by SR Jones
Damn it, I owe it to myself because if I can’t face the truth, I can’t ever heal or move forward.
And then something comes to me, a memory that surfaces from the murky depths of long forgotten detritus. When Mrs. Bretton, the woman who’d become my honorary grandmother, moved away without even saying goodbye, something had happened the week before.
I’d been playing with her daughter, my friend Judith, and my father had come home early. Judith had looked up, and I remember thinking she seemed scared. Then she’d said she had to go, and my father had given her his kindly smile as she left, but she hadn’t looked at him or smiled back. I’d been determined to ask her why she’d been rude the next time I saw her, but then they’d moved away.
I’d never thought anything of it, for years. Now, in light of the accusations against my father, the memory is taunting me, ugly and incriminating.
If I’d seen such an exchange between a dirty old uncle and a young fifteen-year-old girl, I’d have seen it in a very different light indeed. The only reason I thought nothing much of it was because it was my father, and I’d trusted him implicitly. Only saw the good in him.
I take a deep breath in and blow it out slowly through my mouth, trying to alleviate the nausea swirling high in my stomach.
“When I looked into your father, I hacked law enforcement logs, and there are transcripts, interviews. Your father confessed to doing a lot of bad things for Kyrylo, including on one occasion the rape of a young woman.”
He makes a strange moaning wail, and I wonder why the hell he’s reacting this way to the news.
Then I realize, the sound is coming from me.
The bedroom door opens, and Alesso runs out.
“What the fuck, Damen?”
“She needs to know,” Damen says.
“No, she fucking doesn’t.”
“Yes, she does. Go get her a stiff drink. Brandy. It’ll help settle her stomach.”
Alesso goes over to a mini bar in one corner of the room and takes out a small bottle. He comes back to me, untwists the cap, and hands it to me.
“Drink it,” Damen orders.
I do as he says because at this moment I can’t think for myself. My whole world is gone. Everything I believed in, everything I thought was the truth, gone.
My father only ever loved me, but he’d isolated me, and he’d become so important to me this knowledge is like a stake to the heart.
I wish I were a vampire, and I could go stand by the window and catch the fading light of day and let it turn me to ash.
How wonderful it would be to cease to exist. To not feel this pain any longer.
“Okay, listen to me. What your father did … he didn’t start out so bad.” Damen’s voice is low, almost soft. “Kyrylo and others, they made him what he became. Kyrylo used to sometimes get promising foot soldiers to do something terrible, like the rape of a member of one of the families they were targeting. Thought it bound them to him, and he was right. He had a lot of connections in the police, and he took photographs of the rapes. All he had to do was threaten a new recruit with going to the police, and they’d do anything he asked of them moving forward. If they went to jail for rape, particularly of a minor, they’d be killed, or worse, during their time inside. On the outside, their families would be left defenseless. Alone. Ripe for Kyrylo to do to as he pleased.”
He stops and looks at me. I down more of the brandy as it’s the only thing helping me breathe right now. The fire it paints in my stomach and down my throat is somehow reassuring. It’s stopping the nausea too. Helping me get enough of a grip so that I can hear what Damen is saying to me.
“Your father wasn’t a good man, Violet. He’d been caught up in lots of petty crime stuff in his youth, and he got in with the wrong crowd. However, he wasn’t always truly bad. From what I know, and can piece together, he was threatened by Kyrylo and then molded by him and others to become the man he did.”
I start to cry then because he was bad. He’d had a choice, and he’d made the wrong one, taken a fork in the road that led him to a dark place.
Allyov gave me to Andrius, a fucking hitman for God’s sake, and yet he took me in and kept me safe. He wanted me, but he didn’t touch me until I made it more than clear I wanted him too. Even then, he waited until I was sober.
On paper, a person might think Andrius is evil, but he’d kept me safe.
Even when he found out I was the daughter of the man who’d committed the very worst crime against his sister, he hadn’t truly harmed me. If a man like Andrius—cold, and let’s be brutally honest, probably not fully functioning at the emotional level—can behave in such a way, my father should have done better.
