Page 105 of Sapphire Tears

“No,” he says flatly in the present, his knuckles whitening as he grips and regrips his gun. “I don’t remember. Just admit it. You just wanted me out of the way so that you could have it all. The power, the money, the fucking glory.”

“Glory?” I repeat furiously. “Is that what you were chasing when you joined Ravil’s ring?”

He stares at me cautiously, eyelid spasming. He’s trying to determine if he should keep gaslighting us or if he should just drop the mask and tell the truth.

He chooses the latter. “I needed money.”

“You could have come to me.”

“Come crawling back to you with a begging bowl?” he demands. “Oh sure, that would have helped the rumors circulating about me. That I was a coward and a pussy. That I couldn’t possibly be Luka Uvarov’s son, because I wasn’t even half the man he was.”

“You were out of the Bratva. Who cares what they were saying about you?”

“I did.” He bristles. “Turns out,Icared. I fucking cared.”

“What did you expect me to do, Adrian? Cut out the tongue of every man who spoke against you? I’d have been the leader of a mute Bratva.”

“You poisoned them against me,” he rasps. “So I made sure to return the favor. I made sure that our mother knew the kind of man you’d become.”

“You fed an innocent woman lies.”

“How does the world look from up on that high horse?” he cackles maniacally. “You stole my woman, and now, you’re trying to steal my child. But that’s not going to happen. June and I belong together.”

“Funny,” I say as casually as I can, even though I can see the beads of fearful sweat dampening the collar of Adrian’s jacket. “Until you heard June and I were getting married, you were content to stay dead.”

His eyebrows knit together. “It takes losing something to figure out how much it means to you.”

“Jesus,” Milana scoffs for the first time in a while, staring at Adrian like he’s a piece of shit stuck to the bottom of her shoe. “So goddamn typical. You haven’t changed a bit. You’re just a sad little boy who wants what his big brother has.”

“Shut up,” he snarls, lifting his arm. “Shut the fuck up, Milana!”

“You’re right, Adrian,” she says, ignoring him. “We were friends once. You saw how much I suffered. You saw what being forced to whore myself out did to me. And then you went and did the same thing to other women. To other girls.”

A shadow passes across his eyes, but he pushes it away. A man like him can’t afford to feel guilt. That kind of emotion has the power to eat you up from the inside, and he’s nothing but dry kindling in search of a spark to end it all.

“It’s a survival game, honey.”

“Survival?” she balks. “It wasn’t about survival. It was aboutyou.Your pride, your ego. Why else would you go to Ravil over your own brother?”

Adrian blusters, but no words pass his lips. His finger is inching closer and closer to the trigger.

“Because he was going to give you back the faction of the Bratva that left,” I guess quietly. “Wasn’t he?”

Adrian meets my eyes. That’s all the confirmation I need. “You kept me in your shadow your entire life,” he accuses. “Under the guise of protection. So that you could take everything and I would have nothing.”

“I gave you what you wanted,” I point out. “It’s not my fault that you chose wrong.”

“He’s not worth it, Kolya,” Milana says bitterly. “Any of it.”

“I know that.”

He looks between the two of us as we talk like he doesn’t exist. He’s always hated that—feeling like the most inconsequential person in the room.

“You know that, do you?” he interrupts. “So what are you going to do about it?”

I can feel Milana’s eyes on me. She’s waiting for me to start fighting back. She’s waiting for me to be the ruthless don I always have been.Crush the uprising. Execute the traitor. Grind every enemy beneath the heel of your boot.

“You wanna know what I’m going to do about it?” I ask softly. I pause, then I say the answer I’ve arrived at again and again and again every time I’ve thought about how this might end. “Not a damn thing.”

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