Isn't It Bromantic?

by Lyssa Kay Adams

  “A while.”

  “How long?”

  “Since I’ve been in Chicago.”

  He freaked out a second time. “Are you kidding me?”

  “It took me a long time to start to piece everything together, but I’ve finally started to make progress, Vlad. Real progress.”

  He stood, carefully, the ginger movement incongruous to the steel in his voice. “This is too dangerous. You have to stop.”

  “No. I’ve been careful. I use untraceable email addresses and burner phones. I—”

  “Burner phones?” His eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. “Do you hear yourself?”

  “Yes. I sound like a journalist. That’s what I am.”

  He raked his hands over his hair.

  “Look,” she said, picking up something from the bed. “Look at this.”

  He was doing his best to keep an open mind, but the further he stretched it, the more terrifying possibilities poured in. “What am I looking at?”

  “A report from the witness who said they saw my father get on the train that night. But the witness lied. He was nowhere near the train station that night.”

  “How do you know?”

  She hesitated. “My source.”

  “The person on the phone just now?”

  “Yes.” She put the paper back and resumed gathering everything into an organized stack.

  “Who is he?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Jesus, Elena. This isn’t a game.” He regretted the words and his tone this time, so he tried again. “How does this source know the truth?”

  “Because he has seen the original witness report, the one he gave before it was changed. I need that report, Vlad.”

  “And you have to go to Russia to get it.”

  “He has a copy. But it’s too risky to email or fax. I have to get it in person.”

  He swore under his breath. “And what then? What happens after you get that report?”

  “And then . . .” She shook her head, grabbed the entire stack of notes, and shoved them in her backpack. “And then I don’t know.”

  She started to walk away, so he gripped her arms to stop her. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this, Elena?”

  She unartfully dodged his question. “I’ll only be gone a few days. Maybe, maybe a week. I can get a flight to New York in a few hours and then to Russia from there tomorrow night.”

  “No.” He shook his head, his jaw a wedge of granite. “You can’t go.”

  She looked at him with beseeching eyes. “I need to follow this lead.”

  “What lead?” he exploded. “Your father is dead, and nothing is going to change that.”

  “I know that,” she yelled, yanking free of his hands. “But I have to know what happened to him, Vlad. I’m trying to find out what happened to him.”

  “No, you’re not! You’re trying to justify in your mind why his job was always more important than you!”

  Her face fell as the color drained from her skin. “His job was important. Journalism is important.”

  “Is that how you justify the fact that you hid in a hotel room for three days with almost nothing to eat? Why my mother had to buy you your first tampons? Why he never, ever remembered your birthday?”

  She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked as small and defeated as she did the day that he snapped at her in the hospital. He wished he could take it away—the pain of what he said—but he couldn’t. She had to face it, because the guys were right. It was just like in fiction. This was her internal conflict, and until she truly faced it, they would always end up right back here.

  Vlad bent to grab his crutches. He was tired and sore and all out of fight. He slid them under his armpits and leaned heavily.

  “What are you doing?” she breathed.

  Irony turned his voice to vinegar. “What I always do with you. I’m letting a captive bird go winging.”

  “Vlad . . .” Her voice was a hoarse, wrenching rasp that would’ve made any Russian romanticist proud, as if it had floated up from the depths of some hidden well of feelings where she’d been hiding them. He recognized the sound because he had one of those wells too. The difference was, he wasn’t afraid of the dark water below. She was still searching for a life preserver.

  Vlad closed the distance between them and cradled her head against his chest. “I love you, Elena. I don’t want you to go, but I’m not going to stop you, and I’m not going to make you choose. But I’m done trying to convince you to choose me.”

  Elena straightened and pulled away from him. “Why can’t you just support me on this? Why can’t you accept that this is who I am?”

  “Because you’re chasing something you’ll never be able to catch. And I can’t compete with a ghost.”

  “I’m not asking you to compete with my father.”

  “He’s not the ghost I’m talking about. Decide what you want, Elena. Once and for all.”

  The trek down the stairs was the longest of his life. Colton was crouched on the bottom step, waiting for him. He stood up when he heard Vlad’s descent.

  “Let’s go,” Vlad said.

  “Um, where’s Elena?”

  Vlad crutched around him to the door. “She’s not coming.”

  “Is she okay?”

  Vlad didn’t answer. He threw open the door and crutched outside. Colton followed slowly. “Dude, talk to me. What the fuck is going on?”

  Vlad spoke purely out of pain. “I need to make a stop.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “Thought we were never coming back here,” Colton said, car idling in the seedy, weedy parking lot.

  “You can wait in the car.” Vlad got out with his crutches. He banged on the door with his fist, and when the window slid open, he held up his coin. A moment of palpable surprise from the eyes staring out at him made him scowl. “Let me in.”

  Colton appeared beside him as the door squeaked open. Byron ushered them inside, a leery look on his scraggly face. “He’s not going to like this. He said you’re banned.”

