Page 110 of Cruel Juliet

Petyr stays quiet and waits for me to find the words.

“She was six years older, but she always looked out for me. When my father started yelling, she’d pull me into her room and put on a movie. She’d turn the volume up so I couldn’t hear him. She told me we were hiding from monsters.” I smile faintly. “She was the only one who ever made me feel safe.”

He nods. “I remember.”

Of course you do.Petyr isn’t the type to forget something like that. When I opened up to him about it, I gave him another piece of me, and he knows it. Even at his worst, he’s never treated that piece with anything less than absolute kindness.

I guess if anybody knows what it’s like to lose a sibling you love, it’s him.

The fact that he got Dimitri back was a miracle. And maybe I’m expecting too much, but sometimes, I wish I could have that, too. A small miracle of my own.

“Did you ever find out where she went?” Petyr asks, breaking the silence.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “After I ran, I never heard from her again. I don’t even know if she’s alive. I like to think she made it out. Maybe she has a family somewhere. People who love her.”

Petyr reaches over to touch me for reassurance. “You want to find her.”

“I just want to know she’s okay.” I swallow around the knot in my throat. “Even if I never get to see her again, I just…”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he tips my chin up and says, “We’ll find her.”

The certainty in his voice stuns me. There’s no hesitation, not a trace. It’s a promise. A vow.

If there’s one thing Petyr doesn’t take lightly, it’s vows.

I exhale slowly. “You’d do that for me?”

“I’d do anything for you.”

It should sound cliché, but it doesn’t. Because Petyr doesn’t say a word he doesn’t mean. Not ever.

And for the first time since I was twelve, I let myself believe in miracles again.

43

PETYR

The next morning, I can’t stop thinking about what Sima said.

She could’ve asked for anything. Money. Cars. A new house. I would’ve handed it over without a second thought. But all she wanted was to know if her sister was alive.

That alone tells me everything about her.

The story she told me last night runs through my head again. Her father screaming. Her mother shrinking. Her teenage sister becoming the adult for her sake, turning up the volume on a movie to drown out the noise. I see it all too clearly, like I was there.

And it makes my fucking blood boil.

Her father isn’t a man. He’s a coward who built his empire on fear and pain. If he were still breathing, I’d put my hands around his throat and squeeze until there was nothing left.

My father was a hard man, too, but never like that. He demanded loyalty, discipline, control. He wanted his sons to be strong.

But he never laid a hand on us in anger. He never made my mother afraid to breathe in her own house. He might’ve been ruthless to everyone else, but with us, he was human.

Sima’s father doesn’t deserve to share the same air my father did.

At my desk in the home office, I scroll through the search results, the blue light from the monitor sharp against the dark. Lara Danilo’s name pops up again and again in old registries and social pages, but one record freezes me in place.

Lara Volkov.