The Older Brother Served Time for the Younger One and Lost His Fiancée. Five Years Later, He Returned Home — and a Terrible Secret Came to Light
“Put your bag there, on the mat,” Slava said, taking his jacket. “I’ll get you some slippers.”
Anton lowered his worn sports bag onto the floor. The entryway smelled of expensive perfume and fresh coffee. The floor was covered with pale porcelain tiles that softly reflected the recessed lights.
Rita came out of the room. She stopped in the doorway, holding a folded towel in her hands. In five years she had barely changed, except that her hair was shorter now, and there was something wary and sharp in her gaze.
“Hi,” Anton said quietly.
“We were expecting you on Friday,” Rita said, placing the towel on an ottoman and stepping back, folding her arms across her chest. “Slava was going to send a car for you.”
“They processed the paperwork earlier. I came by bus.”
A heavy silence hung in the hallway. Slava loudly shut the sliding wardrobe door as he hung up his brother’s jacket.
“Well, come into the kitchen. I’ll put the kettle on.”
They sat around a large glass table. Rita brought out three cups and poured the tea. Her movements were mechanical and precise. Slava sat opposite Anton, turning his phone over in his hands. He had noticeably broadened across the shoulders, and his face had acquired the healthy flush of a man accustomed to giving orders.
“So… how was it there?” Slava asked, carefully avoiding his brother’s eyes.
“Fine,” Anton replied. He picked up his cup, instinctively wrapping both hands around it to warm his palms. “You can survive.”
“I’ll transfer some money to your card for the first few months,” Slava finally looked at him. His gaze was businesslike, appraising. “Finding work is difficult now, especially with your… background. But I know someone at a household appliance warehouse. He can hire you as an inventory clerk. The salary isn’t much, but it’s steady. You can rent a room.”
Anton took a sip. The tea was too hot.
Five years earlier, they had been sitting in a different kitchen, in their parents’ old Khrushchev-era apartment. Slava was finishing law school then and had an excellent job opportunity lined up. That evening, Slava had borrowed Anton’s car to drive out of town. He returned before dawn, sober from sheer animal terror.
He had hit a pedestrian on the side of the highway.
“Anton, I’m finished,” Slava had muttered, clutching his head in his hands. “You understand, I’d been drinking. They’ll give me real prison time. Everything will be over. My career, my life.”
And Anton, the older brother who had been used to pulling his younger brother out of trouble since childhood, took the blame.
The lawyer Slava quickly found swore that if Anton gave the right testimony, considering his clean record and the poor visibility on the road, he would receive a suspended sentence.
The judge gave him five years.
It turned out the victim was related to a local official. The case was made an example of.
“Dad, who’s that?” A boy of about three peeked out from the hallway. He had light brown hair and a strangely familiar squint.
Rita quickly stood up, walked over to her son, and placed her hands on his shoulders as if protecting him.
“That’s Uncle Anton, Yegor. Go to your room and play. Daddy and I are talking.”
The boy looked at Anton curiously, turned around, and left.
Anton stared at Rita.
When he had been taken to the detention center, she had cried on his shoulder. They had been planning their wedding. Slava had sworn that he would help her with everything and find the best lawyers for Anton’s appeal.
Rita wrote him a letter a year later.
It was short, just one sheet of notebook paper.
“Anton, forgive me. I’m not made of iron. Slava and I have decided to get married. It will be better for everyone. Please don’t write to me anymore.”
“I’ll find a room myself,” Anton said, putting his cup back onto the saucer. “But I need to register my residence again at our apartment on Parkovaya Street. Otherwise, I won’t be able to get a decent job.”
Slava stopped turning the phone in his hands.
Rita walked over to the sink, turned on the water, and for some reason began washing a clean plate.
“There’s something you should know, Tonya,” Slava cleared his throat. “The apartment on Parkovaya doesn’t exist anymore.”
Anton remained silent, waiting for him to continue.
“I sold it three years ago. We needed more space. Yegor was born, and the old place was too small. We bought this apartment in a new building. Part of it was financed with a mortgage, and part with the money from that sale.”
“How did you sell it?” Anton’s voice remained flat and emotionless. “Half of it belonged to me.”
“You signed a power of attorney for me yourself, remember? A general power of attorney. When the prison warden allowed a notary to visit you. I told you it was needed to have the utility accounts transferred.”
Anton remembered.
It had been his third year in prison. Slava had come personally and brought some forms. He had rushed Anton, saying huge utility debts were piling up and that the housing office was threatening to cut off the electricity without Anton’s signature.
“So you sold our parents’ apartment using the power of attorney,” Anton said slowly. “And you put the money from my half into your mortgage.”
