Chapter 28 #2
“Because he wanted to,” Archer snaps. “Because he’s a fucking drama king who gets off on it. He doesn’t love you, Alina. He’s just convinced you that you need him to protect you, but you don’t.”
Every muscle in Dominik’s jaw goes still. He doesn’t speak. That somehow makes it worse.
“You don’t get to talk about love as if you know anything about it,” I tell Archer, and my eyes burn so sharply I have to blink or I won’t be able to see at all.
“The hell I don’t,” he huffs. “I’m the one who held your hair when you threw up that winter we got sick on dollar-store ramen.
I’m the one who stole the old lady’s change jar and paid rent when you were sure we’d have to sleep in the laundromat.
I’m the one who came to your school play and clapped like you were famous even though you had two lines. That is love.”
“That was survival,” I say. “Which is a kind of love. But it also feels like a bad habit. You don’t get to use love like a chain and drag me along behind you while you keep making monumental mistakes that affect me too.”
“You think he won’t do that to you?” Archer jerks his chin toward Dominik without looking at him. “You think he didn’t chain you to him the second he took you? You think this isn’t just a prettier leash?”
I want to say yes, but the truth is slippery. And when I reach for it, what I get instead is the image of Dominik standing up to his brother and when his breath was hot on my neck when he said, “Mine,” like it was both a request and a promise.
Dominik steps sideways, and I feel heat lick across my skin where he passes.
He stops within Archer’s line of sight, close enough that the chain could catch on his thigh if Archer flailed.
“Archer wasn’t lying about one thing,” he says.
“The Bratva will not allow him to have a life. If you go with him, he lives a while longer until they send someone to find him. If you stay with me, he likely won’t live that long.
We don’t get to make the truth less ugly by lying about it to ourselves. ”
“Why are you doing this?” Archer demands. “Why give her a say? You could kill me and be done, but you don’t want her to hate you. You want her to hate herself instead, and that’s fucking cruel.”
Dominik looks at me again. His stormy eyes are tired, and not just from lack of sleep. “I’m giving her a choice because she hasn’t been given a say since you left her with your mess. She deserves to make her own choices, not have us make them for her.”
The sentence opens a door in my chest I didn’t know I’d been standing outside of, one that’s cold and beautiful and terrible. I steady a hand against the wall when they tilt.
There’s still a third option, one Dominik would never suggest or consider. But I can’t stop thinking about it like it could be the only way to keep Archer alive for more than a handful of days.
“I won’t make this easy for you,” Archer says fiercely.
“You choose him, and that’s it. You don’t get to call me next week and say you changed your mind.
He’ll lock you in a room and pretend that he’s a good man by saying it’s for your own protection.
And if he fails to do that one thing for you, you’ll end up locked in a worse place with Gavriil. ”
“Stop,” I say, holding up my palm to try and make him quit talking before he talks me out of doing what I know I have to do.
“You think a man like him knows how to love anything but control? Do you really think he could protect you from Gavriil?”
“Stop!” It comes out like a command this time, and he actually obeys. The surprise of that takes a second to settle.
For a minute, nobody in the room breathes.
“I need to know the truth,” I say finally, needing to confirm what I’ve already figured out. My voice is thin, but it’s not trembling. “Dominik, if I pick Archer will you really let us go?”
“I’ll give you a head start,” he says. No hesitation. No softened words. “I won’t let my brother start the hunt immediately. I’ll take you to the car myself, I’ll put money in your pocket, and I’ll make some calls that buy you silence for two days, maybe three. That’s all I can offer.”
That all adds up to him betraying Gavriil, an insult that wouldn’t go unpunished.
“And if I choose you?” The question is barely a sound.
He breathes out once, quiet, like a man tasting something he’s not sure is safe to say.
“Then I tell my brother that I’m done serving him.
I tell him he has his guns and most of his money, but he doesn’t get your brother.
And if he comes for you, he meets the part of me that doesn’t care that we’re brothers. ”
There’s no promise in his words that this ends cleanly.
Dominik doesn’t say we ride off into the sunset somewhere safe forever.
