I stare at Yulian’s face. His eyes are hazy; he’s losing himself to old memories. Maybe if I can convince him to keep talking, I’ll get some real information out of him.
“I can’t imagine Anton not being able to control anyone.”
He smirks. “I thought the same thing before Marina came into the picture. Honestly, when the match was first proposed, everyone thought it was an amazing idea. They were perfect together. Not just because they looked perfect together. It was everything: the birth and the breeding. The combined wealth and power.”
His explanation leaves me feeling hollow inside. It’s a black hole in my chest and it’ll swallow me up if I lean too close to it. So instead, I just listen, hanging on to every word, even as I lose sight of why I asked the question in the first place. Why I bothered coming out here in the first place.
“Even their personalities were similar,” he’s saying. “It should have been a match made in heaven.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“The first year was more or less smooth,” Yulian recounts. “At least as far as I could tell. They probably fucked so much that there was no time to hate or argue. Hard to pick a fight with a dick in your mouth, right?”
I grimace. “Gross.”
But he ignores me like I never spoke. “But when the sex got stale, they must have realized that they were too alike to actually get along. That’s when the fights started. Nasty fights, too.”
“Violent?”
“Sometimes.”
He says it in a matter-of-fact way, as though violence toward someone you love is normal and they were just doing what was expected of them, what they’d been taught.
“My brother is not one to air dirty laundry in public, but Marina loved a scene. Probably because she knew how much Anton hated it.”
“She sounds unhinged.”
Yulian shakes his head and looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. “I think she was just unhappy.”
“But why?” I ask. “From what you’ve told me, she had everything. Looks, wealth, and a powerful husband.”
“Except she didn’t really have him,” Yulian says, giving me a secretive smile.
I raise my eyebrows. “He was cheating on her?”
Yulian doesn’t answer me. “It was doomed from the start. After the first major fight, they both walked away with scars.”
“Literal or figurative?”
He chuckles. “Both, most likely. Marina wasn’t afraid to draw blood.”
“Jesus,” I breathe.
Yulian pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one. I decline, so he lights up. Smoke stings my nostrils, but I’m too invested in this conversation to walk away now. It’s a morbid curiosity, like rubbernecking at a deadly car accident on the side of the road, but I can’t stop, despite the last scraps of my sense of self-preservation screaming at me to run as far away from this family as I can.
“How did he find out that she was dead?” I ask, hoping I’m not being too obvious.
“I told him.”
My eyes go wide. “Really?”
Yulian nods, his eyes turning sad. “I found her body right outside the boundaries of Anton’s property.”
“Oh my God…”
“It’s strange what death does to a person. All her beauty… it had turned dark. Like some unholy beast had possessed her in her final moments. She still looked like her, but it wasn’t Marina anymore.”
“How did Anton react when you told him?”