Page 73 of Bound to a Monster

We square off and go through the motions. She’s faster and better skilled; I’m stronger and taller with much better reach. You’d think it would cancel out, but no, she wins four out of five, at least.

“I was at my father’s today,” I say as casually as I can. I’m breathing hard and feeling the burn in my thighs. Fuck, I’m not used to all this squatting. I really shouldn’t skip leg day.

“How’d that go?”

“I confronted him about his little intervention. He won’t bother you again.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“It wasn’t all about you.” She swipes at me and I jump back in time. But instead of pressing the fight, I relax and get a drink of water.

She joins me. We sit on the floor together, backs against the wall, passing a big jug of ice water between us. Her shoulder touches mine and she doesn’t flinch away. Her hair’s messy and she’s got a beautiful sheen of sweat on her skin, and it’s taking all my willpower not to reach out and touch her right now.

“You have a complicated relationship with him,” she says softly, looking up at me with those expressive eyes of hers. I swear, she can say more with her eyebrows than she can with her words.

Right now, her face is pure worry.

“I had an older brother named Stepan,” I tell her, even though she already knows this, and it probably sounds like a digression, but it’s important. It’s everything, really. “He was the favorite. Step was my best friend, and he was the heir to the family business. My father basically brought him up to be the next greatest crime lord this city’s ever seen.”

I smile to myself at the memory of those early days. It was absurd, obviously. Step was never going to become more powerful than Valentin Zeitsev. But our dad really did think there was a chance to turn his oldest son into something special.

“I know he died recently,” Carmie says, leaning closer to me. She’s warm and soft, and feeling her touch me like that makes me want to open up even more.

“Dad thought Step was going to be great. And he was right. Step was smart and strong. If he hadn’t gotten killed in some freakfirefight, Step would be running this family by now, and he’d be a force. But back then, Dad put all his time into teaching Step everything, and usually I was a part of those lessons.”

Carmie tilts her head to see me better. “Why does that sound so ominous?”

“My father was never a normal man. He had a theory about how best to teach a person. He felt that young boys needed proper motivation, and you’d think that would mean praise or glory, or maybe even prizes or money, but that’s not what our father did. No, he usedmeas Step’s motivation.

“There’d be a lesson. Sometimes it was simple. All Step had to do was buy a watch from this dealer and flip it for a small profit to another dealer. But while Step was going through whatever test Dad had cooked up, I’d be sitting back home on a chair with a knife pressed against my skin. Because that was Step’s motivation. In order to save his little brother, he needed to be perfect. He needed to be everything our father wanted him to be.

“And sometimes he was. I meant it when I said Step was always talented. But he was just a kid, and sometimes he fucked up. When that happened, he wasn’t punished. Instead, Dad would draw that knife down my spine and leave an ugly new scar, and it would be Step’s job to clean me up again. Sometimes, he had to stitch me, and that was a sort of lesson too. I became a punishment for my older brother. My suffering was his suffering, and if he wanted to avoid it, he had to be perfect.

“You’d think Step would’ve started to resent me, but that’s not the kind of guy he was. Step understood it was never my fault. He internalized everything, took it all inside of him, and he strove to make sure my father never made me suffer. Eventually, we grew up, and the lessons changed, and Dad decided that I wasbetter off as a training partner instead of a punishment, and the cutting and the torture stopped. But he taught me something too back then. Something I’ll never forget.”

I stare down at my hands. The stunned and horrified look on Carmie’s face worms its way into my guts.This is why I don’t talk about it. But she needs to know. Eventually, she’d notice the scars hidden underneath all the tattoos, and she’ll start asking questions I won’t know how to answer otherwise.

I look back up at her. Tears gather in her eyes. One rolls down her cheek. I don’t wipe it away. I don’t feel like I have the right.

“I learned that life is pain and people are liabilities, just like I was nothing but a burden on my older brother.”

“Lev,” she says, her voice choked with emotions. “God, no wonder you hate your father so much.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. It all happened a long time ago. But if you want to know why I hate him and why I think he deserves to suffer before I kill him, this is why. Because to him, I was nothing more than a cutting board.”

I push myself to my feet and scoop up my mask. I can’t stand the way she’s looking at me right now. There’s pity in her eyes. I don’t even blame her for feeling that way—I pity my old self too. I was pathetic and useless back then.

But I’m not that little kid anymore.

“Come on,” I say, taking my position on the piste. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

She wipes her face and gets to her feet. “We don’t have to. I mean, if you want to talk?—”

“I told you because you’ll need to know eventually, but it doesn’t change anything.”

She takes a deep breath and puts on her mask. She takes up her weapon and hesitates before stepping across from me.

“We don’t have to. Maybe we should just?—”

---