He doesn’t promise me protection like a movie hero.
He gives me violence wrapped in a reality that I can understand.
I’m so tired of pretty lies I could break into pieces from relief.
“I can’t choose that for you,” Dominik adds. “I can tell you the costs.”
“What are they?” I ask even though I know Gavriil will never let Dominik walk away from him.
“You’ll live with a man who doesn’t apologize for what he is,” he says.
“You’ll live with the possibility of loss in your mouth every morning you wake up.
You won’t be alone or taken for granted.
You’ll probably be angry with me at least once a day, but you’ll never doubt that I mean it when I say that I would risk my life to keep you safe. ”
“God,” Archer mutters, disgust and fear braided tight. “He’s selling you a pretty cage with a penthouse view.”
“What does your cage look like?” I ask, turning back to my brother, angry that he’s the reason I have to make the hard choice. One that hurts me, hurts Dom. “The life where I run with you? Where we’re always looking over our shoulder because you screwed over the wrong men?”
Archer’s face softens in a way that used to make me forgive him for things that weren’t his fault and for things that were.
“All we need is a car,” he says, almost smiling.
“We’ll drive south. No GPS. We stop at motels where the carpet is sticky and pay in cash.
We get shitty jobs that don’t ask questions.
We change our names and address every time the wind blows, then we keep our heads down and mind our own business. ”
“I’ve been moving since I was sixteen,” I say, my voice threatening to crack under the weight of my disappointment. Does he really think sentencing me to a life like that is fair? “I’m tired of running in circles around your mistakes.”
“Then rest,” Archer says, urgent now. “With me.”
I look at the chain between his wrists. At the crescent moon of dried blood on his knuckle where a cuff chewed skin, remembering the same wounds on my skin.
He’s my older brother. He’s the boy who taught me the difference between cops and neighbors, the man who stole a loaf of bread and cried in the stairwell because he said it made him feel like a bad guy.
He also sold a piece of a world he didn’t understand because he wanted more without putting in any effort.
And I was the collateral he assumed he could live with.
Dominik shifts, and the air moves over my bare arms even though he’s not touching me. The heat under my skin finds his gravity and leans toward him. I can’t help but think about the bandage under his shirt that I changed with hands I tried to keep clinical and failed.
“Time to decide, Alina,” Dominik says quietly. It isn’t a threat. It is what it is—my decision.
“How long?” I ask.
He glances at the clock I can’t see. “Enough to be sure you won’t hate yourself for answering.”
“Enough already,” Archer snaps. “Just choose.”
“Don’t fucking order me,” I say. The words come out cold and sharp, and they surprise me because they land like something I’ve been practicing without noticing.
My brother flinches, then goes ugly to cover it. “Of course. Morozov’s convinced you that you have a little power over him and the rest of his world, so now you think you love him. Congrats.”
“Don’t use that word like a weapon,” I say.
“What else is it?” he asks, almost shouting. “What else have we been doing our whole lives except paying each other back for surviving?”
“I don’t want to love like that,” I say, and the truth of it is a relief that hurts. “I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
“So what?” he demands. “You want to be his new pet? You want to sit in this cage and pretend the view isn’t all bars?”
“I want to stand next to someone who steps between me and the bullet, not shoves me into its path whenever it suits him,” I say. “I want to decide to stay and have that mean something.”
I want to protect my brother and Dom too.
“We’ll have to leave the city,” Dominik says with a scowl as if he hates admitting that much to me, to Archer. As if he thinks I meant staying in this exact spot with him forever. “It won’t be easy, but I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
“So, either way, you’ll have to run. With him, it means you’re constantly looking over your shoulder and sentencing me to death,” Archer throws back in my face. “Can you live with that, Alina?”
The fact that he says it like a dare makes something stubborn and mean in me stand up straight. “If I kill you with my choice, it’s only because you were the one who loaded the gun and put it in my hand.”
Archer closes his eyes when my words land. When he opens them again, he studies my face like he doesn’t recognize me anymore. “I’m still your brother,” he says, and the sentence is so soft it almost disappears.