I considered going home first, but didn’t want to prolong this, so I headed to the club, nodding at a couple of familiar faces but not slowing down until I reached Christoph. He’d been drinking but seemed lucid enough.
“I was just about to call you, Anton,” he said, slumping down in his chair.
“Here I am,” I said.
“Good. I have something for you, but you first.”
“Do you have a problem with the nurse?” I said, for some reason choosing not to use her name. It felt wrong somehow to utter her name in his presence.
Christoph laughed as he regarded me. “So you like her? You fuck her yet?”
“Is there a problem, Christoph?” I said, my face muscles tense with my frown.
“You are,” he said, wagging a finger at me.
Anyone else, and I would have had him in a chokehold, but I held back, stared at him until he was quiet. When I had his attention, I said, “Bring any issues with her to me.”
He lifted a brow and tilted his head, seeming surprised. “You’re giving me an order?”
“Think of it as a friendly request,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from reflecting my rage, but still hopeful that I could avoid escalating things between us, though I would if he left me no choice. There would be no compromise.
Not about her.
“Huh. A friendly request. Speaking of,” he said, shifting subjects, “I need you to handle someone.”
“Who and why?”
“Does it matter?”
I saw my error immediately. Implicit in the question was disobedience, the kind that his father wouldn’t have tolerated, the kind that Christoph Junior couldn’t either if he hoped to survive as leader.
“No,” I said finally, the word like sawdust in my throat.
“Good,” he said, and then he gave me the name.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “And the nurse?”
He shrugged. “I’ll bring any problems with her to you.”
Lily
I’d tossed and turned all night.
I’d done the same countless nights before, had come to expect these sleepless nights. The cause, though, that was the new thing. I’d called to check on Christoph, and Adela said he was fine. I was free for the afternoon, which meant I had time to do something I dreaded.
I dressed slowly and took the long way, opting to skip the second bus and walk to the center. The inevitable couldn’t be avoided, but I was in no hurry to see him.
It was strange, a feeling I’d never thought I’d have. Visiting Braden, seeing what he had become, was fuel for my soul, had given me purpose, a reason for being, for more than half my life.
Until him.
Being with Anton was a revelation, one that had shaken everything I knew and everything I believed to its very foundation. He had changed me, for good or for ill I couldn’t say, but he’d done it all the same. And he’d made me think of something beyond Braden.
Beyond vengeance.
I stopped at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. When it flipped to green and the Walk sign flashed, it occurred to me that Anton had done much the same thing. A switch had been flipped, and like that, everything that had seemed important, everything that had mattered, had fallen away.
A voice in my mind whispered my shame. Told me that I’d let sex, the unnamable but undeniable pull that drove me toward him, allow me to toss aside my goals, the justice, the vengeance, that my brother deserved.
Worse yet, I’d had done so for a person like the man who had broken Braden, done so for the child of the man who had ruined my life before it had even begun.
Anton told no lies about who he was, what he did, and I respected that. But that respect didn’t transcend the hypocrisy of it all. He was one of the ones I was meant to destroy, that I had dedicated my life to destroying.
And I had capitulated, fully and totally.
As much as I wished otherwise, as much as I knew Braden would never have forsaken me as I was him, that didn’t change the facts.
I loved him.
Loved him enough to go back on my word.
And now I had to tell my brother, hope that wherever he was, he would forgive me.
Lily
The parking lot was half empty when I arrived, and though that could have been testament to the hour, I knew it wasn’t that. This lot was always half empty, this center a place for those forgotten, cast aside. How many years had I walked through those doors, stood in silent judgment of the people who left their loved ones here, been so proud of myself because at least I came to visit?
I wasn’t judging today.
My breath hitched as I walked through the doors, my mind reeling with the weight of what I was about to do.
“You’re early this week,” the orderly said with his lascivious smile.