The Divider

When it came to breaking families down the middle, Ragnar was an expert at it.

He'd done it with his mother's family first, losing the battle between mother and husband, because theirs was a typical story. He loved the woman, he did not love her son. The boy was not his and never would be. She had chosen husband over son, something easy to do when she could give Ragnar back to his biological father and claim she'd done the right thing for both of them. Boys needed to know their fathers, and he would be accepted and loved and wanted there.

He was wanted—as a convenient scapegoat. His half-brother loved him for that, since everything he did wrong could and was blamed on him, and his stepmother would rather see her son as an angel and her husband as a saint.

Ragnar had never understood that, but he'd found with his own ex-wife that there was a certain unwillingness to believe the truth of matters. She'd never seen him as he was, and she left him when he wouldn't conform to what she expected him to be. He didn't know if she'd wanted the danger or expected the nobility, but while he knew plenty of the former, he'd never quite measured up to the latter.

He was the son of one of the biggest drug dealers on the coast, and the apple, they said, did not fall far from the tree. Truer in his half-brother's case than his, but no one ever let him forget who his father was, the tarnished legacy he carried.

They never remembered him as the reason his father was in jail, half his organization had been arrested or killed, or as the one who destroyed millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs. No, they never saw past the infidelity that had resulted in the black sheep, the boy no family seemed to want.

Blood was far from thicker than water.

He'd broken enough families to know that. Even his more distant relatives hated him.

Though no one hated him more than his half-brother.

**********

“I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you,” Andars had promised, fury in his voice, blood dripping from the knife and Ragnar had to wonder why it wasn't already over, why the heir they'd really wanted, the one set and ready to follow his father's footsteps, the one who knew how to hurt and how to kill, hadn't already finished it.

“I won't run. You should end this now because if you don't, when you come for me, I'll have a badge and a gun.”

“That's what I'm counting on.”

Blood loss got Ragnar before he could ask about that, but now, almost a decade later, he understood.

His brother's revenge was a thing of beauty, a slow descent into madness. Ragnar couldn't look at any case, no matter how trivial, without wondering if this was the one, the one that his brother was behind, the one that would lead them down their final cat and mouse game and how he was going to minimize the collateral damage.

Andars had gone to the shadows, had run, and after all of this time, all the waiting, all the watching for any sign of his brother, Ragnar thought there might only be one solution.

He took his service weapon out of his desk, clipped the badge to his belt.

“All right, little brother. Time to end this. I'll look for you, I'll find you, and I'll kill you.”