by J. A. Rock
I
“Your brother is crazy,” Ilia whispered, straddling Mikhail.
Mikhail laughed, slapping him on the ass. “He is jealous. Always has been.”
“Jealous and crazy,” Ilia said, pressing his mouth to Mikhail’s jawline. It was late in the afternoon; stubble scraped his lips. He ran his tongue along Mikhail’s jaw.
“Mmmm.” Mikhail gripped him by the hips and thrust up against his ass. “He’s family. Family is complicated.”
Ilia leaned back, tugging at the button on his jeans. “Family is fucked.”
Mikhail’s smile was tinged with regret. “Yes. Family is fucked.”
II
“Eli. Eli?”
“Don’t move,” Ilia said, but it was too late. Louis had already reached out to flick the bedside lamp on. Ilia’s hand shook.
“What the hell are you doing, Eli?” His dad’s voice was still fuddled with sleep. There was no panic in it, only gruff annoyance, like Ilia was twelve again and he’d left his bike on the driveway and his dad had backed over it. Like it wasn’t a gun pointed at his face, just another one of Eli Porter’s dumb mistakes to add to the goddamn list.
“Don’t move!” Ilia repeated, louder, and it was just like every other argument they’d ever had. Ilia telling his father not to come into his room, not to open the bag in his closet, not to look at what he was doing on the Internet, not to take his phone, his laptop, his car keys; Louis doing it anyway.
It ought to have been different now. Ilia had a fucking gun pointed at him. Ilia ought to be the one with the power.
Louis sat up slowly, keeping his hands in front of him, palms out.
Ilia’s finger slipped from the sweat-slick trigger.
“I don’t think you’re any kind of man at all,” Patrick had told Nick.
“Louis?” Ilia’s mom murmured, rolling over. “What’s going—Eli!”
“Stay there, Jess,” Louis said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. Put his feet firmly on the floor. Shielding her, Eli thought, and suddenly it didn’t matter if they slept back to back. “Put the gun down, Eli.”
If he’d been in bed with Mikhail that night, would Mikhail have shielded him?
He hadn’t been in bed. He’d been in the hall, and he’d panicked and screamed for Mikhail, and Mikhail... Mikhail had reached for his gun.
They’d both made mistakes that night.
“Eli, what are you doing?” His mother’s terrified demand.
Time was running out. It would all be over soon, one way or the other.
Come on, whore.
“Put the gun down.” His father started to rise.
“No!” Ilia lunged forward, and Louis sat back. Ilia’s arm shook so hard he could barely keep the gun trained on his target. “He’s going to kill Patrick. I have to do this!”
“Who’s going to kill Patrick?”
Ilia swallowed. “Nick—Nick Kadyrov is waiting outside. If I don’t kill you, he’s going to kill Patrick.”
“Listen to me.” His father’s voice was almost gentle. “Whatever you think you have to do, you don’t. You don’t want to do this.”
“When have you ever known what I want?” Ilia shouted, fury overtaking his terror. “When have you ever fucking bothered to try to know?”
“Eli—”
“Maybe I do want to do this! Maybe I want to, for Mikhail!” Ilia took a step closer, snarling. “You need to know. You need to know I loved him, and he loved me. He wasn’t what you think. Not with me.”
His mother sobbed quietly into her pillow.
“Put the gun down,” Louis said again. “We can talk if you put it down.”
“I don’t want to talk.” Ilia’s throat ached with tears. “I don’t have time to talk.” His voice cracked, and he squeezed his eyes shut.
“Eli,” his father whispered. “Please.”
“Dad?” The word fell out of his mouth. Small-voiced. Scared. “Dad, I’m in trouble.”
“I can have a team here in under fifteen minutes.”
Ilia shook his head. “He’ll kill him. He’ll kill him, and then he’ll kill me.” His voice rose. “I can’t let him do that. You don’t understand; I can’t let him kill Patrick!”
He fell silent, a realization spreading through him.
It didn’t fucking matter, did it? What was to stop Ilia from running out of the house right now and telling Nick he’d done it? Was Nick going to come in and check his work?
No.
Nick was going to kill them both anyway.
If Ilia did the job he’d been ordered to do, then he was no longer of consequence to Nick. And if he failed, as Nick knew he would, he was all the more deserving of the bullet Nick had planned all along to put in his head.
Ilia wondered how he could be so stupid. To ever believe, to ever hope that there were rules. That there was a way to be fair, good, or guiltless in this shitshow of an existence. People shielded each other, and for what?
Maybe Nick had never cared whether Louis Porter lived or died. Maybe he’d only ever wanted to fuck with Ilia.
A sob broke out of him, and his arm trembled so hard he had to let it fall. Louis rose swiftly and made a grab for Ilia’s weapon. Ilia wrenched away, squeezing the trigger. The bullet lodged in the floorboard, the only sound a snap—hiss from the silenced weapon.
Ilia’s mother screamed. She didn’t sound scared so much as angry. She was up in an instant, pushing past her husband. “Louis!” she shouted. “Get away from him. Eli, look at me. Look at me!”
Not a chance.
Ilia fled the room, down the stairs, and out the front door.
