Page 99 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

They take us back to the castle and throw us in a cell. My father is in there too. The life is draining from him one drop of blood at a time. I touch his hand and his fingers tighten around mine. It is the tiniest bit of comfort, but at least it is something. Maybe it is the last thing.

After that, the shock catches up to me, and all I know is darkness.

28

Vito

The only thing I know with certainty is that I am very badly hurt.

Everything else is hazy at best.

The woods … We ran, my brothers and I, the Volkovs in tow, those fucking monsters … Sergio, the cavern … None of it makes sense; none of it adds up. My head aches so badly, white-hot intensity, a sun burning me up in the back of my skull.

I’m remembering things that happened fifteen years ago and things that never happened at all, and I don’t even know where to start with deciphering fact from fiction. I see Audrey, I see Milaya, I see my father, I see my brother, and all of them whirl back and forth in my mind’s eye like people dancing just outside the light cast by a huge bonfire. They flicker in and out of the darkness, looking different each and every time, and the shadows they cast on the ground behind them are monstrous and grotesque.

“He’s going to die,” I hear. I try to force my eyes open, but it doesn’t work. Even the thin trickle of moonlight coming in from somewhere far above me is agony, like a needle piercing my eyeball. I grimace in pain and take a deep breath to try again.

“No, he’s not.”

“Yes, he fucking is.”

“Not if I can help it.”

I don’t know whose voice is whose. It doesn’t matter though. They’re right—I am going to die. I can feel my life seeping out of me like water returning to the soil. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, all that bullshit. I’ve never believed in anything but the here and now. But as I lie here, feeling the cold hardness of rock against my spine, I wonder if I was as wrong about heaven and hell as I was about everything else in my life. It turns out that I never understood anything at all. Too little, too late. Fuck it though. Fuck it all. Nothing matters anymore.

“Vito, can you hear me?”

This time, I know the pain awaiting me when I open my eyes. It hurts just as bad, but because I am ready for it, I manage to pry them open. Faces float above me. Dante, Leo, Mateo. My brothers. What is left of them. So much humanity has drained from their faces.

I failed them. It was my job to guide them, to protect them, and I did the exact opposite. I brought the hellhounds right to our fucking doorstep. I was the weakest link. Me, not them. At least I am the one bearing the brunt of the agony, or so it seems.

I want to talk. I want to tell them how sorry I am, that I understand all of this was my fault. But my lips don’t want to work.

“He’s losing it,” Leo says.

“It’s a traumatic brain injury,” replies Mateo. “His brain is swelling. We have to find a way to relieve the pressure.”

Leo grimaces. “How the fuck would we do that? We’re trapped in our own goddamn cells. It’s not going to work.”

Dante says nothing. He looks utterly catatonic. A sleepwalking zombie. I try to reach out and touch him, but my hand doesn’t cooperate any more than my lips did. I am like a circuit board that has been dunked in the ocean. Nothing works. Nothing makes sense.

Father used to joke that he wanted to die while balls-deep in the wives of his enemies. Even when I was a thirteen-year-old, I knew that was a crude request. But the truth was that I never thought about dying at all. I assumed that, when my time came, it would just be lights out immediately, as swift and sudden as a power outage. No time to prepare or to stage the scene. JustGame Overflashing across the screen. Then darkness.

This is painfully drawn-out though. That feeling of being pulled back towards the source that made me is uncanny and yet undeniable. I know that I am dying. Every cell of me knows. And it wants to rage against the dying of the light, like that old poem said to do. That’s what I was trained to do. That’s what I was taught.

But fighting has become so exhausting.

How many years have I spent raging already? Far too many. I raged against the loss of my mother, of Audrey, of my innocence. I raged against my father’s cruelty. I raged against my own weaknesses. And as I lie here in this dungeon cell with my brothers arguing above me, I realize something:

I lost every one of those battles.

So why the hell would I think that I have any chance of winning this one?

I start to let my eyes flutter closed again. But before I do, I glance into the corner and see Milaya. She is hunched over the body of her father. I cannot tell whether or not he is alive. I wonder if my shot landed where I intended it to land. I wonder if I’ll ever get the chance to find out. That doesn’t matter either, I suppose, though I can’t help but be curious.

She glances back at me and I see those green eyes flash in the moonlight and my heart seizes in my chest as painfully as the back of my head throbs. I’ve seen a look like that only once before: the night I shut Audrey out of the castle. It is hot love and cold fury swirling together. She hates me and yet she cannot bear to let me die.

I know the feeling.

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