My father ought to have refused to do it. It might have meant a bullet in the head, but he should have refused. Andrius would have refused.
I know so in my gut.
My father, on the other hand, might not have been truly evil at first, but he was weak, and his weakness led to him carrying out an evil act.
“So Allyov killed my family because my father double-crossed him? And then my father panicked and moved here and went to the police?”
“Yes. British Intelligence has been after Kyrylo for a long time. Before he moved to the UK, he had a presence here and had been trafficking women. However, your father’s evidence wasn’t enough for them to build a case, not on its own, and they’ve only been able to find one other person who talked, and he was killed. They gave your father a new identity, and it kept him safe, but honestly?”
He pauses and rubs at the short beard covering the lower half of his face. “I found his information, including his new identity, so if Kyrylo had been interested enough in finding him, he’d have been able to. I think he thought your father had simply fled after Allyov murdered your family.”
“You know what’s awful about this?” I say.
Damen shakes his head.
“This is all men playing awful games with one another, and we women are simply pawns in those games. Pieces to be used up and cast to one side when you’re done with them.”
He sighs and looks at Alesso who gives a shake of his head.
“What?”
Neither man looks at me, and my stomach lurches anew. What other horrifying secrets are they hoarding?
“What? You’d better tell me, or I’m going to scream this room down.”
“You try, and I’ll gag you, and you won’t like it,” Damen says.
“Please, you have to tell me.”
Alesso sighs and hunkers down until he’s almost at my level, facing me as I perch on the edge of the sofa. My body is so tense, I’d probably snap in half in a light breeze.
“Your mother wasn’t exactly an innocent. She’d been doing work for Kyrylo and his family too. Your father and mother ended up knee-deep in the shit Kyrylo was flinging around. Allyov didn’t want to have your family killed; he wanted to only take out your father, but Allyov’s father insisted. You, your mother, and your sister were targeted. Said it would send a clear message to anyone else that if you fucked with the Allyovs, you’d face the most horrific consequences. At the time, Allyov was young and did what his father ordered him to do. I don’t think he wanted to do it, and indeed, he told his father you’d burned in the fire too. Then he simply moved on with things. He never looked for your father, or you, so far as I’m aware.”
I can’t take this in. My mother! It seems incomprehensible she’d be involved in any way whatsoever.
“I can’t take this all in,” I say truthfully.
“It’s one big fucking mess, and now the wildcard in all of this is Allyov. If he decides you have to die because you are a danger to him, he and Andrius are going to be at war with one another. If Allyov says you can live, and Kyrylo finds out who you are, he’ll want to come after you. Either way, you’re in the crosshairs of two very dangerous men.”
I shake my head and wipe at the tears on my cheeks.
“I think I need another brandy.”
Alesso goes to the bar to get me one as I contemplate the shit show that is my life.
Chapter Three
Andrius
The door to the club opens, and Sergei walks in. He’s got Alexei and Misha with him as usual, and they sit next to him as he settles into a chair.
This won’t do. These fuckers aren’t high enough on the food chain to hear what I’m about to say, and with the fact that someone in Allyov’s organization is talking, I need them gone.
I jerk my chin toward them. “We need to talk, boss, and they can’t be here.”
His eyes narrow, and his nostrils widen as he sucks in air through his nose.
“Oh? You know they never leave my side.”
“I’m sure they’re not snuggled up with you and Donna at night. They can watch, two tables away. I just can’t have them listening to this.”
Allyov narrows his eyes at me, then turns to the two thugs and nods.
Misha looks at me as if he wants to kill me when he slides out from his chair and moves to a table far enough away that he can’t hear over the music, but near enough he can shoot me dead before I can reach into my pocket. Sure enough, before he settles, he takes his gun out of the waistband holster he’s wearing and places it on the table, his hand on top of it.
“This sounds serious. I need a drink.” Allyov waves over one of the serving girls and orders a vodka. I decline anything else. I’ve had enough today, and I need a clear head for this conversation.
