Chapter Twenty-Nine
Graham
I don’t like Vegas. I don’t like the lights or the sounds or the smells. There was a time when I did, another lifetime in which this was everything I wanted. Now? Now, I find myself walking down the strip, a cigarette dangling between my lips, looking at a map of the surrounding neighborhoods.
I’m being ridiculous, I know. I haven’t seen Sonya in over two decades. A quick search every few years doesn’t actually mean she lives here. It certainly doesn’t mean she stayed. I don’t even actually know if it’s her. She could have changed her name like I did back when shit hit the fan.
Except, when I zoom in on the address I found online and see the collection of irises growing in the front yard of a reasonably sized house, I know it must be hers.
My sister loved flowers, irises were her favorites.
Whoever she’s with must either know her very well or be willing to let her spend hundreds in landscaping to keep them up.
Impulse has me ordering an Uber. There’s no way in hell Sonya would ever want to see me again.
But after a night of watching my best friend absolutely fawn over the girl he’s about to propose to while sitting three seats down from the woman I would literally die to marry…
I don’t know. I’m feeling like connecting with someone else who hates my guts.
When the Uber pulls up, I hand the guy cash and step out, taking a moment to appreciate the house.
It’s big, but not too big. Certainly, nowhere near as lavish as the manor we grew up in.
It’s upper middle class at best, which makes me feel a little better about just dropping in.
Maybe she’s been humbled by time and more constrained means?
Taking a deep breath, I walk up the drive, fixing my tie, then my hair.
I popped a mint in the car on the way here to try to get rid of the nicotine breath.
There’s only one car in the driveway, a white Range Rover, which must be hers.
Interesting. She learned to drive. Grandfather never let her learn when she was a teenager, said there was no need since we had a driver.
“Good for her…” I mutter under my breath.
Then, with another deep breath I don’t quite let go, I reach out to ring the doorbell. I tell myself I’m ready for this. That it’s been over twenty years. It’s time to see my damn sister again.
Nothing prepares me for the moment she opens the door.
The sight of her quite literally steals my breath away because for just a moment it’s not my sister standing on the other side of the door.
It’s our mother. Or what I imagine our mother would have looked like if she’d ever made it past thirty.
Small, slim, impossibly natural blonde hair tied into a ponytail, a beautiful blouse paired with designer blue jeans.
Her blue eyes trail over me a moment in confusion before she finds my eyes and the recognition hits her as well.
Although hers strikes more like lightning than a brick to the face.
Because she looks exactly like Mom. Right down to the bruise barely covered by makeup across her cheekbone.
“Grigory…”
“Sonya,” I swallow nervously switching my brain over to Russian for the first time in years. “You look… Well.”
“I thought you were dead...”
Not exactly what one wants to hear from their sister, but I shrug it off. “Not dead,” I confirm. “It was a close call though. Barely got out of my twenties.”
She doesn’t laugh and my own grin slowly falters. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this. I promise, I’m not looking for a handout. A friend of mine was performing in the Ballet and—”
“You have friends in the Ballet?”
That’s right, Sonya loves the Ballet. It’s just one of the few other facts I managed to hold onto. I smile softly. “I have one friend, yes. Clara Ramirez-Roberts. She was—”
“Principal. Yes, I have heard of her. She is a beautiful dancer. A beautiful woman. You are… With her…?”
“Me?!” I shake my head. “No, God no, she’s dating a friend of mine. They’re actually getting engaged tonight. Later. I’m just her friend.”
“I see.” She looks awkwardly over my shoulder, and I know in my bones she’s looking for the motherfucker who gave her that bruise on her cheek. My fingers clench at my side. Then she shocks the hell out of me by asking, “Would you like to come in?”
I’m so surprised I reply in English first, “Yes,” then Spanish, “Sí.” She steps aside, and I don’t miss the way she checks the night again before closing the door behind me.
Her house looks exactly how I imagined it might.
Lots of ornate heavy pieces of furniture, leather sofas, rounded stairs leading up to a loft overlooking the entry way, tiled floors that look like wood.
Easy to clean were anything to spill. The chandelier is gaudy as hell, almost as bad as the royal gold granite I spot through the archway into the kitchen.
