by Nicole Fox
“Yuri.” My name comes out strangled, and I instantly move to protect her from whatever we have stepped into. But it doesn’t matter. We’re already surrounded.
Large men are standing against all four walls, weapons drawn on us. Clearly, they’ve been expecting us.
“It’s a trap,” I say dumbly, trying to push Bella back into the hallway. But there’s already a man standing there, his gun pushing us towards the center of the room where one of my father’s men is tied to a chair.
“Andrey?” It’s a question because the man’s face is swollen and bloodied beyond recognition. I only recognize the short ring finger on his right hand where he lost his fingerprint to a dog.
I look around the room at the circle of men—each with a Society pin on their shirt—standing still and patient as if waiting for orders. But from who?
“What in the hell is going on?” I ask no one in particular, spinning around to look at each face individually. “Why aren’t you shooting?”
“They haven’t been given the order yet,” my father sneers, looking around the room like he’s waiting for the leader to step from behind the ranks.
Bella is trembling next to me, and I need to get her out. I need to get us both out. But I don’t see how.
“We can negotiate,” I say, speaking to the room. “Whatever you want.”
“Don’t grovel,” my father bites, but I ignore him. He’s too proud to beg for his life, but I’m not. Not when my life has suddenly become so much more interesting.
I move to the center of the room where Andrey is sagging in his chair and begin to untie the ropes around his hands and ankles. “Who is in charge here? Who do we need to talk to?”
He groans as I lift him to his feet, and I worry he’s going to pass out immediately. However, after a few seconds, he seems to stabilize enough to keep himself upright. He looks at me, eyes bloodshot, and shakes his head.
“What does that mean?” I ask, resisting the urge to shake the information out of him. “How do we get out of here?”
Andrey leans around me and raises one arm slowly in a point. Before I can turn my head to see who or what he’s pointing to, a gunshot reverberates through the room.
I’m still staring at Andrey when the bullet shatters through his skull. I watch his eyes go wide and then lifeless in the span of a second. I watch his body flop to the floor like a discarded costume. I’m in such shock at his sudden death that when I turn around and see my father standing behind me, gun raised, I think he must be trying to avenge Andrey.
My father is going after whoever killed one of his men. But if that’s true, why is his gun aimed at Andrey? And where did the shooter disappear to?
Then I see Bella’s face. Her eyes are bigger and paler than I’ve ever seen them, and she’s looking at me like she’s afraid I’m going to crumble apart. I tilt my head to the side, eyebrows drawn together, wondering what has made her so sad.
And then my father lowers his gun, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a Society pin. He smiles at me while he pins it on his lapel.
“Sorry for the theatrics,” he says, dusting off the shoulder of his jacket with a flat hand. “You know how I love a dramatic reveal.”
All at once, everything clicks into place, and it’s all I can do to stay standing. “You.”
“Come on, Yuri,” he says, circling his finger in a ‘hurry up’ motion. “I thought you’d be a little quicker on the uptake. Can we proceed or do you need a minute?”
I glare at him, trying to pinpoint when the man I knew became a monster. When my father betrayed me and our entire family.
“Since you aren’t going to ask me any questions, I guess I’ll start from the beginning.” He sighs and begins to pace back and forth in the same way he has always done. In the same way he was doing just half an hour ago in his office back at the Petrov headquarters. It feels bizarre to see such a familiar quirk in a man I no longer recognize. “I started The Society after our family began making decent money. We Petrovs started out as nobodies in this world, but we made a name for ourselves. Or really, I made a name for us. I made the Petrovs important and wealthy, but no matter what happened, I would always have to share it. With my brothers and you and your brothers. The money I made could never be mine the way I rightfully deserved. So, I started another project. A side hustle, if you will. The Society.”
Andrey’s blood is blooming across the floor, and I can feel the slippery warmth of it under my feet, but I can’t move. Bella is standing between my dad and one of The Society guards. I can’t get to her, and even if I could, we have nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. Because I trusted my father. Because even when my instincts told me something was wrong, I allowed my loyalty to lead us into danger. I killed us both.
Bella is staring at me, her eyes saying something I’m not able to comprehend. Not while my father is still spewing out the details of his story. He’s walking back and forth with his hands folded casually behind his back, taking easy, strolling steps.
“The Society is mine, and the men around you are my employees. Not my family. Not my co-owners. I owe them nothing more than their paycheck, and they don’t come to me with all of their troubles looking for cash. Like any good CEO, I’m on top.”
“Why lie to all of us?” I ask, finally finding the words.
“Are you listening?” he asks condescendingly. “If I told the truth, you all would have wanted your cut. The way you have always wanted a cut of what was mine.”
“We’re family. I thought that meant something to you.” I feel pathetic appealing to him as my father, trying to remind him that he loves me, but it’s all I can think to do. Because the man I followed into this building was a man I would have died for. But this man? I don’t even recognize him.
“It does,” he says, dismissing me with a wave. “That is why I kept the Petrov family. It’s why I kept all of your pockets lined. But The Society was my little secret, and I didn’t want any of you to know about it. That is why Senator McNair needed to be dealt with.”
