Page 40 of Kings of Cruelty

James bristles. “Hey, it was a mistake, and I said I was sorry.”

“There were two ‘mistakes,’ and those are the ones I know about,” I tell Yuri.

I’m sure one of my friends would be able to tell me for sure, but it’s not like I’ve had time to text and meet up with any of them. A pang of loneliness runs through me. I may be constantly surrounded by people, but I miss hanging out with people who aren’t part of the world I grew up in.

“What do you want me to say, Sierra?” James demands. “I tried to apologize, but you wouldn’t answer the phone or respond to my messages. Then you vanished. Twice.”

I stare hard at him. I can’t tell him that I’d been kidnapped by the Russian mafia or that I’d been shot, and even if I could…

I don’t need to make excuses to him.

The fact that he seems to think I do pisses me off.

“Did you want something?” I ask abruptly, unable to keep dwelling on what’s happened over the past few months.

James has the audacity to look wounded. “I miss you.”

Yuri bursts out laughing. “The next thing he will say is,‘None of the others are like you.’It is what my friends always did to get their girlfriends back.”

The pathetic thing is that it might’ve worked if I’d had access to my phone right after the breakup. He might’ve been able to sweep me off my feet again despite the moments of clarity I’d had while eating too much ice cream and watching shitty movies.

Can I really say it’s much better with Konstantin, Nikolai, and Yuri? It’s not like we had the most auspicious start either.

“I’m not—” James throws his hands in the air. “Forget it. There’s no use talking to you when you’re with one of them.”

“You don’t talk to her at all,” Yuri says with a nasty grin. “Or you will learn what it means to piss off a Russian man. We aren’t soft like you Americans.”

James squares his shoulders, trying to look intimidating, but even though he’s got some muscle on him, it comes from the gym—not from actual violence. “She’ll figure out that you’re a loser before long and come back to me,” he says with so much certainty that I wonder how many women do believe it.

But he’s shown his true colors before, and he’s showing them again now.

“Just fuck off,” I tell him.

He casts one more sour look at Yuri before turning on his heel and stalking off. I watch him go in silence, bracing myself for when Yuri inevitably asks why I was with someone like him.

“Did he start with presents?” Yuri asks instead.

I tense, staring down at the textbook in front of me. “Compliments,” I say bitterly. “Then yeah, little presents. Things he said reminded him of me. Then we started dating, and that… didn’t happen anymore unless we had a fight.”

Yuri taps his fingers on the desk. “One of my friends at the orphanage. He always bragged he could get any girl to date him. He said to do things like that.”

“Yeah?” I say, my voice going flat. “Did you ever try it?”

“Once,” Yuri admits. “But it was too much trouble. I didn’t want to date every girl. Only the ones who liked things I did, or who wanted to go on motorcycle rides with me.” He laughs. “Or, later, the ones who liked having fun with me and Kotya at the same time.”

“How old were you when you two started fucking women together?” I ask. I’m putting bits and pieces together about his relationship with Konstantin, but I still don’t have all the parts.

Yuri shrugs. “I dunno. Probably a year or so after I met him. It happened by accident. I walked in on him and the woman, and somehow instead of telling me to go away, he asked if I wanted to join. The woman was very eager about it too, although she kept calling me diminutives.” He shakes his head ruefully. “I guess to her, I really must have seemed very young.” He must notice my confusion, because he clarifies, “Like Sierrochka. Yurochka. It is like calling Thomas ‘Tommy.’”

I study him. “Well, to be fair, youwerepretty young, weren’t you?” I nudge his side. “I wasn’t really allowed to date. I didn’t really even try to sneak around until I moved out. My father made it pretty clear that he’d screw over anyone I tried…” I trail off, realizing Yuri knew that all too well. I clear my throat. “Well. You know. He was too distracted by the time I started dating James to really pay much attention to what I was doing on campus.”

Yuri scowls, and I tense, remembering his extreme anger when he’d gotten out of jail a few short months ago.

“Distracted. Well, I’m not sorry about what happened to him.” Yuri sighs. “You have class soon, right? I’ll escort you.”

Of course he’s not sorry, and I wouldn’t really expect him to be.

But for all of Pa’s flaws, he’d been my father, and he’d deserved more than to be a victim of Silvano fucking Cresci’s machinations.

---