The Double

by Newbury, Helena

  Hailey

  LIGHTS, cold and stark, blasting through my eyelid shone in. “Ma’am, do you know where you are?”

  I couldn’t speak. My tongue was limp and dry and moving it was like trying to lift a mattress with one finger. Why was I so weak?

  “BP’s 90 over 60,” yelled someone. “She needs blood.”

  “Her name is Christina Rogan,” said Konstantin’s voice. I could tell how worried he was because his English was disintegrating. “She’s AB-negative.”

  Why would Konstantin know that? Then I realized: for the Bratva families, getting shot was an occupational hazard. Grigory, Konstantin, Christina...they probably all knew their blood types, in case they needed to be patched up by some backstreet doctor.

  “Check the records, just to be sure,” someone ordered.

  The sound of fevered typing. The lights dimmed as someone leaned over me, comparing my face to a photo. “Yep, that’s her. Records say she is AB-negative.”

  “OK, grab some.”

  Running footsteps disappearing into the distance. A thought coalesced in my brain, making me uneasy, but it was blurry and indistinct and I couldn’t make sense of it.

  Someone was digging their fingers into my leg and it hurt like crazy, but I couldn’t raise the energy to scream. I heard someone move in close to the other side of me and smelled Konstantin’s cologne. Then a big hand lifted mine and squeezed it. I tried to squeeze back, but I was too weak.

  Footsteps pounded towards us. “Got the blood!”

  This time, my stomach lurched. That was bad. That was wrong. But my brain still wouldn’t work properly—I couldn’t figure out why I was scared.

  “Get it in, her pressure’s dropping.”

  The metal feet of a drip stand rattled against the tiles as someone struggled to hang a bag on it.

  That fear again, shapeless but real. With a monumental effort, I managed to crack my eyes open. I could see the bag swinging above me, heavy with blood.

  Christina’s type of blood. But—

  But not mine. I was O-negative. My brain finally came awake. The wrong blood will kill me!

  Someone had hold of my arm. A needle pricked at me. I tried to pull my arm away in panic.

  “She’s waking up!”

  “Get the damn IV in, she needs the blood!”

  A heavy arm pinned mine to the bed. Then the stab of a needle going in and the sticky pressure of a dressing securing it in place. “Line’s in!”

  No! Stop! I tried to yell a warning, but all that came out was a groan.

  Konstantin’s voice. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s just in pain.”

  A pull on the IV needle as the tube from the bag was screwed onto it. “Blood’s going in!”

  No, no! I started to thrash. Strong hands held me down. “Ma’am, we’re trying to help you! Lie still!”

  Over the doctor’s shoulder, I could see the blood coursing down the transparent tube towards my arm. No!

  Konstantin leaned over me. “Golub, what’s wrong?”

  The blood reached my arm—

  Moving my injured leg made it feel like the glass was stabbing into it all over again. But I cocked it and kicked—and felt one toe just catch the drip stand. My arm exploded in pain as the IV was tugged and then the whole thing was tipping—

  “Catch it!” someone yelled. But they were all busy trying to hold me down and—

  There was a wet slap as the bag hit the floor.

  “Goddammit!” snapped a nurse, glaring at me. “Bag’s burst. And that was the last AB-negative we had.”

  “Then get me some O neg!” yelled the doctor.

  O neg. O neg is fine. I slumped on the bed, my eyes closing.

  50

  Hailey

  THEY KEPT ME in the hospital for the whole of the next day. I spent most of the time sleeping, recovering from the blood loss, but whenever I woke, Konstantin was by my bedside, watching over me.

  They discharged me the following morning, the 18th. As Konstantin pushed me to the car in a wheelchair, a man hurried across the hallway without looking and slammed into me. Konstantin glared at him, protective, and he stammered an apology... and as he moved around the chair, I felt him discreetly slip something into my jacket pocket. He must be FBI.

  I knew what he’d slipped me, but I didn’t touch it. Not yet.

