He took a slow steadying breath that filled his gut and let it out.
He spread his arms out, palms up. “Why did you summon me?” he asked coldly, feeling slightly less murderous. “My brother meant less to you than garbage. Never smart enough, brave enough.” He was only stating the facts they both knew.
“He wasn’t you.”
“And you hated him for that. Did he die because of it too? Did you let him make deals that would get him killed?” Sevastyan growled. “Did your greed push him into an early grave? Answer me, God damn you!”
Sevastyan’s scowl of anger clung to him like a three-day-old stench. His chest tightened just being in the same room as the man he despised for far too damn long.
“My greed? Shut up, boy. I won’t have my blood talk to me like I’m some underling soldier. I control you. Not the other way around.” His father’s voice grew heavy and slurred with time. ‘R’s rolled and ‘e’s softened with a rich Russian accent decades of living in the United States couldn’t take away.
He threw his hands up and stormed across the office. He poured a few fingers worth of vodka and downed it, chasing it with a second. He cursed his bloodline. His family name. It meant something growing up, but now it only stood for blood and death.
In a family like theirs, the older brother was supposed to step into the father’s shoes. Take over for the family when the father grew too old to carry the burden of heading an underworld empire.
It’s the way it worked. He understood that. Accepted it. But as a young boy, his father saw it differently, demanding he be the one to take over the Volkov family when the time came. As a child, he didn’t understand what his father saw in him, but as a full-grown man, Sevastyan understood. A darkness in him spoke to the darkness in the man who fathered him. And his father planned on capitalizing on it.
Only he never got a chance.
When his mother died everything changed.
The day she went into the ground he swore off any allegiance to his bloodline and willingly turned into the black sheep of the family.
His father had Mikhail after all. The oldest.
And look how that ended. Sevastyan poured another drink and hammered it back in the same fashion hoping it helped dull the edges of anger slicing into him.
Being on the outside cost him though. Sevastyan couldn’t protect the one person who needed him the most. His worst nightmare had come to life and he’d failed to prevent it. That made him as guilty as their father and he would make damn sure he didn’t shoulder this burden alone.
They’d all failed his older brother. Some more than others.
A cry of horror rang out across Chicago when the Volkov family showed up, fought for territory, and won. He’d been young then. Eight years old. Impressionable. A goddamn fool boy who thought considered his father a hero.
Then he grew up and understood the blood shed to obtain the power his father craved stained anyone it touched and blackened a man’s soul.
His soul. His name.
And he wanted nothing to do with it then, but time had a way of taking everything you loved about life and burying it.
To do what was needed, he couldn’t stand on the outside any longer. He needed to be on the inside. Only from there could he hunt for a killer.
“I’m not your puppet to control. I never was. I’m not Mikhail. Say what you want because this is the last you’ll see of me. The Volkov empire is under my rule now. And there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll slaughter any man you send my way and I’ll kill you too if you so much as lift a finger against me.”
From this distance, he could see the man’s thin lips turn white as he clamped his mouth shut. Holding back.
Murder-for-power spilled rivers of blood in the streets of every corner in the city before any semblance of peace came about. Years of war and death smeared the Volkov name to some and others it represented power and respect.
It made him sick.
His father’s steel gaze tracked him silently as he moved across the room in deliberate strides, the scent of old smoke and vodka hitting his nostrils. For the last four days he’d lived with the smell of burned flesh that leeched the life from his body and clung to his dreaming and waking hours like a nightmare that thrived from his misery, so the stale scents were eerily welcomed.
Images of what they’d left of his brother on his doorstep haunted him every time he closed his eyes. Not since his young adult years had he felt such desolation and hopeless despair.
Left to yet again pick up the pieces alone. His father was too self-absorbed to see the pain others suffered while he clawed out more territory, more power. More money.
His brother was the fool always trying to please their father. Looking for the man’s approval. Which pushed the idiot into doing anything their father wanted.
Fuck. Maybe he should have never left and instead assumed the burden that accompanied the Volkov name.