PURPLE HEART - Soliders Of Fortune [BOOK TWO]

Chapter SIX

Maksimilian 'Max' Angeloff

…early the next morning…

Tyres, trash and rusted out car carcasses line the outskirts of the chain-link fences.. Their shadows looming from all sides, surrounding the shitty southside scrap yard.. A briny sea breeze mingles with the noxious diesel fumes from the nearby shipping port, polluting every breath..

Beside me, Luka grumbles his obnoxious disapproval of our task.. Not that I asked for his grievances or give two shits about his latest gripes..

The guy just loves to hate..

My brother has always been brimming with the kind of internalised anger that I could never sustain, and all that rage would find him on the wrong side of a fight at every turn.. His inability to bite his tongue saw him bear the brunt of our father's wrath, time and time again.. Luka never learnt to control himself, and truthfully, I doubt he ever even tried.. Because that hate-fire was his one defence mechanism growing up in the warzone of our childhood home.. It made him resilient and gave him a reason to keep getting back up, even after being kicked to the ground..

The way our parents fought as if it were a sport set the low standard of treatment we would all become accustomed to, and it only became worse when they began pitting their children against one another to do the same.. The physical pains and psychological warfare has left all three of the Angeloff siblings irreparably scarred..

None worse off than our sister, Verity..

That girl had to claw and scrape for the very bare minimum, all of which led her to take some drastic measures to survive.. Measures that her down a dark road from which she never really returned..

She became unrecognisable to us and for the longest time, there was nothing I could say or do that would bridge the distance that grew between us.. She was just lost and I grieved in her absence..

But my relationship to Verity was never quite the same as Luka's.. a decade older than them both, I constantly found myself taking care of the two, acting as a parent and not a brother..
For me, it is simple.. I love them equally.. But the sad reality is the two can't even stand to be in the same room as one another, and any hopes of reconciliation died long ago..

Verity was the very first person my brother would learn to hate.. So I doubt he will be very happy when I tell him that we've been in contact for several weeks now..

"What the hell are we doing in this shithole, Brat?" Luka gripes with an impatient sneer of disgust as he steps over a pile of discarded trash bags..

"I'm just here to see a man about a dog.." I brush off his question, dispelled from explaining myself for lack of interest in his eternal misery..
Dust kicks up beneath my boots, settling over the steel caps to dull their shine as we navigate the narrow pathways carved into the giant junk heaps..