“How was your date?” he finally asked. His deep blue eyes were menacing.
“Nice,” Renee said frowning. She had avoided talking about it on purpose.
“I’m going to be gone for a while, so if you want to stay here...”
“I like the apartment,” she said, pouring another glass of wine.
“What’s wrong with you now?” he snapped.
“You missed Royal’s birthday today.”
He put down his fork and sat back in his seat. Every year since Royal’s passing, Renee had gone to her grave site on her birthday with Anatoly and put down flowers. He played along because it threw the feds off, but he wanted so badly to tell her that his step-mother was alive and well in Prague.
He watched Renee brooding over his oversight and debated again if he shouldn’t just tell her. She would never tell a soul. Plus, it would ease her pain.
“Sorry, I had...stuff going on.” His voice was softer. Looking up at her, he watched her face change.
“You don’t have to apologize to me. I just don’t want you to...you know.” Her voice ached.
“Want me to what?”
“Forget.” She swallowed hard. “I don’t want you to forget her, Anatoly. She was a very good woman. She didn’t have any family. We were her family. It just seems right that we do what any family would do.” She rolled her eyes again.
He picked up his glass of vodka and took a sip. “I know. I haven’t forgotten, Renee. Not hardly.”
“Good,” she said, getting up from the table. Taking both of their plates to the sink, she turned to find him still looking at her. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing. I better get ready to leave. I’m on a plane out of here in an hour. The offer still stands. If you want to stay here, you can.”
“Be safe,” she said softly.
Anatoly didn’t smile, but his eyes glimmered. Standing up, he walked over to her, grabbed her bare arms and kissed her forehead. It made him instantly think of his father and Royal, how they carried on for so long during their courtship. Is that what he was doing? Courting Renee? The thought disturbed him. Pulling back, he looked down her in her bright, brown eyes.
“I will,” he said, walking off.
***
Victoria threw her phone across the room and watched it collide with the wall. In pieces, it shattered and fell onto the floor by the computer desk. That BASTARD!
She grabbed the open bottle of wine and took a big gulp. The excess ran down the side of her mouth and slithered down her chin. Breathing hard, she wiped her face and cursed.
If Anatoly thought that he could just play her, he had another thing coming. She didn’t give a damn about the mafia, his father or even Royal at this point. If he wanted to just screw her and throw her away all while pretending that he loved her, have her let her guard down and then crush her, she would make him pay. And she knew just how to do it.
Going to her computer, she searched for the stories about the Massacre in Memphis three years ago and found that Lieutenant Nicola Agosto headed the investigation. Anatoly had always said that he hated Agosto more than any other cop in the world. Evidently, the man had to be a serious threat. And he was probably just who she needed to get Anatoly back without it coming back to her.
How hard could it be to find a cop?
Her lip quivered as she pulled up his contact information. His picture said a thousand words. He was a tall, clean cut, dark Italian man in his late thirties. Handsome. Formidable. An Alpha male for sure.
She could look at Agosto’s photo and tell that he was a boy scout, probably ironed his underar. When she told him about the big gun shipment a few months ago in Sochi and how Anatoly laundered his money through art and kept a large inventory in Memphis the only one who would be spending time would be Anatoly...up state.
Scribbling his number down on a notepad, she quickly turned off her computer and fell over into her bed. Her thoughts danced about her in the hazy daze of drunkenness.
Tears formed at the sides of her eyes, but she wiped them quickly and turned over to bury her face in her pillow. Inhaling her perfume, she cried aloud. How she hated him for what he had done.
Anatoly had made her love him.
Chapter Four
Kapotnya (Moscow)
Anatoly looked out the window of his Land Rover as it escorted him down the MDK beltline. It was a dreary Wednesday afternoon, and the smoke of the Moscow Oil Refinery billowed up between spurts of hot fire into the polluted atmosphere and darkened the gloomy horizon.
He and his men were headed to the Kapotnya district. It was a place that he had not visited in many years, and though it was one of the poorest and most crime infested areas in all of Moscow, it was his home.
Running his hands over the console, he let his window down and smelled the air. As thick, strong contaminants filled the back of the SUV, he closed his eyes and thought of his last drive down this stretch of highway away many years ago.
He had left hastily with a pocket of cash and a garbage bag of clothes.
His mother had given him all the money that they had in savings and begged him to go to the USA to find his father. “Find Dmitry,” she urged in his box of a bedroom with a hand of waded-up rubles that were stained with smut from hiding them in the fireplace as she stood in a work smock. Lips twisted and eyes full of pain, she packed his things quickly and kissed him on his cheek before she sent him away.
