Mitya groaned. “He has to take back that he won’t work as my head of security.”
“No, he doesn’t. You were an ass to Flambé and she deserves an apology and you know it,” Ania said. “Stop trying to get out of an apology to Sevastyan. You have to do that as well. One has nothing to do with the other.”
Mitya looked at him, clearly steeling himself to make the ultimate sacrifice. Sevastyan stopped him, shaking his head and even stepping back. “Don’t. Not yet. We’ve got a couple of things we need to hash out before either of us talks about apologies.”
Mitya stood again and this time he tugged Ania to her feet, his gaze steady on Sevastyan’s face, knowing the discussion he was going to force between them was going to be an ugly one.
Mitya brought Ania’s knuckles to his mouth and kissed them. “If you don’t mind, kotyonok, I would very much like to speak to my cousin alone.”
“Of course, honey, just know that I love him dearly, and I want to be able to have both Sevastyan and Flambé to dinner at our house sometime in the future.” She went up on her toes, brushed a kiss on her husband’s jaw and left the den.
The office was spacious, but when two large men with big male leopards in their primes faced off in adversarial positions, that space became small immediately. Mitya put the length of the room between them.
“This has to do with Rolan? Your father?”
“You know very well Rolan is not my father,” Sevastyan accused. “When I was a teenager, I told myself you didn’t know, that I was protecting you from that knowledge. I quickly came to realize after habitually being subjected to beatings by both Rolan and Lazar, and their lieutenants, that there was no way Lazar, in his cruelty, wouldn’t have informed you or your mother of what he had done.”
Sevastyan’s gaze, banded with heat, never left Mitya’s. Shturm was close. They trained with the best every day. They never stopped. He loved Mitya, but betrayal was an ugly thing. In their family, fathers turned on mothers and daughters and even sons and nephews, killing them. It was the norm in his world.
“Yes,” Mitya admitted softly, “I knew. Lazar rubbed it in my mother’s face one night when Rolan’s wife came over pregnant. Rolan was out of town and Tatiana, your mother, was staying with us. Lazar kept taunting her, saying he was going to tell Rolan and Rolan would beat her until she lost the baby. His laughter was so ugly. I remember thinking how disgusting he was and how lucky she would be if she lost the baby. He wouldn’t have anything to hold over her head.”
“But he didn’t tell Rolan.”
“No, he didn’t. So, after she had you, Lazar forced Tatiana to sleep with him. He’d make her come to the house and bring you. I’d have to take care of you while he took Mom and her into the bedroom. Sometimes he wouldn’t go into the bedroom so he could show me what two women could do together to pleasure a man. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about killing you, killing us both, so those two women would be free of him. So we would be free of him.”
Mitya turned away from Sevastyan, balling his hands into two tight fists. “When you were not even a year and half, he liked kicking you around in front of the women. Hard. Beating you with his fists. He wanted me to join in. He would let his leopard out to threaten to eat you. When I wouldn’t help him, he let his leopard loose on me or the women. He was a fucking dick. A monster.” He turned back to Sevastyan. “He didn’t get much better as you got older, although he never beat y
ou when Rolan was around. When did you find out?”
“I was a teenager. Lazar told Rolan. He was so smug. Rolan made the mistake of having his lair be too prosperous and other lairs took note of it. We’d swallowed two smaller territories that were right on the harbors and that gave us more control than Lazar. We also had taken a small but very critical piece of land that bordered the main highway controlling the railway.”
Mitya studied his face for a long time before speaking. “You were fifteen years old and you were already that fucking smart, Sevastyan. You told Rolan exactly what he needed to do to get the advantage over the other vors, didn’t you? You were the one running the business. That’s why the arms deals were suddenly going so smoothly and no one could figure out where the weapons were being kept. Lazar was going crazy. He tried to bribe so many of Rolan’s top men, but by the time he hit the location, the weapons were gone.”
Sevastyan couldn’t help but hear the pride in his voice, but that didn’t matter to him now. He hadn’t once taken his eyes from Mitya. His gaze hadn’t wavered, the heat still as white-hot as ever. Trapped inside his soul, a crimson rage blazed a molten fire so deep and strong he knew it would never be put out. He waited for the answer. He needed to know the why of it.
