Maybe I wasn’t smart. Maybe I was as idiotic as they come.
I took a step backward, the longtime natural instinct of a former prisoner, then reversed to take one forward, a new instinct, hard won. “He’s . . . gone. I’m sorry, Stefan. They found his body. He’s been dead for about four weeks. Anatoly’s gone.”
The lunch bag didn’t drop from his hand, but I saw his fingers loosen. He was stunned and why wouldn’t he be? Anatoly was dead. His father was dead.
Then his fingers tightened and the paper bag crumpled under his hand. I could guess, sort of, what he might be thinking, his first thought. We’d talked about Anatoly since my rescue and I’d gotten a fair picture of Stefan and his relationship. Anatoly and mine, not as much, but I knew Stefan and his father—our father—as much as I could. What do you think when your father dies, when he never was a father at all but an imitation at best? How can you love and respect a man who ordered people killed as easily as he ordered dinner in a restaurant? You pretend, I guess. Pretend, and when that man dies, you mourn what should’ve been . . . what you wish could’ve been, not what actually was.
Stefan had said he’d never killed anyone in the mob and I believed him, but if it had come down to it . . . if it had been kill them to have the money to save me, I knew what his decision would’ve been. He would’ve killed his own soul for me. He thought that made him and Anatoly not so different. He was wrong. Anatoly had done it for the money and the power. Stefan would’ve done it to save me, because Anatoly wouldn’t give him the money then to chase ghosts. To Anatoly, that was what I’d been. He’d given up on me when Stefan never had. No matter what Stefan thought, he was nothing like our father. And I only called Anatoly our father aloud and in my mind for Stefan.
Stefan had told me once that he didn’t know that Anatoly didn’t love his sons, because he didn’t know for sure that he didn’t. Murderers could love their own—couldn’t they? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think Stefan knew for sure, but I agreed they could. It was what he had wanted to hear. That was something I’d learned on my own, not at the Institute.
“Stefan?”
He blinked at the sound of his name, his real name, and corrected me automatically—“Harry.” Here we were Harry and Parker Alonzo, not Stefan and Michael Korsak. Stefan and Michael Korsak were on at least two kill lists. Fake names kept it that way, because you came off those kill lists only when you were dead. I’d picked the names . . . from another old movie,
Stefan had snorted when I’d suggested it and promptly said that if I wanted to call myself Sundance, he supported my bold and very personal decision.
I’d called him an ass, another curse word I’d learned to use, and gave him Harry. It was Sundance’s real name and I used Parker, Butch’s last name. He was the smart one after all, I’d told my brother smugly, although I wasn’t being too bright right now. Harry was also the name of Stefan’s horse that was shot and killed on the beach the day I was taken by the Institute. I thought that might bother him, but he’d said no . . . that we leave memorials scattered through our lives in different ways. Gravestones were frozen in time, but memories you could take with you anywhere. Names too—you could keep them with you always. He hadn’t thought Harry would mind.
“Harry,” I corrected myself with my frown returning, this one directed at my own forgetfulness. I was better than that and had been trained to be exceptional in all areas of deception. I wasn’t being exceptional now. “We should go home. I’ll tell Mrs. Sloot that a pipe burst. It’s flooding the bathroom. You have to go home and fix it.” I turned to go inside the house, but then I hesitated long enough to say over my shoulder, “I’m . . . as I said—I didn’t think . . . I’m sorry.” It was the most awkward handful of words to come out of my mouth probably ever. It was self-conscious and tongue-tied five times over, but it seemed to mean something to Stefan. The darkness in his eyes lightened a little.
He cleared his throat and replied, “Thanks, but he was your father too, even if you don’t remember.”
I nodded silently and went on into the big house with trim the color of half-fresh mint green and half-faded lavender. As I did, I heard the lid being hammered back onto the paint can. Anatoly was gone and there was Stefan covered with paint, doing a job his father would’ve had hired someone to in turn hire someone else to actually do. If it didn’t involve a gun or a knife, manual labor was far beneath him, I imagined. But he was the man who’d bought Stefan his first bike or at least had been the one to give it to him after having his own handyman put it together. Stefan had mentioned the bike. Anatoly probably wasn’t there for school things . . . whatever school things there were—plays or football. But he’d been there for Christmases, Thanksgivings, birthdays, at least half the nights of the week. I’d seen the pictures when recuperating in South Carolina. I doubt he’d hugged Stefan much, though, except when he was younger than three. A web strung together from what Stefan had told me and what logic trumped. That was what I thought and with years of being near the top of my class in psychological training, and, with a failing grade being a failure at survival, I thought I guessed right.
Stefan had once said Anatoly thought I’d hung the sun and the moon—that I was special. I honestly didn’t care what Anatoly had thought about long-ago Lukas. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the thought that counts. What did count was a rescue ten years later by a brother who had refused to give up.
I knocked on the door to the house and as the sign, painted in loops and whirls with tulips and roses, told me to, I went on inside. There, Mrs. Sloot—“Adelaide, sweetie. Call me Adelaide”—tried to stuff me with sugar cookies. “Such a skinny boy.” I might be almost six feet, but I didn’t look nineteen. Seventeen was the best I could hope for, but I could’ve looked fifty and still had grandmotherly women trying to shove food down me. It happened all the time.
I learned to live with it, take the cookies, and be grateful I was too old for them to pinch my cheek—although the lady in one of the tourist shops in town had, only a different cheek. I hadn’t told Stefan. He would either laugh or break her arm, and arm breaking wasn’t part of the whole lying low thing. “Yes, Miss Adelaide, water’s everywhere. Harry’s going home to fix it.”
Her poodle jumped at my feet, then nipped me on the ankle as she
It was too late. She’d shoved a small statue into my hand. It was an armadillo, I guessed dubiously, dressed like a clown, with a happy pointy smile, soulless red eyes, and balloons held in a gloved hand. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s nice,” I lied effortlessly. I hadn’t been an enthusiastic student at the Institute, but I had been a good one. Sookie-Sue nipped me again. I sighed patiently, but I did like all animals, including the ones that made it a challenge, and I didn’t nudge her away. “What is it?”
Adelaide pursed her lips, coated with bright orangered lipstick to match her hair, and her drawn-on eye- brows arched. “I told you, dear: it’s a tchotchke.”
My own eyebrows, and I actually had some, went up at the answer.
She scooped up Sookie-Sue. “Teenagers these days. Don’t know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.”
Stefan’s hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handyman’s persona he’d perfected, “Useless dust collector, Park. Don’t you start collecting’em.”
“Ah.” I handed it back to her with as much care as I would for something not nearly as hideous and worthless and corrected my mental file of Adelaide Thomasina Sloot from mostly harmless with three unpaid parking tickets to bizarre, dusty, possible automotive maniac, with the ‘harmless’ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.
Background checks were useless if you didn’t update them frequently.
“Let’s go home and get that mess cleaned up.” Stefan steered me toward the door.
My mess. It wasn’t all over the bathroom floor, but it was all over just the same. All that training . . . I wonder if the Institute knew how unreliable it was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Institute’s students didn’t fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldn’t always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not
Killing them.