Sonya has a mcmansion. That totally checks out. How unfortunate that she inherited our grandfather’s taste.
“Nice place,” I say, because she’s clearly expecting me to say something. She’s wringing her hands anxiously. Beneath her left bell sleeve I notice another, deeper bruise around her wrist.
“Thank you,” she glances up the stairs, then back to the living room. Looking anywhere but at me. “Would you like a drink? I have vodka, rum—”
“Water is fine,” I tell her.
She nods, gesturing to the living room. “Make yourself at home.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard my sister sound so…
Complacent? Welcoming? I’m not sure how to describe the softness in her voice.
I only realized after we drifted apart how she always looked out for me, in her own way.
Keeping a tie in her purse for me. Warning me when I needed to disappear.
She was never kind. There was never this warmth in her voice. Not like there is now, in her own home.
I always thought it was because she blamed me for what happened to Mom, and maybe she did. But maybe she kept her distance because she was trying to cause less problems? Maybe she did more to keep Grandfather off my ass than I previously thought.
Wandering into her living room, I take a look at all the photos lining the end tables and walls. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a real smile from her, frozen in time with her arms wrapped around children who look exactly like her right down to their glacier blue eyes.
“You have kids,” I call, a small laugh escaping me.
I watch across photographs as a niece and a nephew I never met slowly grow a little older with each passing image.
There are graduation pictures for them both.
Another picture of a little boy much younger than them starts appearing and I watch as he gets super into soccer, recent pictures of him even wearing…
“Holy shit…” He’s wearing Cristian’s jersey in one of the photos. I pick it up, snapping a picture with my phone. I immediately text it to Cristian, asking him if he can give me a signed one to send her way when I get home.
Setting the picture back down I pause on one of the hidden photographs near the back.
That Sonya I recognize a little better. The straight line of her mouth.
The rigid set of her shoulders, holding herself up much too straight, as if avoiding the hand at her back.
The hand of a man in a tailored Italian suit standing next to her in a lace wedding dress.
“Mierda…”
I reach for the picture just as she comes back into the room.
For a moment we both stand there, both frozen as I take in the face of a man I’ve wished unspeakable things would happen to for over twenty years.
His hair is the same, slicked back with too much gel.
His dark eyes crinkle, his smile is unpleasant at best. Everything inside me goes cold.
“You married him…”
Sonya blinks when I look up at her, surprised by the acid in my tone. “I… Of course, I married him. You met him when we were engaged—”
“Did no one tell you what he did to me?! How he fucking raped me?!”
My sister flinches and I take a deep breath, hating that instinct that’s been driven into her. This bastard would do that to her. He would put bruises in visible places without giving a single fuck who saw.
“Is he here? Is he who you’re waiting on to walk through that door? Is he the one who did that to you?” I use the picture to gesture to her face.
She raises a hand to her cheek but shakes her head slowly. “No… He…” Her brow furrows. “He died nineteen years ago.” Sonya straightens when she says coldly, “Too many enemies.”
Now I blink, still holding the picture of her wedding day in my fist. He died.
And not long after Sonya and I became disconnected.
Not long after I killed our grandfather and got myself out of that hell.
For twenty years I imagined having the chance to do it myself.
I imagined wrapping my hands around his throat and choking the life out of him, slowly, painfully, making it hurt as much as what he did to me—
“Grigory…?”
“I go by Graham now,” I tell her quietly, looking back down at the picture. More at her, the woman she used to be, than at him. The dead man who changed my life for the worst in a single night. “Graham Rosales.”
She recognizes the name. I knew she would. It was spoken with venom only a hand full of time, but so villainized it was a hard name to forget. “Your father?”
“I changed it after… You know…” My brow furrows when I look back up at her. “You really didn’t know?”
“I knew about the women,” she tells me softly. “That Grandfather sold you to them….”
My jaw clenches tight enough to pop. I can’t really be angry with her. She was a teenager. There was quite literally nothing she could have done to make it stop. Especially with the amount of money using me brought in.
“Kira never—”
“I didn’t speak to Kira after that night. I heard she went back home- I heard most of the staff returned to their homelands- and that was the last I ever knew of her.”