“I understand.”
“Living an authentic life is hard fucking work.” Ajax whispered. “Sometimes I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep.”
“I can turn on the radio,” Bartosz offered. “Or use a pressure point to knock you unconscious.”
Ajax huffed another sigh. “Liquor is easier. Can we stop someplace and get some?”
“No.”God help me.“Alcohol is not a good sleep strategy.”
Ajax turned his back. “This is turning out to be the longest night.”
“I can sing Ukrainian lullabies.” Dmytro gave it a shot. It worked for his girls, although Liv said they only slept to getaway from the noise. Now his voice sounded barely used, like an ancient set of bagpipes wheezing to life.
“You sing your kids to sleep with that voice?”
Dmytro glared and kept on singing. Bartosz hummed along. The tune was simple. Universal. Ajax didn’t have a clue what the words meant, but for Dmytro the song was so painful just then, tears stung his eyes. Ajax stayed silent for a change, and shortly Dmytro trailed off.
He sensed the change in Ajax’s mood.
“What’s really bothering you, Ajax?”
I missAnton and Katya so much right now.
Ajax didn’t say the words. He couldn’t. It was too raw. Too intimate. Until that moment, he had never realized how much Anton had meant to him. More than an uncle. More like his grandfather, who shared time and space and food with him, rather than simply hiring people who did. He missed Anton’s wife, Katya, whose soft voice and sweet perfume seemed to have followed him there, to the lost coast of California.
The plane crash that killed them had hurt so badly he’d barely spoken a word for six months. Their funeral was agonizing. And now he faced this reminder with Anton’s face, and mannerisms, and even his voice—this constant living proof—that his Anton was gone and never coming back.
Dmytro looked like him, but he was not the same.
Dmytro was cold winter where Anton had been spring. Taciturn where Anton had always smiled. Ajax stayed where he was, doing his best to sniffle quietly and wiping his snot and tears on his sleeves. Eventually, he drifted off to visions of Antonand Katya dragging him into some folk dance he didn’t know how to do.
They used to laugh and stay up late all the time when his parents traveled. Sometimes he caught them kissing in the shadows of his parents’ enormous McMansion. Laughter had never fit him as well, or felt as good, since Anton and Katya died.
Maybe he could mourn them with Dmytro.
Maybe mourning would help both of them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dmytro
Ajax Fairchild,I fuck sick boys like you with a butcher knife. I’m coming for you…
When Bartosz pulledover to get gas, Dmytro decided to stretch his legs. He joined the man by the pump in the chilly night air. Ajax had wept himself to sleep as noisily as any child trying to hide his tears. Dmytro hadn’t acknowledged it because… well. Not to save his pride. Odd. Ajax Freedom had pride, but Ajax Fairchild did not.
“Bartosz, look. These messages are different from the others.” He’d read them over several times before he’d forwarded the messages to Bartosz’s and Zhenya’s phones. “See what I mean?”
“Yes. Besides being horrific, he used Ajax’s legal surname. Someone new, you think?”
“I don’t know.” Dmytro had become uneasy as each one grew more specific and grisly.
“Probably just a different nutter. Zhenya and the others will chase it down.”
Dmytro couldn’t let it go. His instinct told him these threats were more serious—more dangerous—than the others. But also, crying was Dmytro’s other Achilles’ heel. He couldn’t stand it when people cried.
What a little devil Ajax was, offering himself like that. Dmytro could now see the very real difference between Ajax Fairchild and Ajax Freedom. Ajax Fairchild thought before he spoke. He had empathy. He was highly intelligent and a little lonely and possibly, maybe, a decent person.
Freedom would rather be slapped for doing something dreadful than ignored for behaving like a rational human being. Freedom was shock and awe personified. So offering himself… Dmytro tried again to let it go. The proposition had probably been another ploy by Ajax Freedom to get attention.
