Page 43 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"I am your brother," he said. "Alek Sorokin."
"I don't remember anything."
"I can tell that from the way you are looking at me," he said. "We have been looking for you a long time, brother."
"How am I supposed to trust you?"
He paused. He looked at the headstones for one beat. He looked back at me.
"I do not know how to give you the trust you are asking for," he said. "If you remembered me, you would know I am not the brother who throws sweet words at you. I am the brother who buries the man that touches my blood. You are coming with me. We will both protect you."
"We are not going anywhere."
"Do not be stubborn." He nodded once, a small motion, at the two stones in front of me. "Do you want the girl to follow them? There are people who hunt you when you are at your worst, Daniil. You are not a regular man and you are not a safe one to be near. The longer you stand at this grave, the more likely the next one is hers."
I looked down at Rhea behind my leg. Her eyes were very wide and very fixed on the boots of the man on the path. I looked at the soft earth in front of me. I looked back at the man in the long black coat and the working blue eye that had not moved off my face since he said my name.
I decided.
"If anything happens to her," I said, "I will find a way to remember who I was just to break you."
His mouth lifted on one side. A small, slow smile. The kind a man gives a man he has been waiting to see again.
"Spoken like family," he said.
The car at the edge of the cemetery was long and dark and parked the way men park cars when they intend to leave quickly. The driver did not open the door for us. He left it for Alek. Alek opened the back and stepped aside.
I lifted Rhea in first. She sat in my lap with the bear at her chest. My hand went to her shoulder and stayed there. She was small enough that her braid lay across the back of my wrist.
The driver pulled out of the lot. The cemetery slid out of the side window. I did not look at the headstones again. I had already memorized the angle.
I watched the road through the front windshield. I counted the turns. I had been counting things for three months. The number of plates on the rack. The number of steps from the porch to the truck. The number of seconds between the click of the kettle and the steam. It was how I kept the edges of the day where I could see them.
The driver had the rearview tilted a little to the right. He used it more than he used the side mirrors. I noticed the angle without meaning to, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that I had sat in the back of cars like this before. That the angle of that mirror was a thing a certain kind of driver did because he was watching the road behind him for something specific.
Rhea did not say anything. She watched the trees go by and held the bear tighter when the road got rough.
The car turned off the highway onto a road I did not know and then off that road onto a longer one that ran between two stretches of bare field. We came up to a fieldstone wall and a gate. The gate opened for us without anyone getting out. The gravel under the tires changed sound when we crossed onto the drive.
There was a willow at the edge of the property. Bare for the season. The shape of it was the shape of a tree someone had planted on purpose.
The house at the end of the drive was bigger than I had been ready for. I had not put a number on what I had been ready for, but whatever the number was, the house was past it.
"It's so huge," Rhea whispered.
"Stay close to me," I said.
"I'm not letting go."
The car rolled to a stop in front of a wide set of steps and the front door of the house opened before I had the handle.
Three women came down the steps at once.
A brunette in a soft cream sweater first, on the balls of her bare feet against the cold stone. Behind her a smaller woman with a long dark braid down her back, moving fast but careful, the way a person moves who has put other people back together for a living. A third behind them with sharp eyes and a mouth already set against the moment, the kind of look a person wears when they have decided not to cry in front of a stranger.
They were on me before I had taken a full breath. Three pairs of arms at once. Hair against my jaw. The smell of perfume I did not know and the smell of laundry soap I did not know. A small sound I did not have a name for, half a sob, more than one mouth saying my name at the same time.
I stood inside the hug without lifting my arms. Rhea was half between my knees and her small hand had not let go of mine. The bear was pressed between my hip and her shoulder.