Bella gasped, drawing my father’s attention. “He figured out your secret.”
My dad narrows his eyes at her before turning back to me, acting as though she never spoke. “The senator was the first person to ever get wise on me, and he needed to be dealt with. I sent a few men to his office to threaten him into stepping down from office, but he refused. And when I went to end him, he had fled. That is why I had you kidnap his daughter.”
I lock eyes with Bella, and I can feel my face sagging with disbelief and disgust at myself for being so stupid and my dad for being so cruel. She mouths, “It’s okay,” but it doesn’t feel that way. Especially because we’re both probably going to die here, and it’s entirely my fault.
I think back through the last few days, through everything that has happened, and one thing still doesn’t make sense. “Why did you try to kill me? The shooters at the hotel, the explosion at the house. What did I do?”
My father tips his head to the side, his smirk fading into a disappointed grimace. “You fell in love with the senator’s daughter.”
I open my mouth to defend myself, but as soon as I see Bella standing behind him—her long black hair tangled around her shoulders, her cheekbones even more pronounced from days of exhaustion and being on the run—I know he’s right. Of course I love her. Everything I’ve done in the past week (aside from kidnapping her) proves that. I was drawn to her from the moment I saw her, and I’ve been drawing closer to her every moment since.
“I could no longer trust your loyalty to me,” my father continues. “The longer I went without being able to track down Senator McNair, the more likely it was that he would contact his daughter and tell her the truth. And after that, it would only be a matter of time before you found out the truth. And I couldn’t have you telling the rest of the family.”
The cold way he explains the logic behind my death sends a chill down my spine. “You would kill your own son for money?”
He wri
nkles his nose at me. “Don’t sound so surprised. People do worse things for money all the time.”
I’m staring at him so hard, doing my best to burn a hole through his head with my eyes, that it takes me a moment to notice Bella trying to catch my attention. She’s shifting from one foot to the other, her eyebrows raised, and when I finally look at her, she tips her head slightly in the direction of my dad. I wrinkle my brow. I have no idea what she’s trying to say.
She does it again and then clears her throat. “Where is my father?”
My dad rolls his eyes and spins around. “Someone should have taught you not to interrupt. Maybe instead of being an inefficient leader in the government, your father should have tried his hand at being a leader in his own home. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t be waiting in a cell to die right now.”
“You found him?” Bella asks, taking an inadvertent step forward. “Where is he?”
The men around the edge of the room lift their weapons to protect my father from the imminent threat they believe Bella is, but my father waves them away. “You are starting to bore me, girl. Better to be seen and not heard.”
Bella looks over my father’s shoulders and gestures again, and finally, it clicks. Not wasting another second, I take two long strides and throw myself on his back, wrapping my arms around his neck.
The entire room erupts at once, but no one knows what to do. My father is clawing at my arms around his neck, desperate for breath, but they can’t shoot me without hurting him. And my father is far too busy fighting for air to give them any direction. So, there’s shouting and shuffling and the rapid loading of weapons, but no one steps forward to do anything, and I think I might actually be able to kill him. Even if his men still kill us afterward, I might get to end my father’s reign of terror before it gets worse. Though, since his men are employees motivated by money rather than loyalty, I might be able to kill him and then pay them off. Between Bella and myself, we have more than enough money to pay them all handsomely. I just have to squeeze the life out of the traitor who called himself my father, and I’ll figure out the rest later.
But then, one man steps forward, wraps an arm around Bella’s chest, and presses the muzzle of his gun to her temple.
I release my father at once, pushing him away from me for good measure. He stumbles forward, his neck and face changing colors faster than I can keep track of, and gasps for air.
“I’m done,” I say, lifting my hands in surrender. “Don’t hurt her.”
My father turns around, his top lip curled back in a sneer. “Take them both.”
The man holding the gun to Bella’s head lowers it, but quickly subdues her, pinning her arms behind her back. I lunge forward to try and do something, anything, but three men surround me and kick my legs out from under me. My chest collides with the floor, knocking the wind out of me, and when I look up, Bella is gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Bella
The man pulls me towards the door just as Yuri is thrown on the cement floor. I cry out, but then the door slams between us, and I’m being dragged away. I thrash and kick, but it isn’t doing anything other than exhausting me, so I decide to go limp instead.
“Stand up,” the man complains, shaking me like a sheet. “Walk.”
I sag against him, forcing him to carry me to the cell. It’s childish, but it’s the only kind of rebellion I’m capable of at the moment. It also might be my last rebellion as I have no reason to believe I won’t be dead before dawn. But I push that thought away as he unlocks a metal door and pulls it open to reveal a small dark room. No windows, no light. Just a metal cot in the corner and a pitcher of water with no cup. A prison cell.
The man throws me into the room, and I wince as my knees smack against the cold floor.
“Bella?”
The door slams behind me, and I realize the voice came from in front of me—inside the cell. I scramble to my feel and press myself against the wall. Did they lock me in a room with a crazy person? Is that how they’re going to kill me?
