Page 45 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
The three women had already taken Rhea toward the kitchen. I made her promise. I went to one knee in the hall in front of her and I made her promise three times.
"You call me if you need me."
"I will."
"I am one room away. You shout my name and I am there."
"I will," she said again. "Pete. I will."
I let her go. I stood up. I followed my brothers into a room off the hall.
It was long and low and lined on two walls with books. A long table ran the length of it. Three chairs were pulled out at one end. There was a folder on the table.
"Sit," Alek said.
I sat.
Alek opened the folder.
Inside, laid out the way a man lays things out when he wants you to pick them up one at a time, were a driver's license, a passport, a bank card, and two photographs.
The license said Daniil Sorokin. The face on the license was a face I did not know. Clean jaw. Eyes the same gray-green as the man across the table from me. The mouth set the way a man sets his mouth for a camera he does not respect. I looked at the face for a long time. I did not find anything behind it.
The passport said the same name. The stamps inside were stamps in countries I could not place on a map without trying.
The bank card had the same name embossed across it. I touched the raised letters with the side of my thumb. The thumb knew the shape of the letters. The man did not.
The two photographs were the part I sat with longest. In the first I was younger. In the second I was holding the camera and the camera was turned around. The hands on the camera in the second photograph were hands like mine. The knuckles. The way the index finger lay along the body of the lens. I knew those hands the way I knew the inside of my own coat.
I do not know that face. I know those hands.
"Your name is Daniil Sorokin," Alek said. "You are our youngest brother. You went off the road in your own car three months ago. Brakes were cut. The car was rolled into a tree. Wesearched for ninety days. We found nothing." He let a beat sit between us. "We are still trying to find the man who cut the line."
"Are you sure I am this man?" I said.
"We have known you since the day you were born, brother," Mikhail said, gentle.
"I do not remember a single one of you."
Ivan spoke from the wall where he had set himself. "We know."
It was dry and it was not cruel. It landed where it was supposed to.
I told them about the elderly couple. The road they had found me on. The wool of the bandage Grandma had wrapped around my head with her own hand. The three months at the kitchen table. The little girl with the bear and the two braids and the way she said brother. The two stones at the cemetery.
I told them about the note.
I said the line on the note word for word.
Mikhail's mouth tightened around his teeth.
"Do not say that line again," Alek said. "Not out loud in this house."
"Why?"
"Because it is from a man we are going to bury."
I sat with that for a moment. I had been carrying the question since the porch, and the question wanted out, and I let it.
