Page 7 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
The machines around us seemed to get louder, their electronic chorus a soundtrack to the end of the world as I knew it.
“Your mother,” he said, and I felt something inside me go very still. “Your brother. They’re not dead.”
The words hit me like physical blows, each one landing with enough force to steal my breath. Not dead. Twenty-seven years of grief, twenty-seven years of carrying their ghosts, and they were not dead.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The fire.” His eyes were distant now, lost in memory. “It was meant for all of us. The whole family. But I got word…minutes before. Barely enough time to get them out.”
The room spun around me, walls shifting like I was drunk or dying or both. “You’re lying.”
“Your brother. Your twin. Trev.” He squeezed my hand, and I could feel the life bleeding out of him with each word. “Hannah. Your mother. They’re in Australia. Have been for twenty-seven years.”
Australia. The word sounded foreign, impossible. Like he’d told me they were living on the moon.
“I had to fake their deaths.” His voice was getting weaker now, each word an effort. “Had to make everyone believe they were gone. It was the only way to keep them safe.”
“From who?” The question came out as a roar, and I realized I was on my feet without remembering standing up. “Safe from fucking who?”
“The Kozaks.” He coughed, and blood flecked his lips. “Petro. He wanted me to watch my family burn before he killed me. So I gave him what he wanted to see. Empty coffins. Fake bodies. Let him think he’d won.”
Petro Kozak. The name tasted like poison in my mouth, but it made a sick kind of sense. The Kozaks had been gunning for our family for as long as I could remember, and Petro was exactly the kind of psychopath who would target women and children to make a point.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The words came out broken, and I hated how young I sounded. How lost.
“Because you were ten years old and barely surviving what you thought you’d lost. Because telling you would have meant risking their lives if you ever broke under pressure.” His eyes found mine, and for a moment, he looked like the father I remembered instead of the dying stranger in this hospital bed. “Because I needed you to be hard. Needed you to be strong. And the boy who knew his family was alive would have been soft.”
Soft. The word hit me like a slap because I knew exactly what he meant. The ten-year-old who’d watched his mother and brother die in flames had learned to bury every gentle impulse, every moment of weakness. Had turned himself into a weapon because weapons didn’t feel pain.
But they hadn’t died. They were alive, and I’d spent twenty-seven years mourning people who were breathing and laughing and living entire lives on the other side of the world.
“I need their address,” I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. “Phone numbers. Everything.”
He nodded toward the bedside table. “Envelope. Top drawer. Everything you need to know.”
I found it—a manila envelope with my name written across the front in my father’s careful script. Inside were photographs, documents, what looked like years’ worth of surveillance reports. My hands shook as I pulled out the first picture.
A woman with dark hair and kind eyes, older than I remembered but unmistakably my mother. She was standing in front of a house with white siding and a red door, smiling at whoever was taking the picture.
The second photograph knocked the breath out of my lungs.
It was like looking in a mirror, if mirrors could show you parallel lives. Same face, same build, same dark hair. But thisversion of me was wearing a police uniform, and his eyes held a lightness mine had lost decades ago.
Trev. My twin brother, the other half of a whole I’d thought was gone forever.
“He’s a cop,” my father said, and there was something like pride in his voice. “Good one, from what I hear. Made detective a few years back.”
A cop. My brother—my twin brother—was a fucking cop, and I was…what I was. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so goddamn tragic.
“They know about you,” he continued, and I looked up from the photographs. “Know you survived.”
Of course, they knew. Of course, I was the only one left out of this story, the son who’d stayed behind to become everything they’d been saved from, all while thinking they were dead.
“I need to tell them—”
“No.” The word came out sharp, final. “Not yet. Petro’s still alive, still dangerous. If he finds out they exist….”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. I’d seen enough of Petro Kozak’s work to know exactly what he’d do to my family if he got his hands on them. The man didn’t just kill people—he made art out of their suffering.
