Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(3)

Stefan also said that despite his former career, he knew right from wrong too, but before he found me, he was beginning to lose his tolerance for it. It was a lie—or maybe a wish that he could do away with his conscience, because what he’d once done had to weigh on it. He’d worked for the Russian Mafiya. He’d done bad things to . . . well, probably equally bad or corrupt people, but the weak too. The weak always got in over their heads in dark waters. What Stefan had done, he didn’t want to tell me and I didn’t push, but I did my research. You didn’t work as a bodyguard in the Russian mob as Stefan had without doing some serious damage to people who may or may not have deserved it.

Regardless of that and regardless of the things Stefan had done for me, under that ruthlessness to protect, and the willingness to kill if that was what it took to keep me safe, there was a part of him that wanted to believe in a world that was fair. He wanted to believe that concepts like right and wrong could be viable. Despite all he’d done and had been forced to do, he wanted to believe, though he knew better. Stefan had a heart and he didn’t realize it. Why else would he search for a kidnapped brother for ten years when his—our—own father had given up?

Older brothers, especially ex-mobsters, weren’t supposed to be more na?ve than their younger ones, but Stefan . . . sometimes I thought he was. We had both been trained to be killers, but I thought I’d learned far more than Stefan. He would deny it, but he was wrong.

If he hadn’t spent almost half of his life looking for me and doing what was necessary to finance that search, I wasn’t sure what my brother would’ve been. Not what he was, I did know that. When I had been taken—such a simple word—it had ruined lives, and when it came to Stefan, when I had been abducted, it had done more than ruin. It had done things I wasn’t sure there were words for. And when it had happened, it had changed my brother as much as it had me—which wasn’t either right or fair. But true as that was, we were both alive and free now, and that was a thousand times more than I’d ever expected or dreamed. Where I had spent most of my life, freedom wasn’t a concept, only a meaningless word to be looked up in a dictionary.

My brother had made it mean something. Cascade Falls was part of that, which only made me wish again I had made that tourist pay for his contempt. And that was a slippery slope. I focused on my book and the words swam into focus. I was close, very close to what I was trying to accomplish—it was only a matter of weeks or maybe days, I hoped. I’d had seven years of a normal life before I’d been kidnapped, Stefan said, although I couldn’t remember a single second of them; ten years of captivity, which I remembered with stark, vivid clarity; and nearly three years of freedom, freedom to do research; and now the time was almost right. I was almost there. All the more reason to learn more and do it faster.

A finger poked at my book on neurosurgery. “Parker, you’re always studying. If you’re not going to college, why bother?”

Parker wasn’t my real name, but Sarafynna didn’t know that. Then again, Sarafynna didn’t know how to spell her own name and that made me doubt she cared that my name was actually Michael. Or Mykyl. When it came to Sarafynna, I wasn’t too sure that wasn’t how the letters popped up in her brain. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure Sarafynna had a brain at all without an MRI to back that up. All that Sara—the nickname was much simpler and it didn’t make my mind twitch—knew was how to put whipped cream on top of the lattes and how to flirt. To “mack” or “hit on” guys. Since I didn’t know who Mack was, I went with the other one—“hit on.” That was more modern than “flirt” . . . to “hit on” guys. Whatever. I had more significant things to concentrate on.

Saving brain cells for important information outweighed saving them for teenage slang—which was mostly uninteresting anyway. Besides, in another month I wouldn’t be a teenager anymore.

In almost three years I’d learned about flirting and sex, but now, at nineteen closing in on twenty, I liked intelligence in girls or women. Sara was entertaining and she let me know my hormones were working at top capacity—she was gorgeous. . . . Hot, I mean—“hot” was what someone my age should say. But she didn’t have it all. I’d come to find out that I needed resourceful and smart too; Sara had everything except that. She had sunshine-bright blond hair—fake; big, turquoise eyes—fake; and she bounced wherever she went. That meant certain things on her, those things also fake, bounced with her as she went and rarely stopped bouncing. The first time Stefan had met her, he waited until I got off work that night and took me to the drugstore for a box of condoms.

I told him I didn’t need them, and he told me I was an idiot if I didn’t want to play in that sandbox. I was nineteen, he said with a grin, and that was what nineteen was all about. Nineteen and friction—knock yourself out.

But I didn’t. I saw her fake-colored contacts and thought about the one I wore that turned my one blue eye mossy green to match the other one—two fakes don’t make a reality; I thought about her lack upstairs of anything but whipped cream, and it seemed like a waste. Stefan and I had lived in Bolivia for two years before we came to Cascade Falls. I’d played in sandboxes there, whatever Stefan had said. It wasn’t as if I were a virgin. I’d had the experience . . . experiences. I’d been seventeen before I’d gotten to make my own choices, even a single one. Now that I had almost three years of making decisions for myself, I wanted to be sure that each one I made now was the best I could make.