  Konstantin had Grigory drive us into Manhattan and then to somewhere I recognized, though I hadn’t been there in years. Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan. You can look out and see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

  He lifted me out of the car and carried me. I told him that I could walk, or at least limp, but he wouldn’t allow it. He carried me all the way to a bench, looking out over the water, and then sat down beside me.

  It was still early and autumn mist was rolling across the water, but you could still see Lady Liberty rising up out of it. It was bitterly, bitterly cold and that made my tooth start aching again. “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  He was staring out at the water. “I need to tell you my story. You need to understand why I—Why I’m me.”

  I nodded, eyes wide.

  He took a deep breath and then huffed it out in a white cloud. It was so cold, I wasn’t sure how long we’d be able to stay sitting there. “My father was Nikolai Gulyev,” said Konstantin. “He ran half of St. Petersburg for the Russian mafia for over twenty years. A hard man, but fair. He fell for a secretary who worked for one of his companies.”

  “Your mother,” I guessed.

  “My mother. He married her and they had three boys: Pavel, Stefan, and me. We were the richest family in St. Petersburg. Growing up, I didn’t want for anything. I had the best tutors, a huge house to play in, a horse….” He shook his head. “Things were different, back then. There was more honor. We always knew there was danger, we had guards, but we never thought….”

  Konstantin did something I’d never seen him do before. He closed his eyes and bent forward, as if in respect or prayer. The wind started to howl, scouring our exposed skin as it blasted across the water, but he didn’t seem to notice. When he spoke, he didn’t open his eyes.

  “There was a new gang in St Petersburg. Small, but brutal. They didn’t pay any attention to the rules of the Bratva, the brotherhood. They had no honor. They…”

  He paused for a moment, his jaw set hard. I reached out and touched his shoulder, my chest going tight with tension.

  “My brothers and I had just arrived home from school,” he said in a rush. His accent was getting stronger, the edges of the words rough. “My mother was in the dining room, planning the formal ball we held each year. And suddenly there was a crash as the front door was kicked open. Eight men, and their leader had brought his teenage son along, a kid no more than eighteen. They started killing. The guards first, but then the rest of the staff... the cooks, the maids…. The whole house was running in blood.”

  “I was fifteen. My brothers were eleven and eight. They took us upstairs and locked us in a room that had no windows. My mother, they took to the bedroom next door.”

  I slid my hand across Konstantin’s back, trying to comfort him, but his body was like cold rock. There was no comforting him from this.

  “My brothers were crying. I... was crying. I kept telling them that soon, it would be okay because my father would get home and then he’d unleash unholy hell on them. I told them, these fucking idiots don’t know what they’ve done. I told them, we’ll watch as father executes every last one of them.” He paused. “I didn’t realize that they wanted my father to get home. That’s what they were waiting for.”

  His eyes opened and he stared out across the water towards the Statue of Liberty, but I knew he wasn’t seeing it. He was in a mansion four thousand miles and twenty years away. The Russian in his voice was even stronger, now. “When my father got home, they took him upstairs. We heard him pass our door and we banged on it, telling him we were there, and he shouted for
us to be brave. Then they took him into the bedroom with my mother and…” He swallowed. “And then a few minutes later, we heard her start screaming.”

  “Oh God.” I wanted to be sick. “Konstantin—”

  “You see, my father offered them money. Told them where the jewelry was hidden, opened the safe for them, told them they could take all the cars. But that isn’t what they wanted. They wanted to take over. They wanted to take control of everything, all of the family’s businesses, legal and illegal. And of course he refused. So they started to rape my mother, right in front of him.”

  I couldn’t speak. I just gripped his arm and hung on in a death grip.

  “He loved her. He loved her, and us, more than anything else in the world. And when they said they’d torture us, too, cut our fingers off one by one... he broke. He gave them everything. It took all night and into the next morning: they had him calling banks in Switzerland, approving transfers, signing over his companies. They’d bribed lawyers and blackmailed people at his businesses so that everything could be witnessed and signed. We’d never be able to undo it. In one night, we lost everything... and they went from a small-time gang to running half of St. Petersburg.”

