Page 78 of Corruption

I grin. “It’s a close second.”

“The art studio or the assault?” Alik asks.

I shrug. “You decide.”

30

Kiya

“T

here you are,” Isaak says, coming into my room. “I’d wondered where you disappeared off to.”

I shift under the covers of my bed and say, “Yeah. I had to come lay down.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes,” I reply. Isaak looks at me the way his uncle does when I’m not being completely truthful. I sigh. “I mean, I won’t die. But all that sugar and junk from last night hasn’t set well with me. At least I think. Might be my sinuses and allergies. I haven’t completely gotten used to the cold winters here yet. In Georgia, it usually didn’t get cold enough for us to see icy rain, let alone all this constant snow.”

Isaak nods and sits on the bed next to me. “Aunt Nadia has a dream of buying a bunch of land down south. Having a farm with a bunch of animals and living what she calls a simple, ordinary life.”

“A simple, ordinary life in the south is overrated and over-romanticized. Bunch of roaches, humid summers, racists, and everything-phobes. Besides, a simple life seems like the opposite of something Nadia would thrive in.”

“She says it’s for when she’s older. When any children she and my uncle have one day are grown and have their own children and they’re running the business. You’re right that she’d only be restless if she tried something like that now,” Isaak says with a roll of his eyes. “Thanks for yesterday, by the way. It was… It was really nice. The happiest I think any of us have been in a long time.”

“It was your birthday. And it was just a simple cake and some ice cream. I’m sure you’ve had something more extravagant before.”

“I have. But I’ve never had anyone take the time to make it with their own hands specifically for me without my family paying for it somehow. You didn’t have to. But you did. I appreciated it. So did my uncle and aunt. I can tell they really like you,” Isaak says.

I shrug. “It was nothing.”

“It’s everything… which is why I’m giving you this,” Isaak says, holding up a large envelope to me. “It’s the autopsy and coroner’s reports for my grandfather. The fake one and the real one. I checked to make sure. I don’t know if it’ll help you get out of this engagement to my father, but I hope it does. If it does, I still hope…”

“You hope what?”

“I hope that you’ll still choose to be a Vorobev in some other way.”

He’s talking about Nadia and Alik. He knows about us. Maybe not everything, but certainly enough somehow.

I play oblivious and ask, “Are you proposing to me, young man?”

Isaak laughs and rolls his eyes while playfully shoving me in the shoulder. Then he stands and says, “I’ll let you get back to sleeping off your sugar rush.”

“No. You’re fine.”

Isaak shakes his head. “I have to get back home before my dad loses his shit over me being gone too long anyway. See you later.”

He leaves and closes my bedroom door behind him.

I really should go back to resting. I didn’t think I overdid it with the cake and ice cream yesterday, but perhaps having all that sugar on an empty stomach was the bad idea more than how much I ate. However, my curiosity won’t let me rest, and I decide to open the envelope and read the autopsy report, hoping that it’s not in a bunch of scientific and medical terms that I won’t understand without using a dictionary.

I take both of them and look at them side by side.

They’re mostly identical. With Alik’s and Vaughn’s father’s information, where and when he died, and both pointing to outside forces rather than natural causes as the reason for the death. Both from a foreign, outside substance. But it’s the cause of death that’s different and catches my attention.

The fake one, the official one that Isaak must have pulled from some official record, says that the reaction from the body is consistent with poison from an unknown substance that couldn’t be traced. The real one says anaphylactic shock caused by a severe allergic reaction to roses.

I look through the rest of the files to glean anything else about the circumstances of the death. Dinner with Addy back before she and Adrian were married. They were discussing a partnership when suddenly Isaak Vorobev Sr. began to gasp, his body began to seize, and he died before he could get medical assistance.

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