III
He crossed the yard. Raised the gun to his temple. “You think you’ve won, you fucker?” he shouted at the car. “I’m not gonna do it! Not gonna play your fucking game!”
This was the one thing he could still control. He didn’t have to die by Nick’s hand. He could end this himself, and he’d make the motherfucker watch, force him to see that he couldn’t fucking make Ilia do anything.
And he wouldn’t have to see it when Nick—or Mayrsolt—killed Patrick.
But when he went to squeeze the trigger, he caught sight of Patrick in the backseat. Heard Patrick yell, “Don’t!”
A second later, Nick burst from the car, dragging Patrick with him. Patrick’s weight nearly pulled Nick to the ground, but Nick staggered forward, pointing his pistol at Ilia. His skin was colorless. Saliva ran from his mouth down his chin, and his eyes were bloodshot. He fired once, but the bullet didn’t come anywhere near Ilia.
“Lliiiihhhhhhh bchhhhhh,” he muttered, aiming again.
Another shot, this one from inside the car. Nick seized and stumbled with a sudden bellow, releasing Patrick to clutch clumsily at his shoulder. The car started.
Mayrsolt. Mayrsolt had shot Nick.
Nick whirled and fired back, first at the body of the car, then at the tires.
But Mayrsolt peeled away.
Now, Ilia realized, and he didn’t let himself think beyond that.
He pointed the gun at Nick’s back and fired three times.
IV
“Eli!” someone yelled.
Ilia curled on the ground, afraid to move. Nick was in front of him, mouth foaming, body jerking.
Another shot, louder than the others, loud enough that Ilia’s ears rang. Nick stopped twitching instantly. A single dark thread of blood ran from a hole between his eyes.
“Eli,” the voice said again. Closer, out of breath.
Scared.
Ilia had experienced enough fear that he could recognize it anywhere now. Even in someone he’d once thought fearless.
He threw his arms over his head. Tucked his knees closer to his chest. Felt the ribbons pull tight across his back.
The grass made a soft sound under someone’s feet. Almost a svvvsh.
“Eli, please!”
Hands on his shoulders. Ilia wasn’t wolf enough to fight them off.
V
The
re was no window in the hospital room, so Ilia stared at the wall and imagined he was looking out the balcony doors. Sometimes he imagined Patrick was beside him, and they were both staring at a freedom so close that the joke of it was cruel.
This was the easiest thing to do. Better than looking at his mother when she spoke to him. Better than answering the cops’ questions, or responding to the nurses’ false encouraging voices. Just stare and shut them all out.
Imagine fresh air.
VI
Eventually Ilia talked to the cops, just to shut them up. Told his story stoically right up to the part where Patrick came to give Ilia a massage and refused hurt Ilia—even when Nick said he could. Should.
Ilia told everything after that in anxious bursts, sometimes babbling frantically, sometimes surprised to find himself silent, twisting the hospital sheet, half-convinced he was still talking.
His dad wasn’t there.
That helped.
VII
His dad did come in sometimes. Ilia ignored him, just like he ignored everyone else.
Until his dad asked if he wanted to see Patrick.
Ilia turned to him slowly. First time he’d gotten a good look at his father. Hadn’t been able to see, in the darkness of the bedroom, how much more gray hair he had now. The lines around his eyes. Ilia hadn’t paid attention to those things that night at the station after Mikhail had been killed.
He shook his head.
His father didn’t say anything else. Ilia wondered if he’d seen the report. If the other cops, or the doctors, had told him what had happened. He didn’t much care anymore, whether his dad knew the details.
Louis Porter had elbowed his way into every private corner of Ilia’s life, for the sole purpose of humiliating him, winning—and had still failed to learn anything about his son at all.
VIII
“I won’t leave you behind,” Patrick had said.
In their fantasy, they poisoned Nick, and he died, and they escaped together. They embraced in the wide-open world, free to pick any street they wanted to walk down. They told their story together. The same story, because they’d faced the same horrors. Were heroes together.
And then…?
IX
Mikhail was waiting on a simple stone bench in a dark hall with high ceilings. Like a church, almost. He smiled when he met Ilia’s gaze.
Ilia was nervous, checking for blood, a bullet hole. But Mikhail looked good.
Ilia wanted to sit next to him. Lean into him.
But Ilia was afraid Mikhail would be disappointed in him, since they both knew what he was supposed to do instead. What he was supposed to say.
He couldn’t.
Goodbye was the trigger-pull that ended a dream.
Ilia didn’t want that power.
X
He understood the outline of what had happened. Remembered turning the gun on himself. Remembered Nick lurching out of the car, and Mayrsolt shooting Nick in the shoulder. Nick turning around.
Remembered firing at Nick.
Things were blurry after that—a piece of paper rain-pelted until everything on it had bled to a meaningless smear.
Ilia remembered his father’s voice.
Remembered the shot that had made Nick go still.
Wondered if the same thing had happened when Louis shot Mikhail. Life, slammed to a halt in an instant. Death, irreversible yet less final than it seemed.
What people left of themselves went on and on.
For better or for worse.
XI
The ribbon was gone from his piercing.
It had taken Ilia long enough to notice.
