“Sure,” I indulge him, “give me a tutorial on triangulating — I’m sure the slavers will put things on hold for us while we educate ourselves.”
Felix rolls his eyes and starts typing on his computer after I slide my phone to him on the table with Maggie’s number pulled up.
I spend a few minutes just pacing around the room while I wait on Felix, but before long, Liv gets up and heads into my room, flicking on the bathroom light and heading inside. I look after her a moment before Felix gets my attention with a click of his tongue.
He nods in her direction, raising an eyebrow at me. “She okay?” he says in a low tone.
I take a few long moments before responding. “She will be okay. She’s... taken in quite a lot in the past day and a half.” And though that much is true, what I’m really worried about is that I’m the one whose traumatized her most of all. Not long ago, just a few hours, she said I was a hero, and for that brief window of time, I felt something I never had before.
But now she knows the truth. I’ve never been a hero, and no matter what I do to atone for my past, it will never be enough. Not for her, and certainly not for me.
Frowning, Felix nods curtly and gets back to his work. As he does, I stand up and head into my room after Liv, waiting by my bed for her to get out.
The door opens, and she stops short as soon as she sees me, standing in the doorway to the bathroom and looking away from me, unsure what to do with herself as I turn my gaze up to her.
There are a few moments of awkward silence between us before either of us says anything, but something feels so...wrong about leaving her here without a word between us, without some closure.
“Liv, I…” I start, closing my mouth and frowning as words fail me momentarily. “I can’t change anything about my past. I wish to god that I could, but…”
She isn’t looking at me, just standing in the doorway with her gaze at the ground. I can feel the pain in her heart. She desperately wants to look back up at me, but after everything we shared last night, after everything she’s been through, I can’t blame her for her reticence.
“When I was growing up,” I start slowly, “I had no parents. In America, such a start is incomparable. In my home city of Yakutsk, it is a near death sentence. The winters are harsher than anywhere else in the world, and the people can be just as cold to each other. I knew so little warmth in my life that I could never even begin to imagine what it might be like to share a bond with another person. In the orphanage where I spent my early boyhood, we were always in competition.” I almost smile at the memory, though most of them feel so distant now, after I’ve come through so much.
“We fought against one another, we raced each other, we stole from the administrators and compared our loot with one another. It felt like that was expected of us. We had to compete to be the best, in hopes that we would one day be adopted by some kind soul. I had only one person who I could call ‘friend’ during that part of my life.” I take a deep breath. I haven’t spoken of this in a very long time. I can feel Liv’s quiet gaze on me, but I keep my eyes on the wall.
“His name was Andrei. He was tall and sturdy, not unlike myself. Through all the cutthroat competition of the boys’ pecking order, we had each other’s backs, no matter what. We fought together. We survived together. And when we passed into adolescence without a single prospect of adoption, we were ejected out into the cold Russian winters together.” I pause, Andrei’s face clear in my mind that day that we were discharged from the only home they’d ever known. “I felt so betrayed by the world by then. With so many families out there, not a single one would adopt us, give us the warmth every child should know? One more birthday rolled around, and I remember being so angry I wanted to flee the orphanage and starve to death out in the snow rather than face the icy shoulder of prospective parents.” I pause, looking up and meeting Liv’s gaze.
“That day, Andrei spoke to me. He said, ‘Max, we humans, we find our greatest strengths in the bonds we forge with one another that we can choose, not in our families that we can’t. We will do what we must to get by, you and I, because we know that we can work together to do what we have to.” I squeeze my fists tight a moment, the memories quieting me despite myself. “That thought was in my mind when we left the orphanage together. And that was what kept me going when I started working for the Bratva to survive after my time in the military. None of us were truly free,” I say, more fire in my voice than I had realized as I stand up, “but together, we survived.”