Page 108 of Claim Me
Our talks keep being stubbornly short. I’d even call them polite on his side, but they stay formal. He avoids anything personal, but… despite all that, there’s something there the entire time. Something under the surface I can’t easily explain.
It feels like aconstantawareness from Blue directed toward me.
Observing, analyzing, watching.
It’s pretty peculiar.
Subtle, never intrusive, more like he always has one eye on me. That’s how it feels, as if he’s always mindful of my presence, like I’m a fixed element of his surroundings, something that automatically gets a certain percentage of his attention.
There are moments when we’re in the same room, a meeting space or a conference room, and I catch him in brief, fleeting instances when he thinks I’m not paying attention. Sometimes I see it reflected in glass surfaces, and sometimes I use my 5-sec ability, letting myself glimpse a version of events where I suddenly turn my head and catch him looking. Of course, I never actually do it. I don’t want to startle him.
Even when I use the treadmill in the evenings and he’s on a sun lounger, I still catch those brief glances he throws my way over the top of his tablet. He can’t fully hide them.
It’s interesting; no matter how I look at it, I can’t really say that Blue’s ignoring me.
???
Finally, the week comes to an end, and Marlow’s visit arrives.
Exactly at 2 pm, my brother shows up at Blue’s skyscraper. James brings him in, pausing to let out a loud sneeze along the way.
The moment I see Marlow, I realize he doesn’t look well. He seems thinner, pale, subdued. His face doesn’t even break into a smile when he sees me.
I introduce him to Blue, who invites us to join him for a meal.
Apparently, he treats Marlow a little differently than Veyron, more like close family. Officially… he is Marlow’s brother-in-law after all. The contract we signed carries the legal weight of a marriage, which makes them ‘family’.
Blue politely inquires how Marlow's studies are going, and my brother answers in a gentle, equally polite, though somewhat dimmed voice, mentioning that he’s in his final year of veterinary school and will be graduatingsoon.
Blue asks a few questions about his faculty, and it turns out he knows one of the professors who taught Marlow a course related to animal genetics.
Then the conversation shifts to our family’s history. Marlow tells Blue that our dad fled Russia because members of our family were being hunted there.
That clearly catches Blue’s interest.
Marlow explains, though his tone remains muted, like he’s only halfway present.
He talks about a legend in our family, that several generations ago one of our ancestors escaped from a secret laboratory, part of some classified Russian government program, where he had been treated inhumanely, kept in cages, subjected to strange experiments.
After escaping, he married and started a family somewhere deep inland in Russia. For nearly a hundred years, his all descendants lived in the same village.
Then one of them, our grandfather, wasn’t careful enough. Stories began to spread around him. Supposedly, he could turn into something powerful and strange. One day, he was caughtin the middle of a transformation. The locals attacked everyone in our grandfather’s family and forced them to flee. The Ivanovs scattered in different directions, losing contact with one another. My dad and one of his brothers escaped to the States, but the fate of the rest remains unknown.
Blue listens attentively. "Transformation? So he was a purple alpha?"
"Not just that. He was something far stranger. More animal-like," Marlow admits reluctantly.
"They called it ‘oboroten’," I add gloomily, already convinced Blue will think Marlow is cuckoo and that our family legends are just silly.
But I don’t see any of this in him. Instead, he rubs his chin and asks, "And what exactly does that mean in his case?"
There’s a sharp curiosity in his eyes, like his scientist side has just found something to feed on.
"It basically means a shapeshifter in Russian folklore. In our grandfather’s case, it referred more narrowly to a werewolf, since that was his… transformed form. But the word ‘oboroten’ on its own comes from a root meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to transform.’ So it has a broader meaning."
I feel silly explaining it like this, like it’s a ‘real’ thing and not a family legend. Marlow has his head low, staring at his hands.
But Blue’s face does not show any disbelief or contempt; he just raises his brows in surprise, then nods slowly. "When I was in college, I came across a research paper translated from Russian. The author described an old experiment he had heard about, where scientists used alien genes and tried to combine them with the genes of local animals, taking advantage of the potency of those foreign sequences to mix them and introduce them into human bodies through gene therapy. It was a nichepaper. I read it more as a curiosity. I didn’t think it was actually possible, especially since it was quite old."
