11. Harrison
11
HARRISON
G oing through your dead parents’ things is an edifying experience. Strange how processing a person’s belongings is shaped entirely by your memories of them.
Those memories have changed shape and color since last year.
Growing up, I swore my parents had all the answers. Until they started arguing at night in hushed tones. I challenged them to leave the business they were in and start fresh on their own. When they died, the guilt crippled me. It was my fault they’d left.
Finding them dead only made it worse. The people I loved and admired were gone, and Sebastian would grow up without parents, and every time I closed my eyes for years, I saw their still, slumped forms and blamed myself.
Now, learning they hadn’t really been trying to leave, I should feel as if a weight has been lifted. They weren’t innocent. Some people might even go so far as to say they deserved their fate.
Except my need for vengeance on the man who killed them has grown—not because they were saints, but because when Mischa burned Kings to the ground. It wasn’t only about them anymore.
He attacked my business, the one I built from nothing with my own hands.
The Ivanov family molded my past with cruel, greedy hands.
They won’t touch my future.
I’m in the third-bedroom closet, surrounded by boxes, unpacking photos and other items that have sat here since I had them shipped from London.
Some items I toss in a pile to get rid of.
I can’t sell their things, so I’ll donate them.
When I spot a slim, black lacquered box, my chest tightens. Inside the lid, there’s a photo of Ash as a baby. Me holding him with a put-upon smile. I would’ve been fourteen, I think, and home from school on a break.
My mother never kept her things in a safe. She wouldn’t let my father convince her, no matter what beautiful trinkets he bought her. She wasn’t a suspicious person. Once she said, “If someone cares enough to take them, they need them more than I do.”
The exception was her wedding ring.
I lift it from the case, the gold band slim and smooth in my fingers. There’s an inscription I never noticed before. Through everything .
I’m surprised it’s here. When they passed, I had the funeral home dress them in clothes as different as possible from what they were wearing when I found them. Anything to clear that awful image from my mind. I told the funeral home to bury them with their rings. Yet this one’s here.
Footsteps in the hall have me glancing up. As they approach the half-open door, I call, “Natalia. Could you?—“
“Not Natalia.” Sebastian steps inside. His shorts are forest green, his favorite shade as a child, and his polo shirt is a few shades lighter.
I set the ring back in the box and rise, the box still in my hands. “What are you doing here?”
“Rae told me what happened last night at the bar. The woman who overdosed.” His eyes search my face.
“Don’t do that,” I say, irritated.
“What?”
“Try to see if I’ve lost it. I’m your older brother. I’m supposed to make sure you haven’t lost it.”
His lips curve, the ghost of a smile.
“Did you talk to the police?” I ask.
He crosses to the bed, the only place to sit, and sinks into the bedspread uninvited. “Yes.”
I clench the box harder. He shouldn’t be keeping secrets from me. I’m his damned brother.
“When did I let you down, Sebastian?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t ask me for anything.”
“I’ve asked you for money. You helped put me through school?—“
“I mean anything that’s going on in your life. You call me when you get drafted, but when your season goes off the rails... I didn’t hear from you once.”
He flops back on the bed, insolent as a teenager. “You’re the infallible older brother with all the answers. If anyone had a different approach, they were wrong. Our parents thought the sun rose out of your arse whether you gave a shit or not.”
My chest tightens. “I told them to leave the business, and when they did, it cost them their lives.”
He throws his hands wide. “That’s not why I’m angry! I’m angry because I didn’t lose two pieces of my family that day—I lost three.”
His meaning sinks in, prickles lifting the hairs on my neck.
“I took custody of you, Sebastian. Made sure you had what you needed. Not only food and shelter, but the best schools, the top football coaches.” I refused to let him grow up with less than I had.
“I didn’t need private school or football coaches. I needed my brother. But he was too busy picking up where they left off.”
He shoves himself off the bed and stalks toward the window, avoiding my gaze.