He had Lazar’s venom running in his veins. He knew that. Mitya knew it. They both shared a legacy of brutality and cruelty. There was no denying Sevastyan had borne the brunt of the hatred and ire of both Rolan and Lazar. He had aided Rolan in outsmarting Lazar only to have Lazar gleefully spew his secret truth—that Sevastyan was Lazar’s son, not Rolan’s. At the same time, there was no denying that, as Lazar’s son, Mitya lived in hell every minute of the day.
“Yes, I took over running the lair, although completely behind the scenes,” Sevastyan admitted. “Rolan was a good fighter, but he wasn’t good at planning battles and worse at business. I could see the bigger picture. Once Lazar told him the truth, that I was his son, not Rolan’s, Rolan despised me. He took every opportunity to find ways to hurt me. He needed me, but he hated me. He threatened to kill you all the time. He hated you almost more than he hated me. He thought you mattered to Lazar. He knew I didn’t. Hell, even Rolan used to worry that Lazar was too ugly to you, too hard on you, but it never bothered him when Lazar kicked the crap out of me or my leopard. It wasn’t like I mattered to any of them. Not Rolan. Not Lazar. And certainly not to you.”
Mitya’s eyebrow shot up. “You’re changing history, Sevastyan, and I’m not sure why. You might have the right to ask questions, but think back. Who stood in front of you? Who took beatings for you? Later, when you were a teen, you watched my back, that’s true, but we did it for each other.”
Sevastyan shoved both hands through his hair in agitation. Over the years, he’d come to accept that his role was always to be in the background. He found he preferred it that way, but the rage in him built and built. The more the others heaped their cruel brutal beatings and forced him to fight, the more his leopard learned in the battles to protect his human. Sevastyan learned to fight as well, to become proficient in all weapons until he was a killing machine just as his leopard was. He was exactly what Rolan and Lazar had shaped him into.
“I tried to counter what they did to you, but I was in a different lair, Sevastyan, not around you as much as I would have liked,” Mitya pointed out. “You often heard things before I did. More than once you took my back, and I thought it was because of our relationship, that you knew, like I did, that we only had each other.”
Sevastyan didn’t think that deserved an answer. “You had plenty of opportunities to acknowledge the relationship, but you didn’t. Not once. In fact, you avoided me for the most part. You seemed to have an aversion to me unless you needed someone to fight with you or go out on a drug raid.”
Mitya shrugged. “You were the best. The fastest. The deadliest. You still are. I don’t know another shifter capable of taking you down. In a battle, I’m going to choose to have the best with me every time. That made perfect sense and no one would question my choice or my reason for choosing to have you with me. And I didn’t want you left behind alone in either lair.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means?” Mitya sounded annoyed, the way he often did. “No one could be better than Lazar. You were a kid, Sevastyan. A big kid, maybe, all muscle, but you were still a kid. Already you had a reputation, and it was growing too fast. How do you think he was going to react to hearing about some kid being the best? The deadliest? The fastest? You were already getting a reputation as someone the women liked being with. They didn’t run screaming from you. They smiled and flirted with you. That was going to get you killed in a very ugly way. And if he ever found out you were the one running Rolan’s lair, his business, besting Lazar, he would have emptied a gun in your belly and then let his leopard devour you.”
Sevastyan knew that was all the truth. Lazar had an ego that wouldn’t stop. Sevastyan hadn’t helped Rolan succeed in running the lair so efficiently to please Rolan or make money; it was to best Lazar. To know he was undercutting him at every turn. Taking away his business slowly.
Sevastyan studied Lazar’s territory and all of his imports and exports. He knew where he kept his weapons and drugs. He knew the pipelines and the routes he used for trafficking. Systematically he began to interrupt them. He was careful and used only those men he could trust. He stashed any contraband in places no one would think to look and then stayed quiet while Lazar and his men went crazy looking everywhere. Their leopards were let loose to track, but Sevastyan used scent blockers and he mixed up scents to throw the leopards off.
“I protected you the only way I could, making sure to take you on every raid if he wasn’t with me,” Mitya said, “and leaving you behind if he was.”