“Well, yes and no,” she admits. “He was still all spitfire-y, ready to keep arguing. But then Kolya, he… Have you ever noticed how his eyes change sometimes? It’s like they’re—”

“Splintering,” I fill in with a shiver. “Yeah. I’ve noticed.”

Sara grins. “Exactly. Splintering. That’s perfect. Anyway, they did that thing, and then Kolya started asking questions. But it was like he already knew all the answers. He asked if my dad knew what Luka had done with his wife, Kolya’s mother. My dad got weird then. He kind of shuffled in place, hemmed and hawed. But that wasn’t good enough for Kolya. Kolya made him say it out loud. Forced him to, really.”

She fades off, picking at her lip with one long nail.

I feel a sudden chill in the air. “What did he make him say, Sara? What did you hear?”

She’s still quiet.

“Sara,” I prompt, my eyes huge and pleading. “Please tell me.”

She swallows and straightens up. “I stood there and listened as my father confirmed that Luka had sold his own wife into a prostitution ring.”

The words are as sickening now as they were the first time I heard them. Like knives whirling in the air, cutting indiscriminately. I close my eyes until the nauseous feeling passes.

“He knew that my dad was one of the few who’d been privy to that disgusting little secret,” she explains. “And he made him swear never to repeat those words. Kolya didn’t want Adrian to know what happened. Even then, he wanted to protect his brother from ugly truths.”

I swallow the acrid taste in my mouth. Where does the lie end? Where does the truth begin?

Out loud, I ask, “Then what happened?”

“That was pretty much the end. Papa got the message. He understood that any other don would’ve slaughtered him on the spot. For his sins, for his secrecy, for his insubordination. Kolya was being merciful. We walked out and that was that.”

“So how did you come back into the fold?”

She shakes her head. “Kolya contacted me about a couple years later. Papa’s cancer had just come back, and I was struggling to take care of him and put myself through medical school.”

I nod, already seeing where this is going. “He offered to help you out, didn’t he?”

“All expenses paid. He only asked that I be available to him as a doctor if and when he needed me. He said he’d pay me handsomely for my services when the time came. He put the proposition forward like he was asking me for a favor. But the reality is, he was doing me one. So I became a part of the world that I had hated for so long. I became a Bratva doctor. And I came whenever Kolya Uvarov called.”

My head is reeling from all this new information. Every time I’m so sure I finally have a read on the Uvarov brothers, some new story smashes it all to bits and makes me rebuild from scratch.