7. Silas
Ican feel my muscles screaming at me to stop, to take a breath, but Andreas seems to be carrying a rage that needs somewhere to go, and lucky me, I’m the outlet.
“What the hell is going on with you?” I ask, trying to block each hit as it comes.
Every weekend we meet at a boxing gym and burn through every last thing in our bodies until we can barely stand, but today it feels like I’m his actual enemy in this ring.
I barely duck his uppercut in time, and when he clocks how close he came to putting me on the floor with a possible internal bleed, he stops and drops his hands to his knees.
Andreas is the same age as me, and he’s the only friend I have who knows everything. He knows about Dean. He knows about my decision to come here. He knows about Karina. The only thing he’s not aware of is a bun with a handful of loose strands escaping it.
“Lost him in Zagreb,” he says through his teeth, and he doesn’t need to tell me who he means.
For over seven years, Andreas has been helping me track down the man who killed my brother.
In the beginning, neither of us had much to work with. He came from an immigrant family out of Hong Kong, and I had just started figuring out what to do with the money coming in from my various extracurricular activities.
The moment we’d scraped together enough, we bought the equipment and an apartment. That’s how Triad Financial was born.
Any balance sheet, any unjustified expense, any liability that might draw the wrong kind of attention, we fix it with math and algorithms.
But the firm has always been a way to keep ourselves occupied until we find him.
We’re both sharp with numbers, but where formulas and calculations pulled me in, programming pulled Andreas. So we built the perfect team.
These days Andreas is the face of the company while I work from the background, but the firm’s core mission has never changed: find the snake who decided spilling my brother’s blood was preferable to paying us a four-figure sum.
Because we needed capital to fund every piece of surveillance equipment, every trip across the world that almost — almost — ended with our hands on the bastard.
If he were an ordinary man, we’d have had him by now. But he has too much reach, and no matter how hard we push, we haven’t been able to find the opening that leads to him.
“We’ll find him, Andreas.”
The rage tries to consume everything inside me. I remember the promise I made to Dean, to myself, but I hold on to one thought: that fucking scumbag will pay for what he did. That’s the only thing keeping me from spiraling.
Unlike me, Andreas has always run on anger and nerve. He’s the blunt force. I’m the calm one, the brain.
I watch his eyes, brown, nearly as dark as mine, lift from the floor.
Almost smiling, he asks, “Something’s off about you, Si. Don’t tell me you’re finally taking advantage of that position of yours and bringing home a few students who want to learn all about, what do you call them, integrals?”
I walk over and smack him on the back of the head, because he knows exactly what I think of his jokes.
“Ohhh, so there is someone. Otherwise you wouldn’t be that easy to rattle. Brunette? Redhead? Purple?”
Chestnut brown with faint warm undertones. Eyes that look like someone took early autumn leaves and blended them into a color that comes out to roughly 25.5% green, 74.5% brown.
Yeah. I looked that much. For God’s sake, this is bad.
“Second round?”
“Not a chance. I feel like you’re about to crack a rib, and I need to be functional.”
I hear him laughing as I step out of the ring, and I have to admit, even though I mostly show up here out of habit, to keep our weekly tradition alive, I needed that hour.
Usually I walk out of these sessions feeling a significant level of release. Usually. But evidently today I don’t get that luxury.
She’s just a student, Silas. Just a student.