  “I don’t give a shit what he said.”

  Byron made a quick decision about the difference in their two sizes and told them to go inside. Colton was blessedly silent as he followed Vlad up the ramp and through the heavy curtain. When they walked inside, Roman didn’t even look up from where he arranged a delicate array of cheese curls. “Didn’t think you’d have the balls to show up here again.”

  “I need a hit.”

  Roman snorted.

  “Ädelost,” Vlad said, pointing at the blue-veiny Swiss cheese. He scanned the day’s selection and landed on a semihard from Denmark. “Samsø. And . . . Époisses.”

  Colton and Roman both reeled back. The creamy French cheese was known for its pungency. Only the most hard-core of cheese connoisseurs could stand its aroma.

  “Dude, no,” Colton said.

  “That is strong cheese, my friend,” Roman said.

  “The stronger the better.” Vlad pulled his wallet from his back pocket.

  “A man only drowns himself in cheese like that when he’s looking for a fight,” Roman said.

  Colton lifted an eyebrow. “Or when he’s just been in one.”

  Vlad lifted his chin to the end of the table. “Throw some of that Edammer in there too.” Because why the fuck not? He was going to drown his sorrows in the decadent nutty flavor alongside some chilled peaches until he passed out. And then maybe he could wake up and realize it had all been a dream, and she was not going back to Russia.

  Roman tossed him the bag, and Vlad dropped two hundred dollars on the table.

  “Tell your wife I said hello.”

  Vlad growled, and Colton dragged him away. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, helping Vlad into the car. He threw
the crutches in the back and jogged around to the driver’s side. “I mean it, Vlad. You either tell me what’s going on or—”

  Vlad ripped open the bag. The pungent, offensive odor of the Époisses immediately filled the cab of Colton’s truck. Colton gagged and opened a window. “Christ. That smells like athlete’s foot.”

  Vlad tore off a hunk of the Samsø, set it on his tongue, and rolled it around in his mouth. “It’s an acquired taste.”

  “Caviar is an acquired taste. That is the end stages of gangrene.” Colton gagged again as he pulled out of the parking lot. “Start talking.”

  “She’s going back to Russia to find her father.”

  “Elena?”

  “Yes, of course Elena.”

  “What the fuck? Why now?”

  Vlad relayed the key details of what Elena had told him.

  “And you’re not going to stop her?”

  “What’s the point? She was always going to leave me.”

  “If you still think that after all this time, then you haven’t learned a goddamn thing. Have you been paying attention at all?”

  Colton made a call on his hands-free calling device.

  Mack answered immediately. “What’s the story? Is everything okay?”

  “No,” Colton said, glaring pointedly at Vlad. “Assemble the bros. We have a magnificent ass to kick.”

  The minute they pulled back into the driveway at Colton’s, Claud and Michelle met them on the front porch.

  “What did you do?” Claud demanded.

  “Vlad, what is going on?” Michelle, at least, used a nice tone of voice.

  “I like that girl,” Claud said, following Vlad inside. “If you hurt her, you will answer to me.”

  The guys dragged him to the basement. The yelling commenced as soon as Vlad explained himself.

  “So . . . you gave her an ultimatum?” Malcolm looked ready to tackle him.

  “No! I told her specifically that I was not going to make her choose.”

  “Which is an ultimatum to a woman who thinks she doesn’t have a choice,” Mack argued.

  Vlad felt a kick inside his chest.

  “Oh, is that a light bulb going off?” Mack snorted.

  Malcolm sat down next to him and settled a hand on Vlad’s knee. “You’re the heart and soul of this friendship. But sometimes the most tender people can be the most stubborn, because they have the most to lose when things go wrong.”

  “She is the stubborn one.”

  The guys all exchanged a get a load of this douchebag look. “Vlad, why do you think she never told you about any of this before?”

  The question was from Noah, who had mostly refrained from yelling until now.

  “Your lack of answer tells me you know what it is,” Noah said.

  “She said she knew I would freak out.”

  “And you did, didn’t you?” Malcolm prodded.

  “I told her I love her. I told her—”

  “That your love comes with strings attached when she needs you most.” Noah’s tone of voice managed to shame Vlad as much as the words themselves.

  Malcolm was there again, this time with an arm around his shoulders. “There’s a big difference between letting someone go because you have faith that they’ll come back to you and letting someone go because deep down you’re convinced they won’t. One is an act of love, the other an act of fear.”

  I let a captive bird go winging . . .

  He’d spent six years clinging to his mother’s interpretation of the poem, that Elena was a frightened bird who needed to fly free for a while before returning to the nest. But didn’t that mean their marriage was, and had always been, a cage from which Elena had to be set free? Didn’t that trap him in the role of the beast holding her against her will until he chose to open the door to the cage?

  All his time in book club, all the lessons he thought he’d learned, and he never learned the most important. He wasn’t the cage. He wasn’t the captivity to which she had to eventually return.

