Page 29 of Wrath
“That’s my brother!” she shouted, resisting the fireman still pushing at her. “That’s my brother. He’s deaf. He needs to see me.”
In the end, she broke through and landed heavily on her knees next to Alek as he opened his puffy eyes.
“You okay?” She signed with her hands as she spoke the words.
Poor kid. There was so much going on in his sight. He’d be freaking.
Brow furrowing, her brother nodded hesitantly. His wide-eyed gaze shot around the lot, and Misha could see wetness pooling in them. She tapped him on the shoulder and signed some soothing words as she spoke them.
Misha looked up at her father, who also had tears in his eyes. “He’s okay, Tata. He’s going to be okay.”
“That’s up to us to decide,” said a male paramedic crouching down. “Sir, are you injured? Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”
Misha translated the paramedic’s words to sign language, in case Alek was too frazzled to read lips. “I’m right here, Alek. Right here.”
Alek gave her a nod. It was the,I can do it on my own, sisnod. She stood back, wiped her stinging eyes and hugged her father. In fact, she hugged them all tightly. How could she ever think that this shit with Dimitri would end with her life? It would never end unless she did something about it.
Standing back with an arm around her sobbing father, they watched the Pierogi Palace burn. Her parents had started it after they’d married. Both her mother and father met a few years after their immigration, but had been together since. They’d grown up there. Now it was gone. It was like a memory of Hannah Minksi being wiped from the face of the earth.
Misha overheard two firemen speaking behind her.
“Tell you what, lucky that kid had a wet blanket over him, otherwise he’d have burned alive.”
Another responded: “Don’t know how the other dude got out unharmed.”
“Fucked if I know. Where is he? Ask him.”
“Nah, already looked. He’s gone.”
Misha searched the parking lot, now filling with police questioning bystanders. Wyatt wasn’t there. Disappointment made her soul heavy. He was gone. With nothing left to do, she stood with her family and watched the Fire Department shoot water at the only source of income their family had.
Well… it wasn’t their only source.
Thirteen
By the timethe Minski family returned home that evening, Wyatt had tidied the apartment to the best of his ability. Using rusty tools he’d found in the garage, he reinforced the bed and set it back to its original height. The light fixture that fell was in working order, and he re-connected it to the ceiling. After a good Hoover, the only thing out of place was the crack in the wall and the broken doorknob. He’d make a trip to the hardware tomorrow to fix that.
Showered and dressed, he sat at the edge of his bed, staring at the contacts screen on his smart-phone. Thumbing through the list, he hovered over the names of his family. First there were his adoptive parents, Mary and Flint. Parker, his eldest brother and leader of the Deadly Seven. His other siblings made up the rest of the seven: Liza, Tony, Sloan, Griffin, Evan.
Seven.
Once there were eight.
But that was long ago and something they rarely spoke about.
Being only five years old at the time, he didn’t remember much except the lab they were born into, the tiny room they grew up in, and their kind and loving eldest sister, Despair. Evan hadn’t yet been born, and seven of them were squeezed into the living quarters, raised by nuns, experimented on, and surveyed through two-way glass by sick scientists. Their biological mother was the lead geneticist who perhaps felt because she grew them in her womb that she had the right to change their DNA and mix it with other things. Repulsive, unnamed things now swimming in Wyatt’s blood and making him invulnerable to things like fire and knives.
He laughed at the irony.Invulnerable. Where was this power when Sara had slit his throat, ruining his culinary career and his life?
Wyatt studied his phone as Evan’s name scrolled by. Evan had been nothing but honest with Wyatt. He’d warned that Sara was a liar, that she worked for the enemy, but Wyatt had been so eager to have a fiancée, to lead a normal life not born from a lab, that he’d made himself believe Sara was theonefor him. That he could have a family, a career, and children of his own, despite his Yin-Yang tattoo never holding its balanced shape.
His fucking Frankenstein mother programmed their DNA to recognize a person who embodied their exact opposite, someone to balance the sin they were destined to fight, and to make life livable. It all seemed so ridiculous, so outrageous, that none of them had a choice in who they would be with for the rest of their lives. Wyatt had rebelled, heart and soul.
But the heart was the most selfish muscle of all, and the mind was easily fooled.
There was no denying what he was, no escaping it. Mary knew that. It was why she sent all seven of them around the world to learn the art of war for years on end, and why she constantly told them stories of the fabledonethey would meet one day.
He snapped his gaze to the door as it opened.
