Nikolai looked up at me. “He liked it too much, his other… Shit, how do I even explain this to a kid?”
“I’m not a kid!” I yelled, angry that he’d insult my intelligence and my maturity.
“The drugs cause you to lose inhibition. The injection works for a certain amount of time, allowing you to experience trauma but forget you experienced it. Imagine taking a pill that erases the things that have been done to you; we’ve been working on it for over a decade. And when Maksim was asked to do something hard, he decided the easiest way to do it would be to take the drug, black out, carry out his little mission and then return to normal.”
“But he didn’t,” I whispered as icy fingers of horror crept over my body.
“No,” Nikolai said. “When he finally came out of it the first time, we did a psych evaluation—a real one—and he scored extremely high in areas of psychosis. The drug basically pushed his brain into a situation where he needed to separate what he was doing from how he was living—Essentially, dissociative identity disorder. It was treatable,” he added quickly. “There’s a suppressant that keeps him from going into a murderous rage, and it worked for months. I thought we’d just keep giving it to him until he leveled out, but… he started needing more and more.”
“So give him more!” I demanded. “That’s not brain surgery!”
“If I give him more,” Nikolai said in a soft voice, his tone even, detached. “He’ll have full organ failure.”
“What?”
“Your organs can only take so much of the medication before they’re overwhelmed before he’d either have to choose between eating or taking the medicine, so they have time to process it. Imagine an alcoholic drinking liquor and eating at the same time. The liver has to process the poison first before it can process any sort of—”
“I know what the liver does,” I ground out. “There has to be another way.”
“Trust me.” Nikolai sighed. “While he’s been pumping himself full of the suppressant, I’ve been trying to find a way. Had I caught it sooner, it wouldn’t have been this bad. We did everything right.”
I glared at him, one eyebrow raised, because obviously, they had not done everything right.
The only indication Nikolai noticed my rage was a quick flattening of his lips before he went on. “He took notes in his journal about how he felt both on the medicine and off of it, but by the time I told him he needed to stop taking it because it was killing him-it was too late.”
“Why was he taking it in the first place, then?” I asked. “Why would he feel the need to take something so he doesn’t know what he’s doing? So he doesn’t remember? So it doesn’t cause permanent trauma?”
My dad cleared his throat and finally looked away from the floor and at me. “That’s my fault.”
“What?” I hissed.
King grabbed more whiskey and tossed it back. Clearly, he already knew.
Dad pulled out a chair. “I asked Maksim for a few favors. He was working for me for a while, and he… didn’t have the stomach, he said, for what I asked him to do. When he went to Seattle, he was in Nikolai’s lab and saw a scientific solution to his problem, one that would help him and help Nikolai’s research. Nobody had any way of knowing.”
King grunted and looked away like he was pissed at the world.
I wanted to join because what the hell?
“So, he took it because the idea of working for you was so horrendous?” I asked, modulating my tone. “That makes no sense at all.”
“He took it,” King interrupted, his lips twisted with a mirthless smile, “because your dad asked him to kill his friend.” He slammed the whiskey back down on the counter, the sound echoing like an explosion. “Maksim killed Claire.”
Blood roared in my ears as I stood there and saw affirmation on every single person’s face, in their eyes, posture.
An invisible fist slammed into my chest, stalling my breaths, as I stumbled against the counter. “I always wondered,” I whispered. “Why you let her go, Dad.”
“He didn’t.” King was full on tilting the bottle back and drinking in earnest now. “Do you really think Chase Abandonato would let that girl go? No matter who she was—a rat is a rat.”
“A rat is a rat.” Nikolai squeezed his eyes shut.
“You’re all insane!” I roared. “This is insane!”
Nikolai drummed his fingertips against the counter. “The medicine should have repressed him by now; the knots help his psyche gain control again over the other personality.”
“Then what’s our current problem? Right now?” I asked. “His impending death or that he’s going to Hulk out and go on a killing spree?”
“The problem,” Andrei finally spoke, “is that he was born in fire and blood, that is in his veins. The problem is that Maksim has suppressed himself his entire life. He’s always denied what’s been right in front of him the entire time… He liked it, his true nature liked it, the killing, the feeling of finally having freedom, the warmth of the blood, and the excuse that it wasn’t really him consciously doing it.” Andrei sighed. “I know this because he’s my son. I know this because…” He eyed the journal. “He said it in there.”