The lunch bag didn’t drop from his hand, but I saw his fingers loosen. He was stunned and why wouldn’t he be? Anatoly was dead. His father was dead.
Then his fingers tightened and the paper bag crumpled under his hand. I could guess, sort of, what he might be thinking, his first thought. We’d talked about Anatoly since my rescue and I’d gotten a fair picture of Stefan and his relationship. Anatoly and mine, not as much, but I knew Stefan and his father—our father—as much as I could. What do you think when your father dies, when he never was a father at all but an imitation at best? How can you love and respect a man who ordered people killed as easily as he ordered dinner in a restaurant? You pretend, I guess. Pretend, and when that man dies, you mourn what should’ve been . . . what you wish could’ve been, not what actually was.
Stefan had said he’d never killed anyone in the mob and I believed him, but if it had come down to it . . . if it had been kill them to have the money to save me, I knew what his decision would’ve been. He would’ve killed his own soul for me. He thought that made him and Anatoly not so different. He was wrong. Anatoly had done it for the money and the power. Stefan would’ve done it to save me, because Anatoly wouldn’t give him the money then to chase ghosts. To Anatoly, that was what I’d been. He’d given up on me when Stefan never had. No matter what Stefan thought, he was nothing like our father. And I only called Anatoly our father aloud and in my mind for Stefan.
Stefan had told me once that he didn’t know that Anatoly didn’t love his sons, because he didn’t know for sure that he didn’t. Murderers could love their own—couldn’t they? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think Stefan knew for sure, but I agreed they could. It was what he had wanted to hear. That was something I’d learned on my own, not at the Institute.
“Stefan?”
He blinked at the sound of his name, his real name, and corrected me automatically—“Harry.” Here we were Harry and Parker Alonzo, not Stefan and Michael Korsak. Stefan and Michael Korsak were on at least two kill lists. Fake names kept it that way, because you came off those kill lists only when you were dead. I’d picked the names . . . from another old movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was my favorite, though it was older than I was.
Stefan had snorted when I’d suggested it and promptly said that if I wanted to call myself Sundance, he supported my bold and very personal decision.
I’d called him an ass, another curse word I’d learned to use, and gave him Harry. It was Sundance’s real name and I used Parker, Butch’s last name. He was the smart one after all, I’d told my brother smugly, although I wasn’t being too bright right now. Harry was also the name of Stefan’s horse that was shot and killed on the beach the day I was taken by the Institute. I thought that might bother him, but he’d said no . . . that we leave memorials scattered through our lives in different ways. Gravestones were frozen in time, but memories you could take with you anywhere. Names too—you could keep them with you always. He hadn’t thought Harry would mind.
“Harry,” I corrected myself with my frown returning, this one directed at my own forgetfulness. I was better than that and had been trained to be exceptional in all areas of deception. I wasn’t being exceptional now. “We should go home. I’ll tell Mrs. Sloot that a pipe burst. It’s flooding the bathroom. You have to go home and fix it.” I turned to go inside the house, but then I hesitated long enough to say over my shoulder, “I’m . . . as I said—I didn’t think . . . I’m sorry.” It was the most awkward handful of words to come out of my mouth probably ever. It was self-conscious and tongue-tied five times over, but it seemed to mean something to Stefan. The darkness in his eyes lightened a little.