Chapter 1 - Alexei #4
By afternoon my father’s business was finished and we were driven back to the airport. I kept the ribbon in my pocket the entire flight, my fingers returning to it every few minutes, touching the frayed edges.
I told myself I would come back one day and look properly.
I never did.
Over the next years, I often thought about searching for him.
But I was afraid of what he had awakened in me. I had grown far too comfortable with the silence inside my own chest and I was scared of what that boy could bring out of me.
But beneath that fear lived another.
That I would find him and discover he had become nothing more than a star.
I still carried the ribbon through high school.
I kept it in the inside pocket of whatever jacket I wore, pressed against my chest. After every psychological dismantling I performed, after every mind I methodically reduced to nothing, I would touch the frayed edge and remember.
Remember that for one night in Italy I had felt something else.
Remember hazel eyes.
Remember a gap-toothed smile.
Remember that stars were holes poked in the dark, so the light could breathe.
On certain nights, when the quiet got too big and the nothing threatened to swallow me whole, I would go outside and look at the eastern horizon. I would find the brightest star, the one that might be the hope star, and I would hold the ribbon in my closed fist, and I would remember.
There is light behind the dark.
Even for you.
***
When I was eighteen I enrolled at Bloodburn Academy.
It wasn’t called an academy anymore once you were inside.
It was a college for the children of power.
The students arrived in Bentleys and Lamborghinis, drivers in black suits standing beside the cars like armed guards waiting for orders.
They laughed too loudly in the corridors and wore watches that cost more than most people’s houses.
Bloodburn shaped the next generation of leaders, the ones who would inherit empires built on blood and pass them on to their own children in turn.
I kept to myself, the boy who spoke only when necessary, and even then in a voice like winter, flat and cold. No one tried very hard to know me, which was how I preferred it.
But the rumors started anyway.
Russian mafia trash. Probably fucks corpses because he is too cold to get it up for anything living.
The last one bothered me because it came closest to the truth, not of what I did to others, but of what I was.
I didn’t care about sex. Bodies were meat.
Warm or cold made no difference to me. The physical held no appeal.
When I fucked, it was more like a duty. I felt nothing when I stuck my dick in someone; to be quite frank, it bored me to death.
There was only one thing I had ever wanted to touch.
And I was too scared to go find him.
Today was the evening of the Founders’ Gala.
It was an official event held every year at Bloodburn Academy, a showcase of philanthropy meaning a carefully staged production designed to convince the world that the families who ran it were capable of benevolence.
The guests were exactly what the academy wanted the world to see: it was full of politicians who smiled for the same cameras that would later capture their indictments.
The centerpiece was the official scholarship ceremony. Bloodburn’s founders had created the program decades ago, full rides for promising students from underprivileged backgrounds.
The dean spoke first, praising the vision of the founders.
Then came the donors, each one taking their turn at the podium, each one praising “bright young minds” and “the power of education to change lives” while their eyes stayed fixed on the cameras, calculating the return on their investment in goodwill.
Then the recipients were called.
Nervous teenagers in their best clothes walked across the stage to receive oversized symbolic checks and leather portfolios with their names embossed in gold.
I didn’t really look at them.
I wasn’t interested.
The performance wasn’t for them. It was for the donors, the press releases, the social media posts, the tax advantages. The actual children of power such as myself were expected to attend, to be photographed supporting the cause. It made future deals smoother.
Dimitri had refused to come so Ivan, his father, had sent me instead.
“Represent the family, Alexei,” Ivan had said on the phone two days earlier. “Dimitri’s absence would be noticed. You go. Stand there. Smile at the appropriate moments. Don’t cause problems.”
I had agreed because refusing wasn’t worth the conversation that would follow.
So I stood near a pillar in my black suit, the fabric tailored but plain, my tie a dark line against the white shirt.
The noise pressed against the inside of my skull like static, laughter too loud, conversations too bright, the constant clink of champagne glasses raised in toasts to nothing that mattered.
I wanted them to die. Why did the world have so many people?
The effort of standing still, nodding at the correct moments, avoiding any conversation that might require more than three words, cost more than I usually spent on such things. Each minute drained something from me.
I lasted an hour before it became unbearable.
I slipped out through a side door when no one was looking and climbed the narrow access stairs to the rooftop.
Bloodburn’s main building had a flat roof with low stone parapets. On clear nights astronomy students such as myself sometimes came up here with telescopes, tracking stars and making notes.
Yes, I knew how funny it sounded for a mafia heir to major in astronomy. I guessed we had a certain boy with curls to blame for that.
Tonight it was empty.
Above me the sky was black and endless, pierced by thousands of stars.
I walked to the center of the roof, tilted my head back, and let them fill my vision.
Under them my own emptiness felt correctly proportioned.
Manageable.
I reached into my pocket and touched the ribbon. It was thin now, worn almost to transparency in places. The pale blue had faded to grey. I had touched it so many times over the years that it had molded to the shape of my fingers, curved into the cup of my palm.
I had been there twenty minutes when the rooftop door creaked open behind me.
Matt Langford the Third stepped out alone.
He was the son of a mid-level politician, the kind of kid who had never heard a “no” in his life.
He was also the one who had started the rumors about me.
He had been needling me for weeks, escalating each time I refused to respond, and the reason I didn’t respond was because he was too boring for my attention.
He must have seen me leave the gala and followed, thinking he could corner me without witnesses.
He was lucky Dimitri wasn’t here. If Dimitri had heard the things Matt was saying about me, Matt would have received a very public death. Dimitri didn’t know the full extent of what lived under my mask, but he was loyal to blood, and Matt had crossed lines that family didn’t forgive.
Matt spotted me and grinned, his teeth white in the darkness.