XII
Ilia tried to wait for his mother, but his father came in first. They watched over him in shifts.
Ilia didn’t want to wait any longer, didn’t want to lose his nerve. So even though he’d sworn years ago he’d never ask his father’s permission for anything ever again, he steeled himself and said, “Can I see Patrick now?”
His father called a nurse. Together they helped Eli out of bed, as though something was wrong with Ilia’s legs. Ilia was stunned for a moment to have his body in contact with his father’s. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. And then, because Louis was strong, because he was a big man and his arm was around Ilia, Ilia felt memories bash against whatever weak walls he’d put up.
Nick’s arms, Nick’s breath. Nick’s strength.
Ilia ripped at those thoughts, because they had nothing to do with now, nothing to do with his father, and he wasn’t going to spend his life fending them off then looking over his shoulder for more. “Let me do it,” he told his father. And once the dizziness passed, he put on a pair of sweatpants under his gown and followed his father and the nurse down the hall.
XIII
Patrick’s arm was in a cast from wrist to elbow, and he looked tired. But he smiled when Ilia came in. “Hey,” he said. “We made it.”
Ilia stared at him. A strange feeling, warm and cold colliding.
“I have to go,” he muttered to the nurse, and left the room.
XIV
Maybe if Ilia had been less of a
whore
cunt
little bitch
he would have fought Nick, all by himself, until he was free. And then he’d be able to say, “I made it.”
He wouldn’t have needed Patrick at all.
XV
Wasn’t much to do at home besides lie on the couch with Charlie and keep the TV on, so that if his parents did talk to him, he had an excuse not to hear them.
Sometimes he wondered how he would find a place to live, without money. How he would manage alone. He couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning without his mother standing at the open door, calling softly to him. And even then, he only got up because he was afraid she’d do it again—that he’d have to keep hearing her voice. When he thought about getting a job, he thought about a place with too many people and not enough windows, and just—loud.
XVI
One morning he was sitting at the kitchen table. Gray light filtering through the sliding glass door in the kitchen. Empty cereal bowl with bran flakes stuck to the inside. Rings from his water glass on the table.
He didn’t know how long he’d been there. He just knew he couldn’t go anywhere else.
His father came in.
Even then, Ilia couldn’t move. A bitter, snake-strike of a thought: at least with Nick, he’d never been bored. He’d always had some temporary goal: to escape pain, or to try to embrace it. To steal a few hours of sleep while Nick was out.
To fuck Patrick, just once, and have it be ours.
Now there was an endless stretch of nothing.
The shame of thinking, for even one second, that there was something preferable about being Nick’s captive to being his parents’ son, made him dizzy. Patrick would never think something like that.
The gray light became shadows.
“Eli?” Louis’s voice was soft.
“Eli...please.”
Louis stepped closer to the table, and once again, Ilia recognized someone else’s fear as though it were his own. His father was as cautious as he would have been approaching an animal.
wolf
bitch
Louis sat in the seat next to Ilia’s.
Ilia kept his head down. Sometimes, after a fight, that had been the only way to feel like he hadn’t lost completely—if he didn’t let his father see his tears of frustration. If he made keeping his head down as much of a fuck you as he could.
Louis reached out. Bridging something, and maybe neither of them knew what. He rested his hand on Ilia’s shoulder.
Ilia’s body shook, but he tried to hold his mind rigid. Tried to feel nothing.
Which according to Patrick, wasn’t a victory.
You didn’t win by pushing aside what you felt. By twisting it.
“I never buy any of that ‘I don’t know who I am’ bullshit. No offense. It’
s just…everyone knows who they are. You don’t have a choice but to know it.”
What if you didn’t know it?
What if you really fucking didn’t?
Ilia looked at his father.
A mistake. He didn’t know what any of those feelings were in his father’s expression. Didn’t want to know.
His father rubbed his shoulder—small motions, like Patrick had used. That afternoon felt so long ago that Ilia ached after it like it was some lost part of his childhood. He tilted his chin down, watched the tears splat on the table, one after the other. Tried to stay silent at least, because any sound he made would be ugly. Wouldn’t be a sound Louis Porter wanted to hear from his son.
He drew in a breath only when he had to, let it out, and it was ugly, and his father didn’t leave.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
Sometimes the universe collapsed in the blink of an eye.
Other times it limped on and on, hour by hour, day by day, and wouldn’t fucking die.
II
A few weeks later, Patrick sent Ilia a letter. It had come via his dad’s desk at the police station. Ilia supposed Patrick didn’t know his address. Ilia opened it and read it blankly. Patrick was leaving. He was going to Wisconsin. He had family there. There was a school with a good sports therapy program. He was buying a car. Getting a fresh start.
Patrick had never lost himself at all.
Was there a part of him that would always be trapped with Ilia, or was Ilia living in that place in his head by himself?
He threw the letter out.
III
“Dammit,” Louis said from the bathroom.
Ilia lay on his bed, his hands behind his head. He stared at his ceiling. The radio burbled in the background, the two DJs talking shit about something.
Louis appeared in the doorway, dabbing at a nick on his chin. “Bathroom’s free.”