He remembered that fateful night out in the courtyard of their impoverished apartment complex when he shot a man dead by the swing set. He was only 18 then and full of rage. His mother had worried that he would be sent to prison or worse. And while he did not fear his future, she did. Little did she know that he had been in a gang since he was ten years old.
To go to prison would have simply puthim on a quicker path to the Vory and gained him more respect, but she told him that he would face a fate worse than being a Vor if he stayed. “You must go,” he remembered her saying. “And you must never, ever come back, Anatoly – not even when I die.”
She had always feared for her eldest son – a blonde, stout, quiet young man with eyes full of rage and a heart full of malice. And she did right to do so.
His first murder had been one of necessity.
The forty-year-old man he had slain had eyes set on his sister, a girl barely twelve.
When Anatoly saw the man rubbing his sister’s hair on the swing and offering her a piece of candy to go up to his apartment for a while, he shot him.
It had been a quick, respectful death – more than the man had deserved. He never got a chance to tell his mother that part - that the man had been a letch. Instead, like always, he kept his secrets. Besides, they all thought that he had gone mad. And maybe they were right, but that man would never have his sister.
Since he had come to the states, however, only one other murder had been a necessity. It was a shame that one had been his uncle. He looked down at his hands as he thought of the day that he put a bullet through Ivan’s back in his father’s mansion and watched the giant’s body fall forward. That day, he knew that he was a murderer, because before then he had never enjoyed murder, but after that, he had.
“Boss, do you really want to go inside of apartment? There is a group there now. They cleared the hallways just in case for you. But the place is a real shit hole,” Vasily informed him, looking back at his young boss sitting in a daze.
“Why wouldn’t I want to go up there?” Anatoly asked. “I came all this way, didn’t I?” His blue eyes were ice cold.
Vasily didn’t respond. He simply looked over at the driver and nodded. Anatoly eyed them both for a moment, then averted his gaze back out of the window. He rode the rest of the way with a clear mind and thought of nothing.
***
The residents of the small, impoverished community gathered curiously as the convoy of luxury vehicles pulled in front of Anatoly’s old apartment building.
Quickly, men began to file out and stan
d on both sides of the cars before Anatoly’s door was opened. The grand show made him mildly embarrassed.
He paused as he looked out of the truck and then proceeded to step out and look around. Amazingly, nothing had changed. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Vasily stood by him looking around like a secr service agent on duty for the President.
Again, one more thing to further embarrass Anatoly as he and his entourage made their way through the crowds to the tall, bricked building that housed his mother’s belongings.
Someone called out his name from afar, but he didn’t bother to look up. He was certain that many people from around this place remembered him.
Many, before he left, had told him how he would never amount to anything. Look at me now, he thought. And they did look. Only even in their wonderment, they were afraid.
Word traveled fast, and the word was that the Boss had come to Kapotnya to pay respects to a woman whom he had abandoned in her final hours.
If his callousness had not been evident before, it was now. He didn’t even care for family. A true Vor. Only true to the code.
The thought sent chills through his body. If they only knew that she would not have him, that she was so proud of what he had become until she didn’t want him to ever look back at where he had come from, maybe then they wouldn’t judge him so harshly.
Then words from his father filled his head. Without Dmitry being there to physically say it, he heard him. “You don’t owe these bastards an explanation. Pay your final respects and move on.”
He did just that. Lifting his head, he moved up the concrete steps with his men to the fourth floor with the speed of a lion.
It wasn’t that he was afraid to be in a very vulnerable position of staircases and sure doom if caught in an ambush, it was simply that he wanted this over with...done and finished.
With halogen lights blinking and the smell of old urine in trash-filled corners, with people opening their doors and looking out of their peepholes, he passed quickly through the now guarded hallway to his mother’s apartment.
The door was already open and his men stood inside and out with guns, protecting him from everything except his fear of what awaited him on the other side of the door.
Quietly, he walked inside of the dingy, dark apartment and ordered the men to leave. He stood in the box of a living room as they cleared the apartment and left. He didn’t turn to see the door close, but he heard it, heard his men barking for the residents to stay out of the hallways, not to come any farther. He smirked, then turned his attention to his old home.
In the silence of the room, he heard the raggedy ceiling fan rattling only inches above him. The cool, stale air eased the sweat on his brow.
He slipped his hands in his pockets and surveyed the room. Not much had changed,e doopt the pictures on small wooden tables. He kneeled down and looked. Could it be? His little sister had grown all the way up. She was beautiful, even more so than when she was a young child. Reaching out, he ran his hand very gently over the dusty frame and debated whether he should take it or not.
“I was 15 in that picture,” a woman’s voice said from the far corner. A smile nearly colored her broken accent.
Anatoly looked up from the picture at the wall. Standing back up, he was slow to turn around. He heard her feet walking over the old, stained shag carpet. Suddenly, he was no longer a boss, just a boy standing face-to-face with is little sister in his mother’s house.
