“Doesn’t matter.” She stopped. Looked at him. “Listen,” she said. “I know you’re just trying to help, and I get how, from your perspective, this makes no sense. But there’s history here—a lot of fucking history—if you’d lived it, you’d understand, and I assure you, John understands.”

“Make it make sense, then. Make me understand.”

She sighed. Debated. Some things just weren’t worth the effort.

“It’s just words,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

“Try me.”

She answered out of spite more than anything. “Clare pitched us against each other constantly,” she said. “She played favorites. Didn’t matter if I outshot, outfought, outperformed my brother. He was brilliant, and I was the fuckup. I guess a person can only handle so much of that before they buy into the belief, and he bought into it hard enough to carry it into adulthood. He makes decisions on my behalf that aren’t his to make, believes he has that right, because he thinks he knows what’s better for me than I do. We’ve drawn blood over it. He’s well aware of where the line is and what happens if he crosses it.”

She wrapped her arm around her knees. “I’ve made a lot of shit choices in my life, Chris, but every single one has been deliberate, and I’ve always been aware of the consequences. John, on the other hand, is so used to being Mr. Good Guy that he’s blind to his own blind spots. We should have bailed in Berlin the moment that fucktard offered new tickets, but John, he’s like this abandoned street urchin who just heard a rumor about parents searching for him. He wants this thing with Dmitry more than he’s ever wanted anything, wants it so badly that he’s lying to himself about what he sees. He would have gone with or without me, so I came to make sure he had someone watching his back. He thanked me by pulling this shit, so yeah, I’m done.”

Holden took a long time to answer.

“I get why you’re angry,” he said. “I do. I just can’t wrap my head around hating him so much, you’d rather let him die than suck it up and deal with it later.”

“I don’t hate him,” she said. “I mean, yes, I do. Especially right now. But it’s not him I hate. It’s . . . it’s everything else. I don’t want him dead.”

“Want, indifference, it’s all the same thing, really.”

“No, want would be me actively seeking to make him dead. Indifference is me refusing to let him drag me into more of the same old shit.”

“So there’s no changing your mind?”

“No.”