Page 15 of Reverie
“Your next question, I suppose, is how the hell did she get here?” Luna speaks while analyzing her cuticles.
When I’m silent for a moment too long, she looks at me. I nod.
“Well, all of the details of what happened between then and now are for your mother to divulge. However, I can tell you that she came to be with us about five years after she ‘passed.’”
“Why then?” I ask.
Luna shrugs. “Another mystery, I suppose,” she says.
I highly doubt that Luna doesn’t know the answer to that question too.
I nod again, rubbing my hands on my thighs. It’s only been a few minutes since Luna led me to this room, and I’m getting antsier, not calmer, the longer we’re in here.
I stand, anxious to get this energy out of my body. I want to go to Winter. I need to go to August. I have to know what thefuckis going on.
“Surprise number two. Misha is your brother.” Luna sits up, leaning to put her elbows on her now-bent knees. “Well, your half-brother, to be accurate.”
The confession hits me in the chest, but so does massive confusion. I focus on the tick of the second hand on the massive clock on the far wall.
“Uh-huh,” is all I can make myself say.
“You’re probably wondering why and how that all happened too, right? Well, nothowit happened. I’m sure you know how that works?—”
“Why,” I bite out, “am I just now learning that I have a half-brother? The head of the Ukrainian mob, no less?”
“It’s a mindfuck, I know. I could kick Misha for not telling you earlier. He planned to, you know. As for the mafiya,” shewaves her hand in the air dismissively, “That’s been running on its own for at least the last decade since he took it straight. He never wanted to be pakhan, but if he weren’t in charge…well, the alternative is intolerable.”
I run a hand across my mouth when she finishes, my brain whirring like an old, overworked computer. Misha’s reputation presents him as a deadly, unmoving mafiya leader, but now Luna is suggesting that his organized crime unit is something altogether different.
“I see,” I reply. “And the rest of it?”
Luna works her jaw to the side for a second before continuing. “He was unsure where you stood with everything after he saw you still planned to marry Blair Winthrope. Things were…unclear. He wanted to wait until you got back from Isla Cara and was going to tell you tonight…or last night? But?—”
“But we were raided,” I finish for her.
“Exactly,” she confirms.
“All right, so Misha is my brother. How is that logistically possible? Seeing as he’s Ukrainian and my mother and I are not.”
The stories begin to spin in my head.
“When your mother was a child, she was promised to a Soviet nomenklatura as part of a silent pact between the United States and the USSR.”
“A pactbetweenthe US and the Soviet Union? They were adversaries.”
The look Luna gives me clearly telegraphs how idiotic she views my statement.
“Right,” she replies coolly. “Anyway, the Politburo was essentially like our Congress, but over in the Soviet states back then. The end of General Secretary Brezhnev’s term and the beginning of Andropov’s saw a lot of corruption. Like, a specialamount of corruption. So no one knew what the Politburo was doing or who really was in charge.”
I nod my head to signal that I’m following her.
“Dimitri Hroshko, Misha’s father, was the de-facto leader of the Politburo. And he wanted Amelia Brigham.” She shrugs. “Amelia’s father, Lance, was so sure the USSR was going to take over the world, so he allied himself with the Soviets. Dimitri and Lance met in Vienna when Amelia was a child, and Dimitri was immediately infatuated. So in a deal with her father, Dimitri took her.”
I think about my grandfather’s insistence on having tunnels built in the walls of Amelia Manor, and the safe room that I recently updated following Winter’s disappearance. His fear that the USSR was going to take over the world tracks.
“How old was she when they met?” I say, feeling a rising sense of dread.
“She was nine,” Luna says simply.