“But we’re family, Anton,” Rita interrupted, drying her hands with the towel. “We’re not strangers. We’ll help you. Slava will transfer two hundred thousand rubles to you. That should be enough at first to rent somewhere and buy some clothes. After that, you can manage on your own. You need time to adapt.”
Anton looked at Rita, then at Slava.
Slava stubbornly stared in the direction of the sugar bowl.
“Two hundred thousand,” Anton repeated. “For half of a three-room apartment in the city center. And for five years.”
“Don’t start,” Slava’s voice hardened. “Nobody forced you to take the blame back then. You were an adult. I’m grateful to you, I really am. But life doesn’t stand still. I couldn’t put my life on hold for five years. I have a family and responsibilities. We’re trying to help you. We’re offering you support.”
Anton silently stood up.
Slava instinctively pressed himself against the back of his chair, but Anton simply walked over to his bag.
“I’ll stay here tonight,” he said. “I’ll leave in the morning.”
That night Anton lay on an expensive sofa in the dark living room. Through the wall, he could hear muffled voices.
“Why did you let him stay?” Rita whispered irritably. “He’s angry. Did you see his face? We have a child in the house.”
“Calm down,” Slava answered. “He’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll give him some money and he can get lost. He can’t prove anything. The apartment sale was clean. And the statute of limitations on the old case has expired. Everything is covered. The important thing is not to provoke him now.”
Anton left early the next morning, quietly closing the front door behind him.
For the next two weeks, he lived in a cheap hostel on the outskirts of the city. He found work as a loader at a wholesale warehouse, where they paid cash and didn’t ask questions about documents.
One evening, he went back to the old neighborhood, to the house on Parkovaya Street.
He stood in the courtyard for a long time, staring at the second-floor windows where he had spent his childhood.
There were new roller blinds hanging there now.
The next day, during his lunch break, a white crossover stopped outside the warehouse gates.
Rita stepped out.
She looked around the place with obvious disgust, noticed Anton sitting on a wooden pallet with a thermos, and walked toward him.
Rita took a thick envelope from her handbag.
“Slava asked me to give you this. There are three hundred thousand rubles in here. He added another hundred thousand. Take it, Anton. Buy yourself some decent clothes and rent an apartment instead of living in that dump.”
She held out the envelope.
Anton didn’t move.
“Put it on the pallet,” he said.
Rita pressed her lips together, but placed the envelope beside him.
“Why are you making everything worse?” she said, looking down at him. “You’re behaving like an offended child. Yes, what happened wasn’t pretty. But we couldn’t do anything else. Slava had prospects. His career was taking off. If he had gone to prison, we all would have gone down with him.”
Anton silently screwed the lid onto his thermos.
Rita began to grow nervous under his calm stare. She adjusted the collar of her coat.
“We fell in love. You were in there, and we were here. Slava took care of me. We’re a family. You just need to let it go and move on with your life.”
“Leave, Rita,” Anton said quietly.
“Take the money,” she repeated. “Slava won’t give you any more. Don’t try to manipulate us with guilt. You’re the one who chose what to do with your life.”
She turned and quickly walked back to the car.
Anton picked up the envelope.
Three hundred thousand rubles.
The price of five years of his life.
That same evening, Anton sat in an internet café.
He hadn’t wasted his time in prison. He had read legal literature in the prison library, trying to find loopholes in his own conviction.
He understood how government registries worked.
He ordered an extract from the Unified State Register of Real Estate for the old apartment on Parkovaya Street.
The document arrived by email a couple of hours later.
Anton carefully examined the ownership transfer history.
The apartment had indeed been sold three years earlier.
The buyer was listed as a certain V. A. Ignatov.
Anton searched the name online together with his brother’s surname.
V. A. Ignatov turned out to be the senior partner at Slava’s law firm.
Anton looked at the date of the sale.
September.
In September three years earlier, Anton had been lying in the prison hospital with severe pneumonia, in an isolated ward.
No notaries had been allowed to see him.
The power of attorney Slava had actually brought him to sign had been issued a year later, in October.
Slava had forged the general power of attorney.
He had carried out the transaction through his partner using falsified documents.
Slava had not simply abandoned him.
He had methodically and deliberately robbed the brother who was serving a prison sentence in his place.
The next day, Anton asked for time off from the warehouse.
Through an acquaintance who had once worked at the cadastral office, he obtained a copy of the same power of attorney from the archive.
The signature looked like his, but it had clearly been made by someone else’s hand—more angular and without the characteristic pressure of Anton’s handwriting.
He took out his phone and dialed Slava’s number.
“Yes,” his brother answered in a cold, businesslike tone. “Rita said she gave you the money. I hope the matter is settled now?”
