“Where you going, Stef?”

It was a question I’d heard a hundred times before. You could search the world, any country or culture, and it was a good bet you’d hear the same words or a version of them anyway. It was the siren call of little brothers far and wide. Lukas, for all that he was a great kid, was no different there. Rolling my eyes with all the long sufferance I could scrape up, I stuffed another pair of wadded-up jeans into the duffel bag resting on my bed. “Football camp, runt. Remember?”

“No, you never said.” The corner of his mouth plunged down and a stubborn glint bloomed in his bicolored eyes. “You didn’t. I would remember.”

I thought it was more a matter of his not wanting to remember that led to his sudden amnesia. It was easy enough to understand even wrestling against the self-centered nature that was a biological by-product of being a teenager. It wasn’t as if we could simply run out the front door, grab our bikes and our buddies, and race off down your typical neighborhood street. This wasn’t a typical neighborhood, and we weren’t your typical kids. Those kids didn’t have “friends of the family” ferrying them back and forth to a private school exclusive enough to put a Kennedy on the waiting list. Those kids lived far from our stretch of beach, and if I thought they were the lucky ones, I kept it to myself. Our father wasn’t much on ungrateful children and had a spearing gaze that had even the smartest mouth snapping shut instantly. His brown eyes were mine, but I’d not seen any mirror reflect my irises paled to an ice-covered muddy pond. It might be a talent that came with age or it could come from something else entirely . . . something that I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about, not even at the ripe old age of fourteen.

I knew what Lukas was feeling. I’d felt it myself. It was easy to get lonely. There were only so many school activities you could do and only so many times a week Anatoly was willing to have us driven to friends’ houses. At the end of the day it came down to Lukas and me. With seven years’ difference between us, we didn’t have much in common. Video games and riding lessons; there wasn’t much more. That was all right; it was enough. Never mind that Lukas read encyclopedias as if they were comic books and I read whatever I was forced to for English class . . . or porn if I could sneak it. And it didn’t matter that he wanted to grow up to be a doctor or a chemist while, despite my father’s amused disdain, I still had crazy thoughts about the police academy.

All the differences between us didn’t matter a damn. We were all each other had. If it were the other way around and Lukas was off to camp, I’d miss the little shit. I’d die before I’d admit it, yeah, but I would miss him. Tugging at his olive green T-shirt, I pulled him down into a sitting position on the bed. “It’s just two weeks.” I might as well have said two years for the stricken look he gave me. Two weeks was forever when you were seven, and when you were a lonely seven, eternity wasn’t just a concept. It was a cold, hard reality. “You want me to write?”

“Would you?” He seized on the offer immediately, his face brightening to a sunny glow.

Yeah, that wouldn’t sentence me to two weeks of endless wedgies—writing my kid brother faithfully like the biggest dork on the planet. Swallowing a sigh, I managed to do the almost impossible and leapfrog a nicely healthy egocentric core. “Every day. How ’bout that?” Hooking an arm around a small, sturdy neck, I rubbed my knuckles lightly across his head in the ever-classic noogie.

He yelped, struggled, then collapsed laughing to rest against my side. When he regained his breath and quieted, he repeated the vow fervently, “Every day.” Twisting his head, he looked up at me. He was close enough that I could count the freckles on his nose, a gift from our mom. “You won’t forget? Like you forgot the Captain Crunch was mine? Like you forgot me at David Fedorov’s birthday party?”

Shrewd pup; his memory worked just fine when he wanted it to. That had been two years ago and I had forgotten him. It had been for only a half hour, but it had been a pretty scary half hour for a five-year-old roaming around lost in a house bigger than the governor’s mansion. We’d all trooped outside after cake for volleyball and swimming, and it had never crossed my mind Lukas had disappeared into the bathroom only minutes before. The housekeeper found him later sitting forlornly on the sweeping stairs and led him out to the rest of the party. He hadn’t been mad. Lukas never got mad at his oh-so-amazing older brother, but he hadn’t forgotten that I once had.

“Elephants have nothing on you, do they?” I rested my chin on his head. “I won’t forget, kiddo.” Screw the guys at camp. Let them make fun all they want. “I won’t forget you again. Promise.” I meant it too, with an unshakable resolution I couldn’t have dreamed would have to last so long.

So damn long.

I couldn’t say what brought that particular memory to mind, but it wasn’t surprising that my mind was boiling with every moment that I could recall of a seven-year-old boy’s life. It was just too bad for the guy whose throat was under my shoe that the flash of guilt storming through my brain happened right then. It certainly didn’t put me in a very happy or forgiving frame of mind. It was a piece-of-shit world that took what should’ve been sweet nostalgia and turned it into nothing more than bitter regret. I had a feeling a small portion of that regret was about to be passed on.

Leaning a fraction harder, I let gravity take my weight until the distressed squawking died out beneath me. “Dipping into the till, Vasily.” I shook my head, bored. “You think I have nothing better to do than kick your preklag?”

Normally this wasn’t my job, punishing the stupid. I was a bodyguard, not random muscle, and I wasn’t too wild about this new detour in my career path. No matter how temporary, this was not what I wanted to do. Maybe none of it was. What had once seemed as inevitable as the tide now seemed nothing short of criminal insanity. Everyone was born with a soul; when had I decided to throw mine away?

It didn’t matter because I knew exactly when I was getting it back—two more days. Two more days and I wouldn’t be the person I had been, but I would be better than I was now. It wasn’t saying much, I realized with a dark twist of my lips, but it was better than nothing. I’d lived ten years with the nothing, and I had few illusions there was worse than that.

“How much did you take, sika?” The demand was harsh, the voice itself cut glass and shattered ice. It was my father’s voice, clearly . . . unmistakably. And yet it managed to find its way from my mouth with a natural ease.

“Perhaps our dear friend Vasily would be more forthcoming with a crushed testicle.” Konstantin crossed his legs, tugging carefully at the crease of his elegant slacks. “Or two.” He was balanced on a barstool with the grace of a much younger man. With one arm resting along the polished wood and glass counter, he tapped his index finger imperiously against its surface. “Black tea, sugar and milk.” Our beloved leader had a trace of a sweet tooth and preferred his tea milky and as cloying as honey in contrast to the strong Cuban coffee he favored. With shaking hands, the guy behind the bar scrambled to obey.

The restaurant belonged to the man on the floor, Vasily Bormiroff, who was soon to be a eunuch if Gurov had his way. Correction—the restaurant belonged to Vasily in name only. In reality, the Samovar, as with so many other businesses, existed to launder money for the organization. When some of that money went missing, it was taken personally. Poor doomed Bormiroff; he must have thought himself pretty damn clever, taking only a little here and a little there. He wasn’t clever; he was a moron. Even a wayward penny would have snagged Konstantin’s eye. Vasily was nothing but a hen in a fox house and a hen that was well and truly caught.