Chapter 1 – Lev #2
“Because you were ten years old and barely surviving what you thought you’d lost. Because telling you would have meant risking their lives if you ever broke under pressure.
” His eyes found mine, and for a moment, he looked like the father I remembered instead of the dying stranger in this hospital bed.
“Because I needed you to be hard. Needed you to be strong. And the boy who knew his family was alive would have been soft.”
Soft. The word hit me like a slap because I knew exactly what he meant. The ten-year-old who’d watched his mother and brother die in flames had learned to bury every gentle impulse, every moment of weakness. Had turned himself into a weapon because weapons didn’t feel pain.
But they hadn’t died. They were alive, and I’d spent twenty-seven years mourning people who were breathing and laughing and living entire lives on the other side of the world.
“I need their address,” I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. “Phone numbers. Everything.”
He nodded toward the bedside table. “Envelope. Top drawer. Everything you need to know.”
I found it—a manila envelope with my name written across the front in my father’s careful script. Inside were photographs, documents, what looked like years’ worth of surveillance reports. My hands shook as I pulled out the first picture.
A woman with dark hair and kind eyes, older than I remembered but unmistakably my mother. She was standing in front of a house with white siding and a red door, smiling at whoever was taking the picture.
The second photograph knocked the breath out of my lungs.
It was like looking in a mirror, if mirrors could show you parallel lives. Same face, same build, same dark hair. But this version of me was wearing a police uniform, and his eyes held a lightness mine had lost decades ago.
Trev. My twin brother, the other half of a whole I’d thought was gone forever.
“He’s a cop,” my father said, and there was something like pride in his voice. “Good one, from what I hear. Made detective a few years back.”
A cop. My brother—my twin brother—was a fucking cop, and I was…what I was. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so goddamn tragic.
“They know about you,” he continued, and I looked up from the photographs. “Know you survived.”
Of course, they knew. Of course, I was the only one left out of this story, the son who’d stayed behind to become everything they’d been saved from, all while thinking they were dead.
“I need to tell them—”
“No.” The word came out sharp, final. “Not yet. Petro’s still alive, still dangerous. If he finds out they exist….”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. I’d seen enough of Petro Kozak’s work to know exactly what he’d do to my family if he got his hands on them. The man didn’t just kill people—he made art out of their suffering.
“When?” I asked.
“When he’s dead.” My father’s eyes were starting to lose focus, but his grip on my hand remained steady. “When the threat is gone, you can have your family back.”
Family. The word felt foreign in my mouth, like a language I’d forgotten how to speak.
“Promise me,” he said, and his voice was barely audible now. “Promise me you’ll keep them safe.”
“I promise.”
He nodded once, satisfied, and then his eyes closed. The machines around us started screaming, alarms and alerts that brought nurses running. They pushed me out of the way, tried to save a man who was already gone, but I barely noticed.
I stood in the corner of that sterile room and watched my father die for the second time in my life, the envelope clutched in my hands like a lifeline.
The photographs of my mother and brother felt like they weighed nothing and everything at the same time—proof of a life I’d never known existed, family I’d grieved for twenty-seven years who were out there somewhere, living and breathing and completely unaware that I existed.
The machines went quiet. The nurses stopped moving. Time stuttered and stopped, and in that moment of absolute silence, I felt something inside me break open—not the clean break of grief, but the messy, complicated fracture of hope and rage and twenty-seven years of misdirected pain.
My father was dead. My family was alive. And somewhere in Chicago, Anya Voronov was probably stepping off a plane, walking back into a life I was no longer sure I understood.
Everything I’d believed about myself, about my history, about the man I’d become—all of it was built on lies.
Well-intentioned lies, maybe, but lies, nonetheless.
And now I had to figure out who the fuck I was supposed to be in a world where the dead could come back to life and the living could disappear without a trace.
I looked down at the photograph of my brother one more time, memorizing the face that was and wasn’t mine. Trev. Detective Trev Antonov, living his life in Australia, while his twin brother turned into exactly the kind of man he probably arrested for a living.
The symmetry was so perfect it almost seemed intentional.
I tucked the envelope inside my jacket, close to my heart where it burned like a brand. Then I walked out of that hospital and into a world that had just become infinitely more complicated.
Petro Kozak was somewhere out there, breathing air he didn’t deserve. And until he stopped breathing it, my family—my real family—would remain hidden. Safe but lost, alive but unreachable.
Just like I’d been for twenty-seven years.
The difference was, now I knew exactly who I needed to kill to get them back.