Page 60 of Bound By Ruin

Why would my brother willingly leave with the man who’s been trying to kill him for the past fifteen years? Why wouldn’t he kill him as soon as he saw him?

My gaze drifts from the incline in front of me to my future wife as she runs through the underbrush, her dress snagging on fallen tree limbs, her gait slowing as she struggles to make it to the road. Following her and making faster progress than she is tugs a thread of guilt inside of my heart. She isn’t built for the wilderness. A woman like Celia should be sipping on a champagne flute as fireworks light up the night sky behind her, illuminating the sparkle in her eyes.

I quickly scoop her up off the ground and cradle her in my arms. If she had been out here instead of Ruin, if our father had seen her and taken her, I would never have forgiven myself or my brothers for letting it happen. I know that Ruin would feel the same, blaming himself more than anything.

Our father has always wanted to get rid of Ruin, and Celia is collateral damage.

She closes her eyes and concentrates on what she’s hearing. “Rebel is going to keep looking behind us. Thanatos is saying something about…” She pinches her bottom lip between her teeth. “Going up the mountain.”

What she doesn’t say is that Ruin is still talking to us, but I have no doubt that he is. We just can’t hear him anymore. I take Celia’s hand and give it a gentle squeeze. “He’ll be okay. We’ll find him.”

Celia holds her breath for a long moment, then exhales heavily. “He left without saying anything. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he fight back?” What few beads remain sewed into Celia’s dress sparkle in the moonlight, a reminder of how beautiful she looked beneath the lavender spotlights an hour ago… and how my youngest brother couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

In a typical scenario, Ruin would have never left with our father. He would have fought tooth and nail to kill the bastard on the spot, not caring for the damage to his own body as long as he completed the job. He would have died if it meant destroying that man.

But he would also die to keep Celia safe.

I tilt my head back and stare at the moon, the circle around it cinching tighter. A hangman’s noose. An omen.

Someone is going to die tonight.

Chapter24

Thanatos

What my brothersdon’t know is that our father has nightmares. Throat-clenching, unable to breathe, night terrors. He used to wake up screaming in the middle of the afternoon, lying on a filthy mattress in broad daylight in an abandoned, run-down house in the middle of the woods.

I used to watch him suffer.

I’d get close to him while he slept, imagining all the ways he could die. Strangulation seemed too simple. Drowning was too loud. Stabbing could work, but I wanted him to bleed out for a long time, and I only had one belt that I wasn’t about to sacrifice to use as a tourniquet. I thought about dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire as a fucked-up tribute to his sins, but then his suffering would be over.

I couldn’t allow my brothers’ tormentor to go unpunished.

It was one thing for him to come after me. Growing up with bruised ribs and black eyes was my induction into manhood at the ripe age of nine. But after my dad remarried and my brothers were born, our father changed. Foolishly, I thought that he might have turned a new leaf for his new favorite son Nikolai and his perfect wife who provided him with such a gifted heir. Even after Emil was born, our father attended t-ball games, barbecued on the back porch on the weekends, and kept his shady business deals under wraps so that my step-mother could answer honestly when the police came knocking with questions.

But once my youngest brother Yuri was born, everything changed. I’m not sure what tipped our father over the edge—the way his mother would sing Russian lullabies to stop him from crying, or how he lost his job at the meat-packing plant when they shut down an entire factory, or the phone call from one of the bratva’svorsat the time, saying that he needed to pick up slack in our part of town and start contributing to the Baranova’s legacy.

I don’t think he ever anticipated becoming a made man. The previouspakhanTolkotsky was known for his obsession with bloodlines, and ours was so watered down that our father never got the call to officially join the bratva’s ranks. It wasn’t until a skirmish at the city’s borders took out a few dozen men that Tolkotsky started recruiting from the dredges of Russian society—even going so far as to induct orphans from theHarlin Heights Home for Children.

Sometimes, I think that Ezra and Andrei were lucky not to know their parents. At least when they look in the mirror, they won’t have to see every fatal flaw their parents passed down staring back at them.

As I watched my father’s body seize up in blind terror on that dirty mattress over and over again, I wondered if I would end up like him. Choking on my own spit, unable to break out of whatever nightmare I’d created.

I have no doubt that he smells my step-mother’s charred flesh in his dreams.

He fucking deserves that memory. The rest of us have to live with the remains of our unhappy childhood and subsequent descent into aggression as an outlet. I took to brawling in the streets when I was a teenager. That’s how I met Ezra, the two of us climbing the bratva ranks in record time. It’s why I wasn’t there when our house burned down; I was beating the shit out of some lowlife who hadn’t paid his protection fees.

Like my brothers, I’m good at violence.

But that doesn’t mean that I enjoy it.

My father’s pain, on the other hand, is the one crucial exception. A year or two ago, he finally noticed that I was following him and tried to flee, so I shot him in the leg and fractured his femur. As he crawled to a hospital and later claimed a local Catholic Church as sanctuary, I waited for him to run again.

I waited so long that I got careless, letting him slip back into the city like a rat returning to its hole.

It’s my fault that he noticed my brothers’ dedicated attention to Celia, because I’m the one that failed to kill him before he could come crawling back. When I first returned to the city, I thought that I could rejoin the bratva and reunite with my brothers so that we could kill our dad together. In a sense, I wasn’t wrong—but I wasn’t entirely right, either. All three of them were distracted by the pretty girl with tears in her eyes and a fire in her heart. Inevitably, we would kill our dad—but what was the rush when he wasn’t doing us any harm?

It was stupid to underestimate him, and now, we’re paying the price. We’vebeenpaying for weeks, between all the dead girls and the threats on our family, until now—this very moment when our youngest brother slips from our grasp, right beneath our noses.

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