“It’s been long time, Anastasiya,” he said, preparing to hug her, if she would just move closer to him.
He committed her every feature to memory. Long, bone-straight, blonde hair. Pale skin only interrupted by rosy, high cheeks. Full pink lips curved into a heart shape. Bright, big blue eyes. Skinny frame. Petite. She had grown into a simple woman. She wore a long denim skirt and a plain white cotton shirt.
With no makeup, he could see dark circles under her angelic eyes. “You’re still as beautiful as I remember,” he confessed. He bowed his head in respect.
“I’m surprised that you remember anything,” she said frowning. Leaning against the doorway, she held tight to the Bible in her hand. “The rest of the family is already at the church. No one wanted to wait for you.”
Anatoly looked up surprised. “Why are you so angry with me?” He was dumbfounded by her reaction to his presence.
“It’s not me who is angry with you, Anatoly. It is God,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“For not being there for mat'?”
She shook her head in disgust. “No. For doing the devil’s work each and every day. But I’m praying for you, brat. I’m praying that God will help you, heal you. Right now, you think that you’re really big man, because you have so many lost boys to follow you and die for you and kill for you. But soon, you will see the error in your ways. I only hope that after you do, you will fall on your knees and beg Him for His divine mercy.”
Anatoly was speechless. Something humbled him. He didn’t shout at her, tell her that his road started trying to save her. Instead, he simply smiled. “I’m glad to know that you are safe and well, syestra,” he said, trying to mask his pain with sarcasm. “Since the family has already gone without me, I suspect that I should head over to the church for my mother’s funeral.”
“Yes,” she said, walking closer to him. “This is for you.” She passed him her brown, leather-bound Bible.
He took it in his hands, brushing hers as he did. They looked at each other for a moment, eye-to-eye.
“It is the same one that helped me find my way. I hope that it helps you find yours in time,” she said, pulling away.
“Can I offer you a ride?” he asked, unsure of what to say.
“No. I said my goodbyes to mat' at hospital,” she smiled. “I don’t plan to go to funeral. I took care of her alone until her death. What is left at the church is only memories, and I do not care to remember her in casket.” Touching his face gently with her cold, boney fingers, she gave a crooked smile and turned to walk to the door.
“But I have so many questions,” Anatoly whispered. He looked down at the floor and tried to bare the pain of feeling the separation from her with every step that she took.
“There are no answers here for you, brat.” With that and without looking back, she opened the front door and left.
***
The church was smaller than he remembered. This had been a place that he had visited many Sundays as a young boy, yet he felt like a stranger inside of it now. Begrudgingly reminiscing over his childhood and his saint of a mother, he sat in the front pew with his estranged sisters and brothers as the priest talked.
He was too strong and too proud to dare let a tear drop from his tired eyes, but his heart was heavy. And it was suddenly apparent to him how mortal he was and how unloved he was by so many that he genuinely care for.
Looking forward with his eyes focused on the casket, he would not lay eyes on his family, who stared at him in between their sobs like he was a leper.
He knew from his brief, painful moments with Anastaysia what they all thought of him. Scum. Dirt. Thug. He wondered now if their animosity stemmed from their lack luster lives that consisted of mundane existences his mother had inadvertently saved him from or because he had returned and reminded them of that fact.
In his mind, on the trip to Moscow, he imagined that they might at least be a little proud of him or at least happy that he had survived. Unfortunately, his imagination had not yielded realistic results.
His little brother, Immanuil, sat furthest from him stealing glances that didn’t exactly mirror the family’s consensus of utter hatred. Anatoly could tell that he so wanted to reach out to him. His mossy green eyes sparkled when he saw him as he entered the sanctuary, but his middle brother held him back with a firm grip and admonishing words that he hissed in the little boy’s ear.
"3"> Arseny, his middle brother, was a constant reminder of why he hated this place. They barely spoke to each other
, even after many years of separation, and in fact, he still did not call when their mother passed. Arseny was a prick like that. A devoted Catholic. A straight-laced, pussy with good grades and a bad physique who hid his shortcomings with sharp wit and a community-college degree that he held with the esteem of a Harvard cum laude graduate. They were complete opposites of each other in every way, and they both hated each other for it.
In the back of the church, the doors flung open, bringing with it the light of day. Attention turned from the lonely casket and the drawn up ceremony at the front to the parade of men in the back. Anatoly clenched his jaw and turned to see Davyd, his father’s head bodyguard enter with his men and then a long, processional of Russian mafia elite, including his father, who carried his little sister, Anya, in his arms and his wife, Royal, on his arm.
Anatoly Medlov: Complete Reign Page 4
