Page 77 of Ruby Malice

“Okay. Then go find one,” I tell him.

My twenty-year-old brother bounces back to his bedroom like a toddler. I shuffle over to the table. His speech has been a struggle since the accident. For a few years after, he didn’t speak a word. Doctors assured me he could, that the speech part of his brain hadn’t been significantly damaged. But he refused.

I spent a small fortune on therapists and doctors, but there were no answers. Not any I liked, at least.

“Trauma,” one doctor finally said. “It does strange things to the body. Time and love can undo some of it, if you’re lucky.”

When Ilya did finally start to speak again, he was sixteen. His words came out fractured and stilted. More often than not, he preferred the silent ways we'd come to communicate. Hand signals and expressions, crudely-drawn pictures.

But I remind him to speak. If he doesn't, I'm afraid he'll lose the ability altogether. And another piece of him will be lost to the void.

I’ve lost enough of him already.

Ilya comes back out with a fifty-piece puzzle box. The picture is of a dolphin jumping out of the water.

"This one again?"

He nods. "My favorite."

"Yeah. I know, I know," I say. "Mr. Oceanographer over here. How could I forget?"

It’s why I decorated this apartment in pale blues and golds. It’s why I gave him the best view in the house. The ocean calms him down. If I could keep him here in this house full-time, I would. But I have to be with him, and a few months out of the year away from New York is the most I can manage.

When Ilya hands me the box, I notice the scrapes on the back of his hand.

“Uh-oh.” I set the box aside and show him the scrapes. “We need to clean these.”

He frowns and pulls his hands away.

“Why does no one make it easy for me to take care of them?” I grimace.

Ilya doesn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to.

I’d love to be able to talk to my brother about the woman who drives me crazy. Or any woman, for that matter. But he’s known Sonya for three years and he still forgets who she is half the time.

“Come on. To the bathroom we go.”

I herd Ilya down the hallway and dig for the first aid kit. It’s giving me serious flashbacks to yesterday that I do my best to ignore.

As I’m cleaning the blood off in the water, Ilya whimpers. “I know,” I console him. “You hate being hurt.”

He nods and tries to pull his hand back, but I force him to stay over the sink.

“If I don’t clean it, it could get infected. I have to wrap it.”

In the middle of one of his tantrums, he loses sight of everything. Occasionally, he’ll even try to take me out. But as soon as it passes, he’s harmless. That’s a tough dynamic to explain to most people.

But Rayne was trying to help him.

Sonya had found me downstairs and told me Rayne was on the third floor with Ilya. I sprinted up the stairs because the elevator was too slow. I expected to find chaos.

Instead… they were sitting on the couch together.

Ilya was watching the water and Rayne was watching him. My brother was sitting with a stranger, and he was just… fine.

I couldn’t believe it.

Then she moved, and the hellscape I expected broke loose.

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