He sat up and swiveled to face her. “What is it you need to be happy? You want me to stop speaking with John? Ignore him, refuse to respect him, not be his friend?”

She looked him dead in the face and, with spite he’d never heard out of her, not even in Prague, when she’d been murderously angry, said, “I want him to not win.”

It took a beat to process that.

“Win?” he said. “Is that what I am to you? Some object or trophy you’ve claimed, and that you’re afraid your brother is going to take away?”

She went back to stuffing the bag.

He said, “You’re a vortex, Julia, sucking everything into your storm, destroying anything you could possibly have that’s good, and it’ll never stop until you’re willing to face the thing that scares you so bad.”

Her lip curled in visible disgust. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

“Oh, but you are. Fear drives everything you do.”

“All right, smart-ass,” she said. “What’s it I’m so afraid of?”

“That maybe your mother was right.”

She glared, and he hesitated, truly pained, because the things he’d say would hurt, and she’d had enough hurt in her life, and he didn’t want to be the one to add to it, but she needed to hear it, and he might be the only one who ever had the chance.

“You spend so much energy taking from your brother, not because you want what he has, but because you don’t want him to have what you don’t, as if keeping him from having will keep him from being worth more than you. You treat relationships, connections, people, as if they’re disposable, because it’s safer that way because no one can ever confirm how little you matter if you never let them matter in the first place. And Dmitry, you’re terrified John might actually find him, because what would it say about you if after all these years, it turns out even your own father loves him more?”

With each added word, the whole of her had darkened.

Her fists had clenched. Her jaw had clenched.

She’d stood and inched toward him, and he’d kept going, because this would be the one and only time he could say what needed saying, and he had to say it all, but on that last sentence she came at him, swinging.

He dodged the first hit. Dodged the second.

Clipped her hard on the third, and she went out cold.

He shook his hand, irritated at himself, not for hitting her, per se—in a world like this, notions of chivalry were sexist bullshit that’d get a man killed—but because genuine connections in this life were hard to find, and he genuinely liked her, and he’d hoped . . . he’d hoped. But this was too toxic, even for him.