Page 66 of The Darkness is Calling

“No. And stop scaring me with ghosts. They don’t exist.”

“But chocolate exists,” he declares, looking around. “And Artem hid it from me. Well... he told Polina to hide it.”

He begins searching through drawers, as if the woman would leave anything within his reach that easily, while I pour the already hot water over the tea bag in my cup.

“Why did he hide it?”

“Because he is a bastard who says I’m already too restless and don’t need chocolate.”

He huffs, sulking, after closing a drawer where he doesn’t find the much-desired treasure, then scans the room with narrowed eyes.

“I’m going to make them regret stealing my chocolate.”

This time, I laugh softly.

“You should. I support you,” I say, lowering my voice a little in solidarity. “Anything but chocolate.”

“Right?” he exclaims, his face bright enthusiastically.

For a moment, I forget that he is almost my age and not some wild child barely ten years old.

“He doesn’t understand me. And he’s been doing this for a long time. Once, heliterally took my cake away from me on my own birthday! Said I’d already had one slice and that it had too much chocolate.”

He shakes his head and smacks his lips in dissatisfaction.

“To this day, he has never apologized for ruining my twentieth birthday.”

I laugh even harder.

Who still has chocolate cake at twenty?

Sasha, obviously.

“That was ugly of him,” I try to empathize with him. “He should have apologized.”

But Sasha snorts.

“Voron? Apologize? HA! Never going to happen. He couldn’t say those words even when he broke Mother’s vase, the one passed down from generation to generation from some great-greatgreat-something, and poor Mama was crying over the shards. You will never hear those words leave his mouth.”

His words collide with my memories.

With the way Artem apologized to me many times that night, when he grabbed me by the throat.

I did not imagine it. He truly did it, and I cannot believe what Sasha is saying now.

“It’s hard for me to believe he never apologizes. Maybe you just haven’t heard him.”

He looks straight at me.

“Believe me. He doesn’t. Especially since he became Pakhan. At most, he shrugs like he’s saying, it is what it is, and that’s all.”

The information leaves me confused, and I try to understand why, in my case, Artem was different.

Sasha opens another drawer and curses in Russian several times.

“The bastard! I bet he has it in his bedroom.” He immediately looks at me. “Did he have any in there?”

“No. Not from what I saw.”