“We need to meet,” Anton said. “Today. At your office.”
“I don’t have time for pointless conversations.”
“I’ve seen the power of attorney dated September fourteenth, Slava. The one you used to sell the apartment to Ignatov.”
A long silence followed on the other end.
Anton could hear nothing but uneven breathing.
“In an hour. At the café downstairs from my business center,” Slava said hoarsely before ending the call.
The café was empty.
Slava sat at a corner table with an untouched espresso in front of him.
When Anton sat down opposite him, his brother nervously adjusted his tie.
“What do you want?” Slava asked immediately.
His former confidence was gone from his voice.
Anton placed the copy of the power of attorney on the table.
“Forgery of documents. Fraud on an especially large scale. Article 159.”
Slava swallowed.
He leaned over the table and lowered his voice.
“You can’t prove anything. The statute of limitations for challenging the transaction has expired. They can’t perform handwriting analysis on a photocopy. And the original was destroyed a long time ago.”
“The original is in the Rosreestr archive,” Anton replied evenly. “And a handwriting examination of the original will show that the signature isn’t mine. It will also show that on the day the power of attorney was supposedly signed, I was in a secure hospital ward where visitors had no access. Medical records and prison visitor logs are kept for a long time.”
Slava turned pale.
His hands, lying on the table, began to tremble slightly.
He pulled them into his lap.
“Why are you doing this, Tonya?” Slava’s voice became pitiful. “Do you really want to send your own brother to prison? Do you want to leave my son without a father?”
“You left me without a life,” Anton answered calmly. “For five years. I slept on a prison bunk while you built your career, lived with my fiancée, and sold our parents’ apartment.”
“But we had an agreement! You chose to take the blame!”
“I took the blame for the accident. I never asked you to steal my home.”
Slava wiped his forehead with a paper napkin.
“All right,” he began quickly. “You’re right. What I did was… wrong. But I had debts. I needed money to get the business started. Ignatov demanded a contribution before he would make me a partner. I was desperate. Name your price. Five million? Six? I’ll take out a loan. I’ll mortgage the apartment. Just don’t take this to the authorities. I’ll lose my license to practice law. It’ll be the end of everything. Rita won’t survive it.”
Anton looked at his brother.
The man sitting before him in an expensive suit now looked like a guilty teenager—cowardly and willing to do anything to save his own skin.
A thought flashed through Anton’s mind.
Go to the police.
File a report.
Set the machinery of justice in motion and let it crush Slava’s life just as Slava had crushed his.
Slava would go to prison.
Justice would be served.
Then Anton pictured Rita.
He pictured three-year-old Yegor asking where his father had gone.
He could do it.
But then he would be allowing all that filth into his new life, a life that had only just begun.
And Anton wanted to wash himself clean of it.
“I don’t need your blood,” Anton said, looking Slava directly in the eyes. “And I’m not going to destroy your family. You and Rita deserve each other.”
Slava leaned forward hopefully.
“So we can make a deal?”
“We can. Tomorrow, you transfer half the current market value of the apartment on Parkovaya Street to my bank account. I calculated it based on today’s prices. That’s eight million rubles.”
“Eight million?” Slava choked. “I don’t have that kind of cash! I’ll have to mortgage our apartment! Rita will find out. There’ll be a huge scandal!”
“Your family problems don’t concern me,” Anton said, standing up from the table. “The money must be in my account by noon tomorrow. Otherwise, I go to the prosecutor’s office.”
He turned and walked toward the exit.
“Anton!” Slava shouted after him. “We’re family!”
Anton didn’t turn around.
The money arrived at eleven o’clock the next morning.
That evening, Anton received a long message from Rita.
It was full of reproaches and accusations. She called him a heartless blackmailer and accused him of destroying their peace. She wrote that Slava had been forced to take out an enormous loan secured against their apartment and that they were now living in constant fear of losing their home.
“You ruined our lives,” the message ended.
Anton read it while sitting at the train station.
Beside him lay a ticket for a train to the regional capital.
He had decided to leave the city, buy a small place somewhere no one knew him, and open his own auto repair shop.
Anton deleted Rita’s message.
Then he removed the SIM card from his phone, snapped it in half, and threw the pieces into a trash bin.
They had ruined their own lives by building them on lies.
Now they would have to live with the noose of a mortgage around their necks, in constant fear that one day Anton might return.
That fear would stay with them forever, poisoning their perfect marriage and making them suspect each other every time something went wrong.
That would be their punishment—to live inside the prison they had built for themselves.
Anton rose from the bench.
He picked up his bag.
For the first time in five years, he felt completely free.