She returns with his drink a minute later, but it feels like she’s been gone a week. I want to get this over and done with, so I know where I stand.
“Okay.” Allyov takes a sip. “Tell me.”
“I’ll come and work with you, in the business, as your next in command. I’ll take a fucking oath, get the ink, do whatever you need me to do to know I’m completely loyal to you and completely in, but in return I want something.”
“Okay.” He says the word as if it is anything but. Wary as shit.
I steeple my fingers together and tap my lips with them as I consider how the hell to tell him this.
“Jesus, Andrius,” he says. “Fucking spit it out. You’re making me nervous here, and if Alexei notices, he’ll shoot you before I can stop him.”
“Violet isn’t a nobody. She was working for you for a reason.”
“Is she a fucking cop? That stupid organized crime unit is so fucking useless. Why send her to a legitimate business. Shit.” His face pales. “Have I kidnapped an undercover fucking copper or agent?”
I laugh because the thought is ridiculous. “Did she act like a copper to you?”
“No, but maybe she’s really good.”
“She’s not,” I say. “She’s ridiculously bad at what she was trying to do, and now she’s in so over her head she’s drowning.”
He takes another sip of his drink. “What was she trying to do?”
I swallow and fix him with a direct stare.
“She was trying to kill you, Sergei.”
He’s in the middle of a sip of vodka, and it goes down the wrong way. He’s choking and coughing, and I sense Misha move, but Allyov waves him back down as his eyes stream.
“Excuse me? Are you fucking winding me up? Is this some big joke? Have you lost your fucking mind? Kill me? Why would she want to kill me?”
I sigh and take a sip of the drink I’ve been nursing for the longest while. Here goes nothing.
“Because she’s Petro Babiek’s daughter, and you burned her mother and sister alive.”
His face pales, and he doesn’t seem to breathe. For a long moment we simply watch one another. I’m super aware of Misha and Alexei at my back. One move from Allyov, one flick of his fingers, and they’ll be firing at me.
I’m fucking quick, though. Reflexes they’ll never have, honed in the molten heat of battle. I can be on the floor by the time either have squeezed the trigger because I’ll be moving as soon as Allyov does anything else but stare at me.
He leans in and fixes me with a deadly glare.
“I take it you’re here to tell me you killed her, right? And not because of who she is. That shit with her family never sat right with me, and I never did anything like it again. I’d have let little Violet Babiek live, despite having such a piece of shit for a father. But she came to my business, came looking for me, and to kill me no less. So … I assume now you know this, you’ve disposed of her?”
“No.”
Not a twitch. He doesn’t move a fucking muscle.
“I can’t,” I confess my sin.
“Of course, your rule. Okay, you did the right thing coming to me with this. I’ll get Misha to do it.”
“No.” I lean in and lower my voice. “I’m about to tell you some shit that might mean you want to kill me in the next five minutes. But you try it, and I can take out your two boys and put a bullet in you before they can react. I don’t want to do this. I want us to come to an agreement, but you even fucking move your eyes an inch to the right and look for them, and I’m going to react.”
A pulse pounds in his neck. “Are you fucking threatening me?”
“No. Sergei, calm the fuck down, or this is going to go in a direction neither of us want. You need to know something about me. There’s a reason for my code. Kyrylo Voloshin murdered my family. They did nothing wrong … truly they did nothing wrong. They wouldn’t pay into the protection racket he was running back in the day, before he moved onto bigger things, and so he killed them. Petro Babiek helped, and he raped my sister.”
Allyov sucks in a breath through his teeth and shakes his head as if in disbelief.
For a moment he doesn’t say anything, and then he lifts his gaze to me and grins. The fucker grins. “I wondered how long it’d take you to tell me.”
“You knew?”
He laughs, and it’s cold as fuck. “You think I’d hire you and not know everything about you?”
“But … no one knows. My aunt took me in, brought me up in Russia, gave me her name.”