  “When it was all done, they told us they were releasing us. They let us out of the room and we ran to our parents. My mother was crying but trying to be strong. She tried to pretend she was okay, but we knew she’d been…. And her face was covered in bruises. Some bastard had beaten her while he—” Konstantin squeezed his eyes shut in disgust.

  “They drove us out of town and up to a bridge over a river. It was January, thick with snow and far below zero. The sun was just coming up and the river was white with floating hunks of ice. We got out of the car and….” He closed his eyes again. “Nataliya was there. And Mikhail. And Evelina and Feodor.” He had to stop for a moment and take a breath before he could explain and when he spoke again, his voice was raw with pain. “My cousins, Christina. Every one of my cousins. And their parents. People who had nothing to do with crime, the only thing they’d done wrong was to be related to us.”

  “It wasn’t enough that they’d ruined us, they had to destroy us. They had to end the Gulyev line so that no one could come back and take revenge on them.”

  I clapped my hand to my mouth. I’d suddenly realized why Konstantin had never mentioned any brothers. The cold and the bitter wind that whipped at us were forgotten: they were nothing, now.

  “They made us watch as they gunned down all of our relatives and threw the bodies into the river. Then it was our turn. The leader of the gang didn’t do it himself. He got his teenage son, a fat, obnoxious little prick, to do the killing, said it was a rite of passage—one day, the gang would belong to him. And the little bastard was happy to help.”

  “He started with my youngest brother, Pavel. My father was begging, pleading. He knew he’d made a mistake, he knew he’d given up everything, for nothing, he didn’t even care that he was going to die, he just wanted them to let his children live. But the teenager shot Pavel, right in front of him. And then he shot Stefan. And then he got me to kneel down on the edge of the bridge, because it was my turn. I knelt down. I didn’t cry. I knew my father would want me to be strong. I could hear my mother sobbing. I heard the shot and there was pain, and then I was falling….”

  Konstantin put his hand to the back of his head. “The teenager who shot me had been drinking our vodka, and he was showing off. He was laughing and joking, taunting my father, and his hand was shaking from the cold. The gun must have moved away just a little as it fired. The bullet only scraped my scalp.”

  He shook his head. “It shouldn’t have mattered. The fall should have killed me. It nearly did: my head hit a chunk of ice as I went into the water—”—he pushed back his hair and showed me the scar on his forehead—”—that’s how I got this. But somehow, I survived. I floated there for a few minutes. I was in shock: I didn’t even notice the cold. Then a body fell from the bridge. My mother. And finally, another. My father.”

  “I wanted to swim over to them. I knew they were dead, but I just wanted to hold them. But I knew the gang might look down and see me so I just had to float there, playing dead, until I heard their car drive away.”

  “I started to come out of my daze. I looked around. I was floating in a mass of bodies: everyone I’d ever cared about was dead around me, The cold began to sink in and it was….” He shook his head. “It was cold like I’d never known it. The only reason the water wasn’t freezing was that it was moving. Every time it slowed, I could feel the ice crystals trying to form around me. But the air was even colder. When the wind blew on my wet skin... agony, like a knife cutting down to the bone.”

  I suddenly understood why he’d brought me to this freezing place. This wasn’t a story that could be told at the mansion, or in the warmth of a bar. He’d needed to feel at least a hint of that brutal cold. He felt so guilty, for having survived, that he’d needed to punish himself just to be able to keep talking.

  “The air was so cold, so painful, I just wanted to sink under the surface to get away from it,” he said. “Letting go would feel so good. But….” He turned to me. “I could feel this.” He showed me his ring. “It was my father’s. He gave it to me on the way to the river, when he thought they’d only kill him. And my mother, just before they shot her, she pressed her necklace into my hand. Now, those two things were all that was left of our empire. And I was the only Gulyev left.” He looked at me and the pain in his eyes was heartbreaking. “They were all dead. My entire family was dead. If I let myself die….”

