Page 74 of The Wrong Monster

“What?”

“The business.”

I turn toward him fully.

“You know what I mean,” he hurries to add, looking somehow even more ridiculous in the stupid neon vest and hardhat.

“No. I don’t.”

He sets his coffee on the ground, then straightens and takes a deep breath as if this is some kind of intervention.

“You could’ve walked away. You could’ve built something else. You could’ve had what I have.”

Something hot moves through my chest. “You think I chose this?”

“I think you made a choice.”

“My father was dead.”

“Our father was dead. I was there too.” His voice is sharper now, throwing me back into the past. I remember how quickly and unexpectedly we lost our old man, Batya, thanks to an aneurysm and a second one four months later. The final one.

Timur almost never gets angry with me, but now I can see it surfacing: the same frustration that built up and burst out of him for two years after Batya passed. He was young at the time, only in his early twenties, and I was already in my thirties, running Arthur and his men while Batya focused on the finances.

“You were the oldest,” he continues, “but that doesn’t mean you were the only one who could’ve stepped up.”

I stare at him. Because he’s right, and I hate him a little for saying it. But he also never made a move to step up. To shoulder any of this with me, at my side. Instead, he met Natalie and had a gorgeous wedding and learned to ski, and had a child. His day-to-day work is spent lazing from site to site, checking that it’s OSHA compliant, and joking with the men there.

Below us, a machine roars to life.

“You could have walked away,” he mutters into his coffee cup. But the sound of the site waking up isn’t enough to drown it out, and I laugh. There’s nothing warm in it.

“Walk away?” I turn toward him, letting the cold amusement settle over my face. “Do you have any idea what happens to this family if I walk away?”

Timur’s jaw tightens. “You’ve convinced yourself you’re the only one who could do it.”

“No. I’ve spent years proving it. You never even learned how to shoot a gun, Timur. They always scared you, remember?”

Below us, a truck groans into motion. Men shout to one another across the dirt as machinery begins waking the site, engines rumbling beneath our feet. I gesture toward the construction below.

“That house you live in? This business paid for it. As did everything we buried in the dirt.”

“I know.”

“Your cars. Your investments. Your daughter’s future.”

“I said, I know.”

“The legitimate side exists because the other side built it.”

His expression hardens, and he crumples the coffee cup and tosses it to the dirt. “And the other side is exactly why you’ll never be satisfied. You can’t stop, Vasily, and this can’t go on forever. If not Mikhail now, then you, soon.”

I stare at him, cold dread drenching my chest. Surely Timur can’t be involved…in…?

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’ll never become legitimate, Vasily.” A crane swings overhead, metal groaning against metal. “You could have everything. You could walk away from all of this, but you won’t.”

“I don’t need your moral assessment.”