  He was the air beneath her wings. She needed him to fly with her.

  “I need to go home,” he rasped.

  Colton dug his keys out again. “Yes, you do. You have a lot of groveling to do.”

  Colton drove as fast as he could, but it was too late.

  Elena was already gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The hotel by the freeway had only gotten more depressing since she’d last checked in. She couldn’t get a flight out until the morning, but the thought of staying in the house was too painful, so she ended up back here.

  In all her lonely years, this was the loneliest she’d ever felt. She was in a hotel by herself, headed back to a place that was no longer home. But the only home she did have left was suddenly cold and empty. Vlad had taken its light and warmth and walked out the door with it, leaving behind nothing but ugly accusations.

  You’re trying to justify in your mind why his job was always more important than you.

  It wasn’t true. It wasn’t.

  You’re chasing a ghost.

  No.

  Is that how you justify the fact that you hid in a hotel room for three days with almost nothing to eat? Why my mother had to buy you your first tampons? Why he never, ever remembered your birthday?

  Elena didn’t realize she was crying until she felt the dampness on her pillow when she rolled onto her side.

  What happens after you get that report?

  A bone-deep fatigue settled into her limbs, because the answer to that question was a dark horizon. A cliff she couldn’t see over. Clue after clue after clue. None of them led anywhere definitive. How long was she going to do this? How long was she going to ignore the beauty of her present for the ugliness of her past?

  Vlad was right. She was chasing a ghost. She was the ghost. The little girl she once was before she realized how different her life was from others. Before she figured out that no matter what she did, her father was never going to come home on time. Never going to help with her homework, make sure she had a good lunch or clean clothes. He was never going to take her ice skating or to the movies. He was never going to remember her birthday. She’d spent years trying to figure out why she mattered so little to the one person who was supposed to love her above all else.

  Tears soaked her pillow now as sobs racked her body. What was she doing? Why was she leaving the man who did love her above all else? Who always had, even when she’d rejected him, even when it was clear that she didn’t deserve him.

  She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to spend her life blindly chasing something in her past until she was unable to see what was right in front of her.

  Elena shot out of bed, wiping madly at her face. What was she doing here? There was only one place she wanted to be, one place she belonged. Home. And home was with Vlad. She shoved her feet into her shoes, grabbed her backpack and her suitcase. She hadn’t unpacked anything yet. All she had to do was go home.

  The woman at the counter who checked her in watched with confused curiosity as Elena dropped her key cards into the return box. As soon as she walked through the automatic doors to the outside and into the humid night, Elena started to run. The wheels of her suitcase bounced along the seams in the sidewalk. Her car was around the corner of the hotel entrance and beneath a skyscraper-high streetlamp.

  She unlocked the car with her key fob, opened the back, and threw in her suitcase and backpack.

  And that’s when the world went black.

  * * *

  * * *

  Elena woke up disoriented. Groggy. A throbbing pain the only proof that she was alive.

  She pried her eyes open against the pain, but all she saw was more darkness. Her body rocked back and forth in time with a rhythmic sound.

  She was in a car.

  Wait. Vlad�
��s car.

  How did she get here? What was going on?

  The pain. Someone had hit her. Someone had snuck up behind her in the parking lot and hit her. She tried again to raise her hands to the spot on her scalp that hurt, but she couldn’t move. Her wrists were taped in front of her body with something. Duct tape maybe?

  She couldn’t see who was driving. The outline of his eyes in the rearview mirror was all she could see from this angle in the back seat. Nothing about them were familiar. Elena strained to turn her head to see out the window where they were, but all she could see was the glare of lights as they passed by.

  Think. She had to think. She could easily reach the door locks, but they were driving too fast for her to attempt an escape. Maybe she could distract him, force him off the road somehow. But she was as likely to die in that scenario as if she opened her door and rolled out.

  Her eyes darted around the back seat. Why did Vlad keep such a clean car? There wasn’t even a stray pen lying on the ground that she could use to stab someone if necessary.

  “I know you’re awake back there.” Elena gasped and froze. The accent was Russian, but he spoke in English. “How is your head?”

  “Who are you?” Elena rasped.

  “I am sorry about hitting you. You surprised me. I didn’t expect you to come out until the morning. Our plan was to take you on the way to the airport, so we had to improvise.”

  Dread turned her stomach to rot. Calm, Elena. Stay calm. Keep him talking. Her father’s voice came out of nowhere in her imagination. “How long have I been out?”

  “About five minutes. I was starting to worry.”

  Her stomach revolted at his fake concern.

  “I found your phone in your backpack,” he said, almost bored. “I tossed it in the parking lot before we left, so don’t bother looking for it.”

  She swallowed her panic.

  He laughed. “They were right about you. I did not think you would fall for it, but you are a lot like your father was. The promise of a big break was all it took to get him out of the house too.”

  Agony tore a hole in her chest. It was all a ruse, and she’d fallen for it. Is that how they got her father too? “You knew my father?”