  “There’d be nothing left,” I whispered, my vision swimming with tears.

  “So I made a decision. A promise. And I swam to the bank, pushing my way through their bodies. I hauled myself out and started walking. It was several miles into town, crunching through the snow. By rights, the cold should have killed me. But I wouldn’t let myself stop walking.”

  “I finally found shelter in a bus station on the outskirts of town. The next morning, everything sunk in. I had no money, no home, and if the gang found out I was alive, they’d kill me. But I’d decided: I was going to take back everything they’d stolen from me. So I took a different name and began.”

  “I had to start at the very bottom of the Bratva, as a gutter rat picking pockets. I lived on food other people threw away. But I worked my way up. Built my own gang and started taking my family’s territory back one street at a time. It was ten years before I dared to take the name Konstantin Gulyev again. Another five, and I’d taken our half of the city back. Then I came to New York. And….”

  I finished the sentence for him in my mind. And I just kept going. His whole adult life had been about rebuilding his family’s power and carrying on their legacy. He had nothing else. That was why he had to take over the whole of New York. That was why it was never enough.

  He looked towards the Statue of Liberty. “I swore I’d never let myself get close to anyone. I’d seen what could happen, if you allowed yourself to feel. I never loved anyone….” He turned to me. “Until you.”

  My cheeks were wet with tears and my throat was choked. “And the other gang?” I asked. But I already knew what he was going to say.

  “Their leader was a man called Olaf Ralavich,” said Konstantin. “He was killed a few years ago and control of his empire passed to his son. The teenager who killed my family. Dmitri. Dmitri Ralavich.”

  I broke and threw my arms around him, burying my face in his chest. I understood, now. I understood why he was so cold, so isolated, why even sex had been stripped of its emotion and safely locked away in the dungeon. I understood why everything in the mansion was so old and why he’d clung onto traditions like the annual ball: he was trying to recapture all that family heritage that had been torn away from him. I understood why he wore the ring and why he’d had it made into the hardware key for his laptop: he knew he’d never, ever take it off.

  The necklace. He’d given me the necklace. I was tha
t special to him.

  And God, the way he’d reacted when he thought I might be pregnant: he’d glimpsed a chance for his family to have a future. I even understood why he’d wound up with Christina: he’d wanted someone cold and heartless so that there was no danger of him falling for her. And then I’d come along and—

  He pushed me gently back and frowned at me. “I don’t understand how you’ve changed. But ever since the accident, however hard I try…” His shoulders hunched and I saw his whole body tighten in frustration. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “You make me weak,” he said helplessly.

  I put my other hand over his and squeezed back. “That’s not weak,” I said breathlessly.

  He stared at me for a long time, battling with himself...and finally he sighed and nodded and we threw our arms around each other and sat there hugging. The wind was picking up, howling across the water and blasting across our backs. But we were impenetrable, our fronts pressed together to form a glowing core of warmth the cold couldn’t steal.

  “I don’t want to have any secrets from you anymore,” he said, his cheek pressed to mine. “Ask your questions about my business and I’ll answer every one.”

  My chest contracted. This was it: everything we’d wanted when I’d volunteered for this mission. I could ask him what he was planning for the 18th: God, that was today! I could get all the information we needed and then call in Calahan and arrest him....

  But I didn’t want to. Not anymore.

  “Go on,” said Konstantin gently. “What do you want to know?”

  I had to finally make the decision that I’d been struggling with since the night before. I took a deep breath, inhaling his warmth, the scent of his cologne...and I made my choice.

  I wasn’t going back to the FBI. Not ever. And that meant I could know nothing, because if I had information, the FBI could bring me in and force me to testify against him. “I don’t need to know,” I told him. “I trust you.” And as soon as I said it, I realized it was true. “I know you’re honorable. You’re not like Ralavich, you don’t murder innocent people.”