Chapter 13 - Yakov
Yaroslav texted a couple of days ago wanting to meet.
I’d ignored him. But the texts kept coming.
He’s no threat to me, no matter how much our father has tried to keep us all suspicious of one another.
I want to know what he’s got to say, and neither of us is stupid enough to say anything over the phone, so I let him pick the place.
Unsurprisingly, he chose a shithole dive bar in a corner of the city where the neon sign out front has been dead for a decade.
The place reeks of stale beer and low-grade bleach, populated by a few local junkies and deadbeats who are too wasted to care about anything.
It’s the kind of place where if people stare at us, they’ll assume the drugs are hitting hard, and they’re seeing double.
He strolls in four minutes after I arrive, spots me, crosses the room, and slides into the booth I picked in the back corner.
For a few minutes we sit looking at each other.
It’s like staring into a mirror that isn’t quite right.
We are entirely identical—the same height, the same sharp cut of the jaw, the same heavy frame, and our mother’s piercing gray eyes.
It’s the kind of freakish resemblance that unnerves people on a primal level, and we have used it many a time to our advantage.
It’s what drove our father insane when we were children.
“You look like shit,” I say, tilting my glass toward the vodka waiting on the table.
“So would you.”
“No. I’d look like a fucking corpse if the old man had had it his way. “
“I didn’t know.” He knocks back half his vodka and signals the bartender for two more without looking away from me. “Looks like I’ve taken your place on the shit list. Thanks for that, by the way. He’s keeping me out of whatever he’s up to. Got me running fucking errands.”
He’s telling the truth. Yaroslav and I are capable of many things; we can threaten, intimidate, and unleash absolute brutality.
What we cannot do is look each other in the eye and lie.
God knows we tried bullshitting each other enough as kids; it never worked, and we could never keep a straight face.
“Shit list. Hit list, they all end up being the same thing. You didn’t come here to tell me our Father’s in a pissy mood, Slava. So, what the fuck do you want?”
He downs the rest of his drink and sets the glass down harder than necessary. “I’m bored to shit, and someone owes me money; I’m collecting on it. Wanna go fuck some shit up? For old times’ sake?”
It’s the closest thing to an olive branch either of us knows how to offer. I finish my drink and stand.
“Like you need to ask, brat.”
The man’s name is Lazar; he runs a chop shop two districts over. He owes Yaroslav ten thousand dollars from a poker game he refused to fold on six months ago. That’s six bullshit excuses that are apparently getting less creative. He’s not getting a seventh.
We slide in through the back. Yaroslav knocks out the two men by the door before either of them gets a hand to a weapon—he has a mean right hook, and for a second I remember why our father used to send us out together when he wanted to put the fear of god into people.
I take the third, not that it was a fair fight; he never saw me coming.
Lazar’s debt is not theirs to pay, and neither of us has ever made a habit of killing innocent people, but Lazar needs to get the message that we can get to him, whoever he has around him.
Lazar himself doesn’t run. He’s smart enough to know there’s nowhere to go, and unless he stumps up the cash right now, he’s just going to have to suck up what’s coming his way.
There’s a baseball bat leaning against a stripped-down chassis, left there by whatever poor bastard was working the shop before we walked in. Yaroslav picks it up, testing the weight of it in one hand like he’s greeting an old friend.
“You’ve had six months, Lazar.” He says it gently, as if he’s speaking to a child, and it’s the part that totally disarms people.
What they don’t realize is that the softer and more reasonable he sounds directly correlates to how much worse it’s about to get.
“I’ve been a patient man. My brother here, well, he’d have taken your fingers off at the end of the first month.
” He tips his head toward me, and I watch Lazar flick his eyes in my direction; if he’d gone white before, he was looking green now. I nod silently, in agreement.
Lazar starts talking fast, the way men always do when they know they’re fucked and are desperately looking for a way out of the inevitable. A promise: someone else owes him money and has let him down—same old, same old. Yaroslav lets him get about halfway through a sentence before he swings.
The crack of it echoes off the walls. Lazar goes down against a workbench, screaming, grasping at a knee that’s now shattered. We both crouch down in front of his face. I take my knife out and hold it to his throat, giving him a little nick, cause why the fuck not.
“Next week,” my brother whispers in his ear, “you’ll have my money.
All of it. Or I’m going to put a bullet right between your eyes.
” He straightens, hands the bat to me without looking, an old habit from when we were fifteen and did exactly this kind of thing together more nights than not. “Your turn.”
I don’t need much encouragement.
Ten minutes later we’re back in the car, Yaroslav’s knuckles split, my shirt sleeve torn at the shoulder, both of us breathing a little harder than the drive requires. There’s blood on the bat, which he’s tossed in the trunk without comment.
“Feels almost like old times,” he laughs.
I take the opening while it’s there. “Would you have hurt her? Raya?”
“I had my orders,” he says. “Which you completely fucked, no need to apologize.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He’s quiet long enough that I think he’s going to dodge the question, but then he answers. “She reminds me of Selene.”
That’s all he says. I don’t push for more, because I know that’s as close to an answer as I’m ever going to get, and it’s all I need.
He drops me back at my car. “Well, that was fun,” he says before I get out. “Consider it payment.”
“For what?”
“Bogdan. Something’s going on between him and the old man. I don’t know what he’s been promised, but he’s hungry for it, whatever it is, and you know what a hateful little shit he is.”
“Noted.”
“Watch your step, Yakov.”
Then he’s gone, taillights disappearing down the street, and I’m alone with a torn shirt, a split knuckle, and a piece of information worth more than anything I would have gotten out of an hour of talking.
I’ve had Sergei keeping an eye on the house while I’m not there, in case this meeting with Yaroslav went to shit.
There’s a text from him on my phone checking in, telling me everything’s alright on his security feed, but knowing it and feeling it are two different things.
The whole drive back, all I can think about is Raya, and whether she fell asleep on the sofa waiting for me, and how many miles are left between us.