Chapter 28 Bastian
BASTIAN
flam·bé: /?fl?m ?bā/: verb
“Hello, boys.” Aleksei drawls when I lower the car window. His breath is rancid with menthol cigarettes. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“With the day I’ve had,” I growl, “I shouldn’t be surprised you’d show up.”
“Aw, is someone in a bad mood?” Aleksei asks in a baby-voiced sing-song. He reaches out to pinch my cheek, but I smack his hand away before he gets close.
“Don’t fucking touch me.”
“Testy, testy.” Aleksei’s attention shifts to Sage. As it does, his smile widens in a way I do not fucking like. “And who’s this handsome young man? Don’t tell me this is little Sagey?”
Sage frowns, looking between us. “Do I know you?”
“Not yet,” Aleksei says. “But I’m—”
“No one,” I interrupt. “He’s no one, Sage.”
Aleksei laughs. “That’s harsh, Semyon. After everything we’ve been through together?”
“Don’t call me that. And don’t talk to him.”
“I’m just being friendly. Catching up with family.” Aleksei leans halfway through the window, and I can see Sage’s confusion deepening. “You’ve gotten so big, bratishka. Last time I saw you, I was—”
“Leaving,” I cut in. “You were leaving. Just like you’re about to do now.”
“You weren’t joking—you are in a bad mood,” Aleksei says as he lounges against the side of the car and lights up another menthol, hand cupped to his face to shield it from the breeze. “I guess that’s what happens when things go wrong at work, eh?”
“I—” My voice catches in my throat. “How do you know something went wrong at work?”
Aleksei shrugs and exhales a long plume of smoke into the car. Sage coughs and waves it away. I grimace. “Little birdies do a lot of talking in this city. A man in my position learns to listen.”
“Bash,” says Sage, “who the fuck is this guy?”
I ignore him for now. My pulse is starting to climb and I can feel blood rushing in my ears. “What’d you hear, Al?”
He waves a finger through the air and reverts back to that nasally, high-pitched singing voice. “Problems here, problems there, problems every-fucking-where.” Then he drops the voice and squares up with me. “You know what the real problem is, though, Semyon? It’s that our family is so divided.”
“Bash,” Sage interrupts once again, “who the fuck is—”
“Quiet!” I bark at him.
He recoils. I never talk to him that way. I don’t like seeing him cringe and shrink back like this. But I know Aleksei and I know that look in his eye.
I intend to keep Sage as far from this shit as possible.
I look at Aleksei again. “I think our family is doing just fine, thanks.”
“No, no, no.” He tries to touch my face again, and again, I swat his hand aside. He just chuckles. “Brothers ought to be together, Semyon. We’d be like three little musketeers, you know? That’s how it should be. It’s what Mama would have wanted.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sage pale as he puts the pieces together. He’s no idiot, and he’s begged and pleaded with me for enough scraps of our family history over the years. He only knows of Aleksei as an estranged brother I don’t talk to because he made bad choices. A boogeyman of sorts.
If I’d had it my way, he would’ve stayed like that forever.
“Mama wanted a lot of things, and they were all at least forty-proof,” I snarl. “She certainly didn’t give a flying fuck what became of her sons.”
“Ah, maybe you’re right,” Aleksei concedes. “But then it falls to us to do things better, doesn’t it?”
“I think that ship sailed for you a long time ago.”
That laugh again. It’s menthol-tinged, smoke-infused, and it grates on my goddamn nerves.
“I think you ought to be going,” I add. “As fun as this has been, Sage and I have places to be.”
Aleksei nods, completely unbothered. He straightens up, but he keeps his hands clamped on the car door so I can’t roll up the window just yet.
“Fair enough. We Izotovs are busy men by nature.” He points a thumb at Sage.
“Remember that, bratishka. Ambition is your north star. Never settle for less than what you deserve.”
“Time to go,” I growl at him.
He raps his knuckles on the inside of my door. “Sure is. But hey—if you ever need a hand with those construction problems of yours, all you have to do is pick up the phone and give me a call. HVAC can be such a bitch, can’t it?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He just turns and saunters away, stopping only to crush the cigarette under his heel.
