“Half of the camping area was impassible that spring.”
“Then why the fuck bring the kids up there?” Aleksio says.
I squeeze his arm.
Ronson defends the Knutsons, telling us how they’d adopted three special-needs children over the years. “They were good parents, upstanding.” He tells us how Donald Knutson owned the hardware store and some properties in town. The kids would build everything with him, but Keith was wild. They had a lot of trouble with him. He’d fight with the neighborhood kids. He hurt some of them badly.
I go to Aleksio and rest my hands on his shoulders. My heart is breaking for him.
“He had a lot of…spirit,” Lila says. “He was protective of his sister.”
“Keith always went too far.”
“His name is not Keith,” Aleksio says softly. “Fuck. They named him Keith?”
Aleksio was so sure Kiro was alive.
He turns back to the album, tearing through for more shots, like he might find them in there. He does—Kiro at age seven or so, looking a lot like Aleksio. The big eyes, the dark lashes, the lush, dark curls.
Tito comes down. “What?”
I shake my head.
Tito stills.
“What’d you see?” Aleksio barks.
“What you’d expect,” Tito says. “It’s not ketchup.”
Viktor comes down. The second he sees Aleksio’s expression, his tough-guy beaten-up face softens with pain.
“Gone.” Aleksio stands. “They say he died. Eight years old. But he still feels alive…” He presses his hand to his heart.
“Brat.” Viktor’s eyes shine as he covers the distance between them.
Viktor pulls Aleksio into a bear hug. Aleksio slams his face into his brother’s shoulder.
“I still feel him,” Aleksio whispers. “He can’t be dead.”
Viktor clutches Aleksio, speaking in Russian. It sounds almost prayerlike.
They stand there, holding each other, these dangerous, lost men who love each other with every fiber. I feel like I’m on the outside looking in at something beautiful and tragic.
I catch Lila’s eye. “Brothers,” I whisper. “These are Keith’s older brothers.”
She has a strange expression. At first I think she doesn’t comprehend, but then I think it’s something else. Like there’s something more she has to say.
“What is it, Lila?” I ask.
Ronson shoots her a look.
“Sad, that’s all,” Lila says.
Aleksio pulls away from Viktor’s hug.
Viktor grabs his brother’s shoulders. There’s this long silence between them. I’m getting nervous.
“Let’s get bloody, brother,” Viktor says.
“No!” I say. “Think!”
Aleksio takes a ragged breath. His pain feels like cut glass in my throat. I want desperately to go to him, to hold him, to press my beating heart to his, to say, I’m here.
But he’s beyond my reach now.
“The old man took our brother,” Viktor hisses. “I say we start a trail of destruction that does not end until we hit him.”
“You guys!” I say.
“We have soldiers, weapons. We go to war this minute.”
“No. Wait.” Aleksio places his hands on top of his brother’s hands, trapping them there on his shoulders. “We do this smart. We’re not fucking puppets. We don’t let emotions make us into puppets.”
“You sound like Konstantin.”
He pulls away. “I say, we don’t let Kiro’s death make us stupid. Let’s let his death make us smart. Let’s let his death make us dangerous. We don’t just take blood, brother. We take everything, now.”
“How about if Kiro’s death makes you want a better world?” I say.
Aleksio isn’t hearing that. He lets Viktor go and flips through the photo album to one of the pictures of Kiro. I try to catch his eye, but he won’t look at me. I know the one he wants to take—Kiro on a tricycle.
Ronson tries to stop him from taking it, but you can imagine how that goes.
While Ronson’s distracted, I write Aleksio’s number on a tiny shred of napkin for Lila. I put it back in her napkin shred pile. “If anything comes to mind,” I whisper. Because it really seems like there was something she wanted to say.
I’m thinking she might have something. Mementos, maybe? Something she doesn’t want Ronson to know about. I have to get away while I can. But maybe Aleksio will hear from her.
“Thank you for your answers,” Aleksio says, voice calm, but inside he’s wild.
I can feel Aleksio like we’re one person. He kicks down the sandcastles and I put them back up.
“And if I see any police sketches out there looking like us? If you breathe a word of any of this to anyone? Life as you know it is over. Repeat it after me, Ronson.”
“Life is over,” Ronson says.
“Do not doubt our fury,” Viktor adds with a snarl, turning and heading for the mudroom with Tito and Yuri. I hear the door to the garage door open. Out in the garage, a car door slams.
Aleksio hasn’t moved. He stares out at the river. Kiro would’ve played out there. Explored out there. Aleksio is wired up with a raw energy that scares me.
“Ready?” I say, pulling his hand. I say goodbye to Lila and Ronson, like good manners might make up for anything, and pull him out of the kitchen and into the mudroom, past the line of coat hooks and mitten and boot cubbies. Just before we reach the door to the garage, he stops, nearly pulling my arm from the socket.
“What?”
He stumbles toward me, seeming out of his mind, and pushes me to the doorframe. He presses his forehead against mine, his breathing heavy.
He grabs the back of my head, like he can’t bear for our foreheads to stop touching. He’s rubbed raw, a violent man in pain. “I wanna let loose,” he whispers. “I want to kill everyone.”
I grab hold of his hair. “You’re better than that.”
“Get out of your fantasyland, Mira. I’m not.”
“Fuck you,” I say. “You are better than that.”
He looks up, expression torn. Does he hear me? Everything in his world is raging full blast.
So I say it again. “Fuck you. You are beautiful. You still have your humanity, and that’s what’s beautiful about you.”
“Kiro’s dead.”
“But Viktor’s not dead. Tito’s not dead. Konstantin’s not. I’m not. Right?”
His grip on me tightens. He presses me hard to the wall. “I need you, baby.”
You have me, I think.
The thought scares me to death.
The way he looks at me now, it’s like he hears my thoughts.
That scares me, too.
He smashes into me with a savage kiss, flattening me, claiming me. He shoves his tongue into my mouth. He shoves his pelvis into mine.
I grab onto him, letting him take me, taking him back. All his emotion goes into that kiss.
I want him like crazy.
He pulls away, panting. “You’re mine,” he says suddenly. A feral man’s way of saying I love you.
My heart pounds. I feel wild, like the world is changing.
Or maybe it’s going right.