“How do you know you love me? We’ve only been back for a week, and already this anaconda of a woman is weaseling into our minds and thwarting everything for us,” I choke out. “You don’t love me. You just loved the idea of me, your brother’s fiancée.”
“Come on. Aren’t we past this yet? That’s not what this is. From the moment you came in the door of the Queen, I knew you were mine. I just couldn’t do anything about it, because above everything, I needed Julian happy.”
“Really? You’re claiming that, now?”
He thumps down on the mattress and brings me with him. I twist out of his arms and sit up on my knees. “Do you really? You think you were his, what, protector or something?”
He laughs a chilled laughter. “I tried! But, see, you can’t protect people against themselves when they have money and the freedom to do whatever they want. He was a fucking adult. What was I supposed to do?”
“What are you talking about?”
Luka sinks his face into his fists.
“Julian didn’t have any money. Except for the occasional funds around student-loan times, and, and—whatever he got from your uncle in Russia.” My heart is speeding up. It’s growing bigger in my chest, scaring me with the on set of an insight it accepts and I don’t.
Julian’s explanations were always reasonable! He was good at changing the subject too though. No. He couldn’t have lied to me.
Could he?
“Luka!”
“Yeah, baby.” His voice is hoarse with regret. “He got it from me. There. Now you know.”
“From you?”
“I gave him the money.”
This doesn’t make any sense. “No way. You ‘worked’ and gave your brother your sex money?”
“Enough for him to live well. That was the plan, anyway. It’s why Julian didn’t have student loans. Why he didn’t have to work. I worked for the both of us.”
I have no response. If I believed him, Julian, my sweet boyfriend of six years, lied to me, and—how do you let someone you love hate the person you shared a womb with? How do you let her find him so despicable she uses every opportunity to flaunt her disgust over him?
Julian wasn’t that cold. Or was this his observer side? If he could, would he have asked me to take notes for him on my interesting response to Luka?
No. No, it couldn’t have been like this. One of them would have told me, especially if Luka was attracted to me from the very beginning.
“No way that’s true.”
Luka stands, leaving his hands heavy along his sides. “How about we do this.” He stalks to the dresser and grabs his laptop.
“What are you doing?”
He opens it. Logs in. Finds the Department of Education’s loan repayment website in record time. He keys in Julian’s name. Enters a password that works really quickly too. And there, there it is. Julian’s birth date, his social security number. Six years ago, Julian took out the whopping amount of five hundred dollars in student loans. It was paid back two months later. That’s it. Not a single record has been applied to his account since then.
Luka’s face is naked with grief when he looks back up at me. “I did it to help him. It didn’t work. I gave him all the tools to destroy himself instead, Geneva. If he’d had no money, he couldn’t have doped himself into oblivion and death. It was me. I paid for his studies, I paid for his life, and I paid for his death. Julian always had funds in his account. When he wanted a new car—”
“You got him the Mustang.”
“No, he bought it himself with money I’d transferred to his account so he could live well during that semester.”
“This is crazy.” I sob and watch tears roll down Luka’s face. “But why? I don’t understand why you did it. Why didn’t you let him live his life and suffer his own consequences? Why didn’t you let him at least take out loans?”
“Julian didn’t want loans. He was better off without them, especially when the two of you were going to start a life together. You had loans. He didn’t want to add more to your financial burdens. He was clear on that really early on, and I needed him happy. He was my brother.”
I shake my head. “You’re making this up.”
“I’m not making it up.” Luka taps furiously on his keyboard. A bank website. He’s not going to show me his bank account, is he?
He adds Julian Verenich in the search area and shoves the laptop onto my knees. “Here. Look.”
“Oh god, Luka.” My eyes blur. I blink the fog away, because I do need to learn the truth. “So many transfers. And big amounts too.”
Luka nods. “My brother was never going to suffer again.”
I close the laptop and let my stare float up to him. “But you’re the one who’s been suffering. I don’t get it. How could you have done this? Do you love sex so much you didn’t have an issue working for the both of you?”
He snorts bitterly and shakes his head. “Sex is better with you.”
I lean over my crisscrossed knees and draw him against me. “Help me understand, then. If it wasn’t so you could get rich or have an excuse to fuck girls, why? Why did you do that for him?”
Luka swallows. Body tense, his words come out in a whisper. “Because I almost killed him.”