I wait until he’s gone. Then I gun the car out of the parking lot and I don’t look back.
Sage doesn’t say a word until we get home. He stays silent, eyes downcast, as we park, as we ride the elevator up, as we spill out into the penthouse.
But just when I think I might get away without having to do this miserable conversation right now, he pivots his chair around in the middle of the kitchen and looks at me.
“So you gonna explain what the hell just happened, or nah?”
I exhale. So much for ducking the hard things. Today has been a fucking doozy, and I don’t have the energy to do this justice.
But Sage deserves my best. And he’s entitled to answers about his blood and his roots. Since there’s no one else to give that to him, it falls to me.
“It’s a goddamn mess, is what it is,” I sigh.
“That’s not an answer and you know it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“Well?” he demands. “And don’t even try to keep me in the dark on this one. I’m not a little kid anymore, you know.”
“I know you’re not. I… Hold on a second. I need a drink.”
I go to the bar cart and pour myself a splash of vodka. Returning to the kitchen, I sink onto a bar stool across the counter from Sage and fix him with a serious look.
“Aleksei is my brother. Yours, too, technically. Well, half. We all have the same mom. The dad situation is a complete mystery, but it doesn’t really change anything.”
Sage’s jaw is tight. Is that what I look like when I brood? He looks like he’s one sneeze away from shattering into a million little pieces, never to be reassembled. Every muscle in his face and neck is standing at rigid attention.
“Him and I grew up together,” I continue. “We had it rough. Mom was a mess, too young and too wrecked on drugs and booze to be a parent. And no money, of course. Not a damn dime.”
I close my eyes and that Glade PlugIn stench comes floating back, just like it did at Eliana’s mother’s apartment. It’s as real as if someone is wafting it under my nose, even though it’s almost forty years in the past.
“Were you close?” Sage asks, dragging me back to the present.
“We were… Yeah. Yeah, we were. We were about as close as you can get, for a while there.”
He hears what I’m not saying. “But then…?”
“But then we ended up at a crossroads, sort of.”
“Don’t talk down to me,” he warns angrily. “I’m not a little kid. I deserve to know the details.”
“I’m not, I swear. I’m just trying to find the best way to explain a whole lot of complicated shit that happened a long time ago.” I rub my chin as I think. “But, yeah—a crossroads. We both had a choice to make, and we… we chose different.”
I remember the night it happened. The bitter chill of the walk-in freezer. The man’s screams. The door swinging open and Aleksei standing there with the cleaver in his hand.
The blood on the tile.
So much blood on the tile.
“And then we went our separate ways, more or less,” I finish.
“Aleksei made choices I thought were unethical, though he’d say he was doing it for good reasons.
I thought it was best for us to stay in our respective worlds and not talk anymore.
We didn’t, for a long time. The only time we’ve really spoken in the last sixteen years is when we found out about you.
He brought you to my house and gave you to me, and then we parted again. And that’s pretty much that.”
Sage is quiet as he absorbs everything. It’s more than he used to know but not nearly as much as he deserves to know.
Still, I can’t bear to tell him everything. Not yet.
That cold, that scream, that blood, that fucking blood… Those are my nightmares.
Not his.
“I know you’re not going to be totally satisfied with that,” I tell him, “and if you’re pissed at me, I get it. One day, I’ll share more. But for now… that’s that.”
He nods. His face is still taut with tension, but he lets out a long, slow, deflating exhale. Then, without saying another word, he rolls himself down the hall and into his room.
The door clicks shut.
I stay seated at the counter for a long time, nursing a vodka that doesn’t do a single goddamn thing to improve my mood.
Around midnight, I come to a decision.
I don’t know what it is yet, exactly. I just know that wallowing in my past won’t change a single goddamn thing about my present or my future.
It won’t fix the HVAC disaster at Olympus. It won’t make Aleksei vanish in a puff of smoke. It won’t make the peachy taste of Eliana’s mouth any less vivid in my memory. And it sure as hell won’t make me feel less like I’m drowning.
I scrawl a quick note for Sage.
Heading out for a while. Don’t wait up.
—B
Then I grab my keys and run out the door.