“I know, Andrius. I know who you are, and I know you’ve got a hard-on for Kyrylo. It’s never worried me because you haven’t had the chance to get near him, so I let you continue working for me, with me. I wanted you to tell me yourself because I knew the day you did, you’d be putting your trust in me. I want you with me, working at my side. But fuck me, you’ve got to understand, I can’t let that girl live. Neither can you. You owe your fucking family, your sister, to snuff out the piece of Babiek trash.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Fine. It must be hard. I understand, so we’ll let Misha do it.” He’s starting to lose patience, his genial grandfather act slipping. “I feel terrible I put such a viper in your home, but I had no idea who she truly was. I looked into her and thought she was a nobody. Of course, if I had done as thorough a background job as I did on you, I’d have known who she was, and she’d be dead by now.”
His words chill me.
“I didn’t, though. She was just a waitress you liked. I simply wanted some power over you and thought if you liked her as much as I believed you did, then maybe I could use her as leverage if I ever needed it. That’s the truth of it. I swear I never knew she was a Babiek, despite knowing what Petro Babiek did to your family. Come. Tell me what this favor is you want, and then we can send my men to deal with our problem.”
“No, I can’t let her be harmed. I … can’t. That’s the favor. You have to let her live, let her stay with me.”
He stares at me, and then his eyes widen. “Oh, fuck. You’ve fallen for her. I mean, properly. Lost your fucking balls to her.”
I ought to deny it, but what’s the point; he’ll see through it. I probably wouldn’t use such an old-fashioned and sweet term to describe the way I feel about her as fallen for her, but he’s right.
She’s mine. And no one is going to hurt her. I don’t care who her father was. The more I think about it, the more I know it’s not as important to me as she is. Maybe one day I’ll feel differe
ntly. Maybe there’ll come a time when I can’t bear to look at her because of who she’s related to. But I doubt it. She had no idea who or what her father was. None.
It doesn’t change who she is. The girl who is deliciously submissive to me. Who went down on her knees and sucked my cock after I turned her ass red. The girl who still sees wonder in things I’ve long grown jaded about.
I don’t know if I love her. Not sure I know what love is, but I want her, need her, and I’m going to fight to keep her.
“The girl is mine,” I tell him. “You gave her to me, and I want to keep her. That’s my price. That’s my offer. You let me have her, and I’ll come work for you in the business, by your side.”
“Fuck me. You’ve shocked the shit out of me, Andrius. You … having a heart.” He purses his lips and contemplates me. “How do I know she won’t try to kill me again? Think about it from my point of view.”
“You never have to see her. I’ll never let her in your sight again if it’s what you want. She’s not capable of it, though. She’d already decided to leave town the night you took her. And I know her well enough to be sure she couldn’t kill you. Or anyone. And now she knows who her father really was, she has no reason to want vengeance. She’s devastated. Wrecked.”
She is too. Already I want her back with me because I don’t trust her not to try to harm herself and succeed this time.
“I need to think about this. I’m going to go home, have a couple of stiff drinks, and I’ll call you. I presume she’s no longer with you?”
“Of course not,” I say.
“I have my own condition, on top of you working by my side.”
I wasn’t expecting him to say that. “Yes?”
“You’re no longer to go after Kyrylo Voloshin. I’m going more and more legit. The only thing I’m still involved in is the arms side of things. You don’t know as you’re not involved at this level, yet, but I’ve stopped everything on the drugs side. And the arms stuff, I’m moving more and more to the legit side of. The gambling brings in more than the drugs now, and it’s legal. The strip joints are good money makers, and you know I’ve never dealt in livestock anyway. So, here’s the thing: my goal is within five years, everything we do will be legal. I’ll still need protection because I’m going to be running arms and illegal or not, it’s a nasty business. But I won’t be involved with all the other shit my father got us into. Who needs it? Late stage capitalism is the fucking best. You can make a fortune legally doing shady shit, and no one gives a flying fuck. In order to do this, I don’t need a turf war with some goon still clinging to the dark ages like Kyrylo. Plus, I might need him for some of the movement of arms.”
