you know that? The little piece of shit couldn’t be more like you—he just took it. Didn’t even fight me back.”

I grit my teeth. “He is a child.”

“Wewere children when we fought back. You never would’ve done it without me. You would’ve just let him keep doing it to you, wouldn’t you have? Fucking coward.”

Before I can protest, I discover we are not so alone after all. The door to my apartment flings open and his men file into the room. I am knocked upside my head and I fall to the floor still half awake, though with agonizing pain in my skull.

Moy bratstares down at me with a cruel grin and tells me this is the end.

It is over.

* * *

For twenty years, my life became fuzzy, numbing agony. Broken days and long nights where I was reduced to a shell of a man who simply fell in love with the wrong woman and withheld his brother’s secret from the world.

I have suffered every moment, well aware thatmoy Solnishkowas paying the same price in the outside world.

Moy bratmade sure of it. That she was destroyed enough to become a shell too. Drunk and depressed as she lived in a fog. He took pleasure in what he did to the woman he knew his brother deeply loved.

He has taken even greater pleasure in what he’s done to the son he claims she bore him. The boy’s life has been dedicated to suffering. Severe physical pain for no other reason than being born to the wrong man. Because every moment of the boy’s life he’s reminded of the truth.

Every time he looks at him.

Every second I sit here with the knowledge that he has not only ruined me. He has ruined the woman and the son that are truly mine.

I have suffered, burned for my sins.

Now, it is time for him to suffer, to burn for his.

delphine

present…