Page 143 of Beautiful Obsessions
I stood with my back to the door, staring out the window, one hand curled loosely at my side.My body looked whole now.Strong.Rebuilt.A beast dragged back from the edge and taught how to stand again through sheer willpower, fuelled by hatred and a thirst for revenge.
But I remembered lying here.Face down.Breath gone.Pain so bright it had turned the world white.I remembered the gunshot splitting the air before I even had the chance to turn around.
Viktor hadn’t faced me.He had put a bullet in my back like the coward he was.A father should have looked his son in the eyes before murdering him.Mine hadn’t even given me that.
The door opened behind me.
I didn’t move.I knew who it was before the first breath changed the room.
Archie.
My brother.My blood.My only unfinished prayer.
I had waited for this moment for years and still, when it came, something inside me tightened so hard it almost hurt worse than the bullet had.
His footsteps stopped just inside the room.
A weighted silence followed.A pulse.
I could feel him staring at my back.I could almost imagine the look on his face before I turned.
There would be shock first.Then horror.
I had thought about what I would say.For years, in hospital beds and safe houses, in fever and pain, in nights when my legs would not answer me and my body felt like a prison built by Viktor’s hand, I had rehearsed a hundred versions of this moment.
None of them survived the sound of Archie breathing behind me.
How did a man explain to his brother that the death he had mourned had been a lie?
How did he stand in front of someone he loved and say,I let you grieve me because surviving required cruelty?
How did I tell him that I had clawed my way back from death only to find out he had almost followed me there?
I turned.Slowly.And there he was.
Archie stood frozen near the door.
Not the boy I had left behind.The years in-between had carved him into something sharper.Leaner.Harder around the eyes.There was Italy in his clothes, Russia in his bones, and grief sitting between us like an unwelcome visitor.
His face had gone pale.His mouth parted, but no sound came out.
For one moment, he looked young again.
My little brother.
The one who used to follow me through these halls with bruised knuckles.He had hated being protected but looked for me in every room.The little brother who had stood beside me through hell because hell was easier when we endured it together.
Then his expression changed.
The shock cracked.Grief rose.And behind it came rage.
But I was glad, because he was alive enough to hate me.That was more mercy than I deserved.
“Hello, bratishka,” I said.
His eyes dragged over me.My face.My shoulders.My chest.My legs.Like he was looking for the seams.The trick.The wound that would prove I was not real.
“You’re dead,” he said.