I can feel his anger, but it’s the hurt in his voice that shakes me. “I had to provide what they couldn’t any longer.”
“I grew up without a family, Harry. Being a teenager, figuring out what I wanted to do, who I was… it fucking sucked. Not because they were gone, but because I was alone and I didn’t need to be.”
Fuck. Maybe in trying to protect my brother, I isolated him. I think of Raegan, how her parents made their choices about what was best for her and only hurt her more.
I rub the box between my hands.
I hope to hell I didn’t screw up my brother like that. Or if I did, that he ends up a resilient person like she is.
“I’m glad you kept going,” I say at last.
He cuts a look over his shoulder at me. “The other option is worse.”
Raegan’s words about me thinking I don’t deserve love echo in my head.
When I tried to protect her last year, convincing myself it was for the best to leave, I destroyed what was left of our relationship.
Perhaps she’s not the only one I’ve done that with.
My next breath is shallow.
“I need to tell you something. Last year, in the course of trying to win La Mer from Christian, I learned something about our parents. Information I wish I could forget.”
He’s across to me in a heartbeat. “What?”
The sunlight streaming in the window is at odds with how I’m feeling, but I force out the words that have lain heavy on my shoulders for the past year.
“They were liars.” My voice is tight, and I swallow. “I thought they wanted to get out of Mischa’s family business, and I told you as much. But they had no intention of leaving. Everything I did to build this business was for them. To avenge them, to make them… It’s meaningless. Perhaps I should get rid of the villa too.”
I grab the pile of things, including the velvet box, and toss them in a bag by the door before pacing the room.
“Don’t. You like the villa.”
“I wanted it because it was theirs,” I grind out, rubbing a hand over my face.
He doesn’t answer, and I glance back to see him thumbing through the bag.
“You knew them more than I did. Had more time with them. The thing is, we build people up to be what they’re not. I did the same with you.” He opens the jewelry box and takes out the photo. He smiles, holding it up. “I remember this.”
I snort. “You don’t. You were all of six months old.”
“Yeah, but I remember being safe. Protected. Most of all, loved. By them and by you.”
“You don’t care that they weren’t who we thought?”
He turns over the picture. “I never saw that. I’d rather remember that they loved us.”
My chest tightens unbearably. Holding my brother at a distance has been harder than I thought, but safer.
Sebastian straightens, lifts the ring out of the box like I did. “‘ Through everything’ .” He arches a brow. “Guess they knew life wasn’t perfect either.” Sebastian shuts the box and sets it on the bedspread. “You won’t save this, I will.”
I nod. “Sebastian?”
He glances up.
“When did you become an adult?”
“Legally, on my eighteenth birthday. Sexually… far sooner. Though, honestly, I’d take it back if I could.”
My chuckle rumbles through my chest, dislodging some of the pain. “Do you want to go through the rest together?”
“Let’s get lunch first.”
We head back out to the hall.
“You know,” he tosses over his shoulder as we head down the hall to the stairs, “I told Rae you didn’t deserve her.”
I pull up, incredulous. “What? When?”
“Yesterday.” He pauses at the top of the steps. “But I was wrong.”
I shove my hands in my pockets. “I asked if she wanted me to stop pursuing her.”
“Why the fuck did you ask that?”
“Because I didn’t think she would say yes!”
He rubs a hand over his face, and for a second, I feel like the little brother.
“It was a bluff.”
“No, it wasn’t. You meant it, and that’s why you’re freaking out, because now you have to honor it.”
He’s right, damn him.
“She’s the only woman I can see in my life. The only one I want by my side. She’s infuriating and argumentative and sullen and beautiful. I don’t know how not to go after what I want, Sebastian.”
I get that she’s angry, but I never expected the feelings beneath to erode.
Now, the prospect of life without Rae makes me howl.
My brother’s mouth twists. “Take it from someone who’s been there. Loving something you can’t have is better than not loving at all.”