Page 101 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

“Don’t you want to know?”

“Know what?”

“To know what I know, Vito. To know what has happened.”

I sigh, long and slow. It’s taking all of my willpower just to follow along with this conversation and the billion thoughts buzzing through my head like hornets. I don’t have the mental capacity to play Sergio’s guessing games. He wants badly for me to take the bait, judging by the grin playing at his thin lips.

“Tell me if you’re going to tell me,” I finally manage to say. “Or don’t if you’re not. I don’t really give a damn one way or the other anymore.”

Sergio’s face twitches. He catches himself a moment later, but I saw the mask slip. For the briefest of seconds, I saw my little brother in him. It’s gone as quickly as it came.

“Do you think you are brave for staring death in the face?” he asks me. “Do you think this makes you a man?”

“I don’t think I’m anything,” I reply flatly. The room is swimming in and out like a TV with a bad connection. One minute, the lines of the objects before me are clear and distinct. The next, everything fuzzes together and sound becomes muffled and the only clear thing I can see are Sergio’s eyes, boring into me. My head is a lava pit of pain. The straps are compressing the veins in my forearms and calves, so I feel the staticky tingle of restricted blood flow in my extremities. All of it combines to make this feel less than real. I know I’m not dreaming—the pain in my head is far too intense for that—but it doesn’t feel like reality either. Somewhere in between, neither here nor there.

“You are many things, Vito,” Sergio purrs. It seems like he’s switching gears, or at least trying to. He slides from anger and pain to the smooth acidity of a man who knows he holds all the advantages. I have been in his shoes before, with an enemy bound and helpless before me. “You are a fool. You are a coward. You are a pawn.”

He wants me to argue back, or at least to deny the accusations. But he doesn’t know that I agree with him. I fought it for so long. Why fight anymore? If I wasn’t those things, I wouldn’t be tied up in a chair in my own home, looking up at my supposedly dead brother and wondering when he is going to kill me.

“Why aren’t you dead?” I ask finally, in a voice that sounds far too weak and timid to be mine. “I watched you die.”

“Wrong!” he snarls with a sudden twist of anger. The knuckles of his right hand, the good one, turn white as he grips the armchair as hard as he can. “You didn’t watch a fucking thing. You left me.”

“We had no choice.”

“You always had a choice, Vito. You chose wrong. If you were smart, you would’ve chosen to step aside a long time ago. You aren’t cut out for this life.”

I think of Milaya’s kiss pressed into the back of my hand and I know at once that what Sergio is saying is true. If something so small and soft could split me in two, then it is obvious that I am not made up of don stuff. I am cast from weaker material. Tin, not steel. She broke me. Now my own brother is going to kill me. It all seems so inevitable.

“Perhaps not,” I say, as much to myself as to Sergio.

“Oh, Vito,” he murmurs. He scoots his chair closer to mine so that our knees are almost touching, and reaches out to force my chin up. His eyes find mine and lock on with what looks at first to be tenderness, but is actually the coldest malice I have ever seen in a human gaze. “You think that you are completely broken already. I want to tell you something: you are not even close to rock bottom yet. Listen to what I am about to tell you and listen very carefully. When it is all over, you will know what it is to be utterly ruined.”

Then he starts to tell me, and by the time he finishes, I realize one thing:

He was right.

* * *

“Let me ask you, Vito: do you know what it feels like to watch your brothers leave you to die? I planned everything from the very beginning, and yet I still cannot describe to you how that moment hurt. Everything we suffered through as children was nothing compared to the sight of your car receding into the darkness. You left me to die at the hands of our enemies. But that is okay. It gave me resolve. I knew then that I was on the right course.

“You did not deserve what you had been given. By a mere accident of birth, a whole empire was destined to become yours. You were never made of the right stuff though, were you?” He slaps my cheek lightly. “Eh? Look at me. You are soft. You are weak. You are pathetic. Even now, you cannot hold your head up and look me in the eye.”

Sergio’s eyes sparkle in the firelight. “Father was weak too, though in a different way. He thought he could control me. Mother knew best. She was right to kill herself all those years ago. She was right when she thought that she had given birth to a devil. I am exactly that and more. But that is whyIdeserve whatyouhave.”

“I killed him, you know,” he remarks casually.

I look up at him in shock.

“What?”

“Father. I killed him.”

“No. We saw what happened. The Russians …”

He laughs callously. “The Russians were working for me, idiot. Why do you think they knew we were coming? Why do you think they were ready for us?” He shakes his head sadly. “You really didn’t figure that out? My God, you are even stupider than I thought.”

“No.” That’s all I can manage to say. My vision is swimming, things in the room blurring and reconstituting and blurring again. I hurt so badly, from head to toe.

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