10. Alexei #3
Nor has any woman ever seen beneath it. In fact, the only people who ever have are Dima and Lars. Dima because he was the one who made sure the wound he was forced to inflict didn’t actually kill me. I know I would be dead now if it weren’t for Dima’s careful doctoring.
Lars is more complicated. Our friendship should logically have never survived my captivity. We were no more than kids when the Orlov coup took place.
But oddly, the years of covert communication bound us more profoundly than even the bond forged between Dima and me by his knife.
The simple fact is that Lars never abandoned me, not ever, even though he could have and probably should have, a thousand times over.
Not that I ever consider Darya and my father’s escape as some kind of abandonment.
But like it or not, after they left, I was profoundly alone.
Until every night when I picked up that gaming console and found Lars waiting on the other end.
Some nights we did nothing more than game.
Other nights we had painstaking conversations via a code we devised ourselves, and that evolved over the years until it became a shorthand that barely needs embellishment.
Now I force myself to examine the scarred eye socket in the mirror. After Vilnus forced him to cut out my eye, Dima stitched it closed with only an online video as his guide. The resulting scar is surprisingly neat, but still a hard ridge of scar tissue over a sunken covering of skin.
Hard as it is to imagine now, when the coup was finally over, I found myself oddly nervous about how Lars would react to my scar. Despite having shared our most intimate thoughts on a daily basis for years, we hadn’t been face-to-face since we were kids.
Unsurprisingly, we both dealt with that awkward first meeting by getting steamingly fucked up.
Late that night, at Lars’s insistence, we took a bottle of Graf down to the concrete cells where first I, then Ofelia, had been held. Lars made me show him where they’d tortured my parents and my sister. Where they’d forced me to take my knife to Ofelia.
Finally, he made me show him the room where they took my eye. And then he made me lift my eye patch and show him the scar.
“Well,” he said, studying it gravely through squinted eyes that could barely stay uncrossed, “I’d love to say it makes you look like an ugly motherfucker, but sadly, I’d still bend you over a table, you gorgeous bastard.”
We laughed so hard we wound up on the floor, which is where Dima finally found us the next morning, passed out face-to-face as if we were lovers. For a while, I think some of my men thought we were, which wasn’t helped by Lars’s constant barrage of openly suggestive comments.
But the fact is I’ve always known Lars is gay, just as he’s always known I’m straight. I was the first person he ever told that secret to.
He remains the only person I’ve ever told about Vilnus Orlov forcing me to watch my mother being repeatedly raped, until she died.
Lars and I don’t have secrets. He’s the brother I never had, and the only person in the world who has known me through everything.
I could have had my eye cosmetically fixed long ago. But erasing the scar feels like erasing the experiences that created it. As if everything my family endured can just be surgically fixed, cosmetically altered like it never happened at all.
And yet, I think, staring at the scar in the mirror, the thought of Ofelia seeing me like this, uncovered and exposed, is almost as terrifying as the memory of Dima standing over me with that knife.
I turn away from the mirror impatiently. It’s not like me to get lost in this kind of shit. And besides, Ofelia has never known me with anything but an eye patch. Not to mention that given all that has taken place between us, my scars should be the least of my fucking concerns.
Harden the fuck up, idiot.
Wired and unsettled, I focus on the screen showing the maritime map. We’re more than two hundred nautical miles offshore, heading due south. If we continue on this trajectory, we’re headed straight for the port of Algiers.
Algeria would be smart. Africa is the king of continents for those who don’t want to be found.
But if we turn a few degrees west, we’ll be hugging the Spanish coast. Which will bring us within a couple hundred kilometers of Granada.
I stare at the screen for a few more minutes, but the truth is, I already fucking know exactly where I’m headed, and to hell with John fucking Owens.
Even if it isn’t safe to actually see Ofelia, after so many years with an ocean dividing us, there’s something comforting about knowing she is just beyond the coastline.
I pick up the intercom and call Andrew. “Set a course south-southwest.”
“Copy that, sir.”
I walk up onto the deck and sip my vodka, staring across the water at the hazy outline of Spain.
Despite gray suits in at least two countries being hard on my tail, having disappointed my father yet again, my terrible hair color and even worse name, I feel happier than I can remember feeling in a very long time.