“Sixteen years of silence, and this is how you greet me?” he answered, the urbane amusement in his voice sending me over the edge.
“Fuck you,” I said, regretting the call, but before I could hang up, he spoke.
“Wait—brother.Sasha. I would never betray you like that.”
“Eva Jackson,” I snarled into the phone, wanting to believe him but unable to wrap my mind around the coincidence.
“Was a gift,” he answered.
“Liar!”
“Nyet,” Dmitri disagreed firmly. No. His tone held none of the smugness I’d expected. “Where can I meet you?” I opened my mouth to refuse, but he interrupted. “Come to my apartment.”
“Dmitri—”
“I’ll send you the location.”
A second later, my phone pinged. I sighed and shouldered my duffle bag.
Dmitri had quit hockey long before I did—the price for ascending through Nikolai Berezin’s bratva as his enforcer here in the States, when we graduated from petty crime. Well, Dmitri graduated. I was drafted into the NHL straight out of high school, and I suppose that was its own betrayal, wasn’t it?
I threw my bag into the back of my SUV and climbed in, breathing deeply and imagining I could still smell Eva’s vanilla and citrus scent, pretending she hadn’t betrayed me and I hadn’t betrayed her in turn.
A large manin a black suit, covered in Russian prison tattoos, met me in the lobby of Dmitri’s building and escorted me to an elevator without saying a word.
Despite the disquiet roiling in my gut, I kept my handsstill while the elevator climbed, well aware video cameras watched my every move.
Sixteen years of silence.
Our paths had crossed, of course. Yorkfield was a metropolis, but the Russian-American community was small. Dmitri had found ways to run into me, only for me to move heaven and earth to avoid speaking with him.
For a moment, I was eighteen again, sitting on the hood of Dmitri’s car after practice, passing a bottle of smuggled vodka back and forth while we planned a job. “You’re going to make it, Sasha,” he’d told me, his face earnest in the setting sun. “You’ll play in the NHL and make us all proud.”
He’d believed in me more than anyone, right up until the moment he’d chosen the bratva over helping me when I needed him most.
My aching loneliness had slowly shifted to anger at the injustice until the only emotion I felt toward him was rage.
Lies, a voice in the back of my head whispered. I fucking missed him.
The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open silently, revealing Dmitri standing a few steps back. He wore a grey suit and a white button-down shirt but no tie. His bright blue eyes glowed with a thousand emotions I couldn’t name, one bisected by a scar that hadn’t been there sixteen years ago.
I stepped out of the elevator. We stared at each other, equal in size, even after all these years. And then, Dmitri flung his arms out and embraced me.
“Brother,” he breathed into my ear as he clutched me. Stunned, I crept my arms up his back until we embraced each other silently. Dmitri’s shoulders shook once, as if he were holding back a sob, before he moved back. “Sasha,” hewhispered, reaching up to touch my face, his eyes red-rimmed.
I remembered why I was here and stepped out of reach before swinging my arm and punching him in the jaw.
Dmitri never saw it coming.
The blow knocked him half a meter back before he recovered, raising his fists at me by instinct before dropping them.
He took a deep breath then stood up straight, rubbing his jaw.
“Your right hook isn’t as powerful as it used to be, old man,” he said with a smile.
Astonished, my jaw dropped.
Dmitri laughed. “Come, cousin. I believe we have decades to catch up on.”