My heart is thundering in my chest, and I look around for anything I could use to defend myself. I’ve just decided the water pitcher, though plastic, could be useful when a shape lifts off the cot and moves to the middle of the floor.
“Bells?”
Bells. My nickname. The one my father gave me as a little girl.
“Dad?”
In an instant, he has his arms around me and everything that has happened in the past few days is forgotten. I don’t think about the financial records I found in his office or the note on his laptop. I just think about the fact that I’m terrified, and now my father is with me. I break down in sobs.
“What are you doing here?” he asks after a while, smoothing down my hair, voice thick with emotion. “What happened?”
I shake my head and pull away to swipe at my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
His blue eyes—the same shade as mine—look down at the floor. “That is a much longer story.”
“You’d be surprised how much of it I know,” I say.
He runs a hand down his stubbled face. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen him with even a hint of a beard. Maybe when we went to the lake for a week when I was in middle school? He let it grow out then, but shaved it the day we left. He didn’t want to be caught by any press looking less than his government best.
“I’m sorry you got mixed up in any of this,” he says. “That’s exactly what I was trying to avoid.”
“What is this?” I ask. “What did you get mixed up in? Has all of your time in the Senate been a lie? How much of our stuff was bought with dirty money? How long has this been going on?”
He has enough of a moral compass to look ashamed, and I immediately feel guilty. Though, given what Yuri’s father just did to him, I’m not feeling particularly sympathetic towards criminal fathers at the moment.
“Tell me everything,” I demand, stepping away from him and dropping down on the thin mattress.
And for the next twenty minutes, he does.
My father tells me how he was approached by The Society in college and how he tried to get out of it. He told me how he resisted doing their bidding for a long time, suffering small leaks of his private information to the press and notes left on his car. But then I came along, and The Society knew my name. They knew the name of my nanny and the parks we visited. He couldn’t risk it, so he began feeding them the passwords to government accounts and slipping them spare keys to records rooms. Then The Society wanted him to work for the Petrovs, but keep it a secret. None of the Petrovs could know who he was working for. He didn’t understand what any of it meant, but he was doing his best to find his way in their world so he could protect me and my mom. Then my mom died, and it was just the two of us. He felt even more pressure to take care of me, so he accepted more money. He sold his votes and supported whatever the Petrovs and The Society wanted him to. But recently, he ran into the leader of the Petrov family at the headquarters, and he recognized Ivan as the leader of The Society. Ivan threatened him and sent men to his office to force him out of government and the city, but he felt like this was his out. If he was ever going to escape, knowing Ivan’s true identity would be his ticket. So, he made it look like the house had been ransacked, left a note detailing his crimes, and went into hiding. Once the press got wind of his disappearance, he planned to make a deal with Ivan to keep his identity a secret in exchange for being released from his obligations to the Petrovs and The Society.
“Of course,” he says, shaking his head. “Then, they took you, and being released from my duties to them became the least of my worries.”
His story matches up with everything Yuri and I found at the house and everything we have discovered about Ivan, but part of me still doesn’t want to believe my father could have been lying to me for all those years. That he could have been leading a double life without me realizing it.
“I know I really screwed up, Bella. I’ve known it for a lo
ng time, I just didn’t know how to fix it.” He drops down on the cot next to me and hangs his head in his hands. “And now, you are here, and I’m not sure either of us is going to get out.”
“Don’t lose hope,” I say, though the last vestiges of mine are clinging by a thread.
“These Russians are all ruthless,” he snaps. “I’m sure the only reason they’ve kept me alive this long is to torture me with our reunion. To raise my spirits just to kill you in front of me.”
His voice breaks. “I’m sorry, Bells. I’m sorry.”
I reach out and place a hand on his shoulder. My entire life, my dad has always comforted me. It seems strange to be the one comforting him now. “They aren’t all the same.”
He looks up at me, eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
I think about Yuri. I picture his face—square and serious like the first day we met, but also pale and shocked after his father revealed the truth of his double life. I think about the different sides of him I’ve seen in the last few days. About how long it took for me to trust him, to care for him. I can’t explain any of that to my father in a matter of minutes, so I don’t even try.
“It means that if we can get out of this cell, we might have someone on the other side of that door fighting for us.”
My father looks at me for a minute and then nods. “They’ll be in with the slop they call dinner in a few minutes. The guard is a fat man with a bum right eye.”
I grab the pitcher, spill the last of the water under the bed, and hold the hard plastic container in my hands like a boulder. “So, I’ll hit him from the right side.”
My father gives me a look of both surprise and admiration, and then there are footsteps in the hallway. I shove the pitcher behind my back and press myself against the right wall of the cell. Within a minute, the guard unlocks the door and pushes it in, pausing in the doorway.
“Stand back,” he grumbles, his accent thick.
There’s a gun strapped to his thick waist, but he isn’t holding it. Clearly, he’s accustomed to cowed prisoners. As he walks into the room to set the tray of food (Dad was right, it really is slop) in the middle of the floor, my dad nods at me, and I lift the pitcher above my head and bring it down hard on the top of his head.
