Her Russian Millionaire

Chapter 6

Twilight brought out the worst in people. Those who rarely woke up before sunset prowled the streets. Shadows stretched long and low around buildings and into alleyways. Men with heavy feet left icy tracks in front of the closed liquor store. Even the frost-covered ground glistened with a bit of menace. That should have been Erik’s first red flag. He couldn’t see it, though, he was lost in a drunken stupor and deep in conversation with his brother.

Viktor Petrov. The darling child of the Petrov family. He was his mother’s favorite because of his big, brown eyes. Eyes that matched his father and did not tell a tale of a cheating mother who fell into bed with the neighbor. Besides the eyes, their mother’s strong genes assured they were strikingly similar. Most people even assumed they were the same age.

However, they were not. Erik was twenty-three, and Viktor only seventeen. Not even through school yet, the boy was still trying to find his foothold in the world. He had no plans for the future, and expected Erik to give him a prime position at Erik’s budding real estate company. Erik would. The boys were attached at the hip; They always had been.

 “Old man winter strikes hard tonight.” Viktor kicked at the ground with his boot, causing a streak in the frost. “Soon it will be so cold that my мячи will freeze off.”

 “Don’t speak like that,” Erik scolded while trying to hide a chuckle.

 “I do not know the English word for мячи. Will you teach it to me?” Viktor tucked his hands down into his hoodie.

“I will not.” Erik was fluent in English for his business and had been teaching Viktor. “You will never get a wife if you keep talking with such a dirty mouth.”

 “I do not want a wife.” Viktor spat on the ground. “I will never take a wife.”

“You will never get a husband either.” Erik budged his younger brother with his elbow.

 “Fak you.” Viktor’s heavy accent couldn’t quite get the insult out. “I am not gay. I like women, but I do not like wife. Wife talk all the time. Ask me to pick up after myself. It is my house. I leave my socks where I please.”

“You should be picking up after yourself anyway. You are becoming an adult.” Erik dodged it when Viktor tried to shove him back. The alcohol in Viktor’s system made him stumble a bit before standing up.

“I am still drunk,” Viktor proclaimed. Hours had passed since he had only had a few drinks at a sports party with his brother, but the young man was showing it considerably more than Erik.

“Papa will be proud to have raised such a fine young alcoholic.” Erik paused in front of the windows of twenty-four hour convenience shop. He pressed his back against the hard glass and looked down at his shadow.

Their father had more than a bit of a drinking problem, even by Russian standards. It was a sore topic among their mother and father, but the two boys often made jokes. They gave their father vodka for holidays and laughed at the excitement on his face.

“Look at this!” Viktor put his hands up to the light coming from the shop and made crude gestures, watching the shadows lengthen and distort the image.

“Come on,” Erik fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Sober up with a cigarette.”

Erik passed the pack and lighter to Viktor. Had Erik been the first one to light his cigarette, things might have turned out differently. Viktor placed it between his lips, lit the end, and took a deep breath. Erik glanced away for a second to reach for the lighter and when he looked back up, a piece of his younger brother decorated his face. The lighter slipped through his fingers. The cigarette fell out of his lips and sizzled out in the snow.

Four more bullets fired, jerking his brother’s body around in a grotesque puppet show. Erik’s heart pounded and his muscles froze. He stood there looking at his brother in shock as the body kneeled and fell over with a sickening wet thud. A group of men rushed out of the convenience store and returned fire. Erik was a statue, unable to process what was happening. It wasn’t until a hot bullet came dangerously close to biting into his leg that he moved. He grabbed his brother’s leg and drug him to the first place he could think of: the alleyway.

Erik huddled in the garbage while Viktor’s body swam in ankle-deep liquid filth. Erik reached out a shaking hand and put it on his brother’s body. Blood lazily slopped from the wounds on the smaller man’s back. Shredded skin peeled back to expose red flesh. Erik knew from the stillness of the body and the lack of intense bleeding that his brother’s heart had stopped.

“Viktor?” he tried. The gunfire was thinning out as sirens echoed in the distance. “Viktor, please.”

Putting a hand up to his mouth to stifle the sobs, his own brother’s cooling blood smeared across his face. Hot tears ran down his cheeks and he whispered prayers. He bargained with God, saying that if he would bring back Viktor, Erik would do whatever he wanted. He begged and pleaded until the police followed Viktor’s body’s blood trail into the alley.

“Do you have a weapon? Give it to me now!” the cops shouted in Russian.

“My brother. Please help him…” Erik crawled to them. “Maybe we can save him. Get him to a hospital.”

The police officer made him hold up his hands and strip off his coat while another officer dragged his little brother’s body away. The grief clawed its way up Erik’s throat in a strangled scream. He lunged toward the body, and the police tackled him to the ground. He cried out for his brother to get up, to live, while the police shouted in his ear.

In the end, the police pronounced him dead at the scene. It was later ruled a gang shooting. The men who owned the convenience store were part of some sort of mafia and a rival gang had come to put them out of business. One of the surviving gang members testified that he shot the man outside smoking because he thought it was the owner, who happened to be a very heavy smoker. All in all, five men died that night, and Erik wasn’t one of them.

He wanted to be. The depression that set in after his brother’s death was nothing short of debilitating. He lied in his brother’s bed for days, just smelling his scent and crying into his pillow. He watched childhood home videos where the two frolicked around the Russian landscape. Two brothers who were best friends. Not a care in the world. No idea that they would be separated ten years later by a tragic shooting.

One drunken night, he returned to the scene of the crime and chain smoked the rest of the pack. His lungs burning and his mouth caked with the taste of smoke, he was sad to say he survived the night. Erik wanted to rejoin his brother, but was too afraid to do it himself. Busting into the convenience store, he demanded that they kill him. They refused.