Thirty Days of Shame

by Ginger Talbot

  “Willow will be fine.”

  Jasha walks up.

  “We will begin our lesson now. We’ll work out until dinner.” He looks at Helenka. “One rule. You will speak to Sergei with respect.”

  Anastasia moves in front of her children.

  “One other rule,” she says. “If you hurt my kids, even accidentally, I swear to God I will tear your throat out with my teeth.” The feral gleam in her eyes says she means it. She would die for them. Vilyat nearly extinguished her inner fire, but it’s back now, a roaring bonfire, and I don’t think she’ll ever lose it again.

  Jasha gives her a bored look. “Lesson number one,” he says to her. “Don’t be an idiot. Never tell your enemy what you plan on doing to them.”

  Helenka has been standing behind him. She suddenly lashes out with a whirling kick that is so fast I barely see it coming, catching Jasha in the back of the knee. He staggers and almost falls.

  “Lesson number two, watch how you talk to my mother,” she snaps. “Lesson number three, don’t underestimate me.”

  A thirteen-year-old girl who can’t weigh more than ninety pounds did that to him.

  Willow starts laughing. Yuri joins her. Anastasia is laughing, and so am I. I laugh and laugh, until tears come to my eyes and I’m gasping for breath. I realize I haven’t laughed like that, a genuine howl of laughter, in…possibly ever.

  Jasha glares at them. His face is flushed with humiliation.

  “Let’s start with some laps around the mats,” he snaps. “All of you. Then pushups until you puke.”

  “I don’t have a jogging bra!” Anastasia protests.

  He rakes her with a look of contempt. “Sucks for you, princess,” he growls. “When a mugger is chasing you, are you going to stop and ask him to wait while you put on a jogging bra? No? Then start running.”

  “I need to go make some calls,” I say. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. Every cell in my body craves Willow. I want to smell her, taste her, bury myself deep in her tight, warm sheath. That’s why I’m forcing myself to leave the room. To prove to myself that I still can.

  That’s okay. She has no idea what’s coming.

  She ran away from me. She disobeyed me.

  Disobedience requires retribution.

  Chapter Seven

  WILLOW

  After Jasha’s brutal workout, which does indeed bring us all near to barfing, Anastasia and I sit on the sidelines and watch while he works with the children.

  Jasha has never been particularly friendly to me, and I keep an eagle eye on him, but I can’t fault his treatment of Helenka and Yuri. He doesn’t hurt them or even belittle them. He’s brusque but efficient. His teaching is excellent, and very tactical. He encourages them to turn their weaknesses into strengths. For instance, they’re children, small and slender. That’s a weakness. But anyone who doesn’t know them will underestimate them. That’s a strength.

  He has them practice acting helpless and terrified, going limp quickly when he grabs them, and shows them various pressure points where they can strike once they’ve lulled an attacker into a sense of false security. Several times, I hear him grunt in genuine pain.

  “Well, I must say I’m enjoying the show,” I say to Anastasia. “If we get lucky, they’ll cripple him for life. Helenka’s a lot meaner than she looks.”

  “Yes, she is,” Anastasia says with quiet pride. She nods approvingly as Yuri twists out of Jasha’s grip. Then she sighs. “This is all bullshit, of course.”

  I look at her in surprise. “Look at you with your filthy mouth. I didn’t know you had it in you, Anastasia.”

  “I’ve learned all kinds of fun things while you were at work,” she says. She watches them wrestling. “Like strategy. I study strategy. Sergei is trying to fool us into thinking he’s helping us, here. But he’s also sending a message, that he knows we were taking self-defense classes in Ohio. I mean, he even named the type of class we took. And the same when he mentioned my computer classes. That’s a warning. He’s telling us there’s nowhere that we can run and hide, he’ll always be watching us. And also, every single trick that he and his men teach us, they not only know those tricks, but they know how to predict, block, and counter-attack. They would never teach us anything we could really use against them.”

  Now I’m openly staring at her. I’d figured out all those things, but I’ve never seen this side of her. “Wow, Anastasia. It’s like I don’t know you at all.”

  “You don’t.” There’s a flash of danger in her eyes.

  For years, she was this quiet, meek woman who only spoke when spoken to, who screwed her smile on tight and trailed behind her husband with her head down. Now that she’s been freed from Vilyat and she’s off the prescription opioids, she’s turning into something I don’t even recognize.

  We turn back to watch the kids, and suddenly I’m a little more confident about Helenka and Yuri’s future.

  I try to think about what I know about her. I remember that when I was nine years old, my parents told me that my uncle Vilyat had gotten married to a girl in Russia, and he was bringing her home to California. They showed me a picture of Vilyat and his new wife, who liked like a Hollywood movie star. She wore tons of makeup and had her hair teased into a big, dramatic updo. She had just graduated from high school. She was eighteen, and Vilyat was thirty-seven.

  “Gross,” I said when I heard their ages. “I’m never going to marry an old man like that.”

  “You will marry whoever you’re told to!” My father barked at me, and I could feel the anger rolling off him.

  “But I get to choose!” I stared at him in shock. That wasn’t how life worked.

  My father stormed towards me. He’d never hit me, because he’d never had a reason to. I was the perfect daughter; I made sure of it. There was a violence, a rage, that rippled just under the surface of his skin, and even as a very small child, I knew that the only way to be safe in my house was to keep my father happy.

  My mother shot to her feet, moving between me and him.

  Right then, I knew he wasn’t just about to hit me – he was about to kill me. I was light-headed with fear.

  “I will talk to her. Demyon. Please. She is just a child. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  The undercurrent of terror in my mother’s voice stole the breath from my body.

  What was happening?

  I knew exactly what I’d said. I knew what the fairy tales told you. You met a prince and you fell in love with him. You married because you were in love.

  She hurried me out of the room. She talked to me, all right, but she did so in whispers. She told me that she’d make sure that my father would never force me to marry anyone, but we had to pretend that I would do whatever he wanted.

  That was when she first started planning to buy a secret apartment, to get fake ID for both of us. From what I gathered, as soon as I finished college, my father was going to arrange a marriage for me. If my parents hadn’t died in that plane crash, she and I would have vanished right after my graduation ceremony – and before I was sentenced to a lifetime of marital servitude.

  I watch Helenka land a hard, savage kick in Jasha’s stomach, and a smile curls my lips. Vilyat would never have allowed her to take self-defense lessons. What he would have said was that a woman should be able to depend on her man to protect her. But the truth was, he believed that women should be helpless and scared.

  Sergei is a terrible person, and yet he’s better to these kids than their father ever was. He took the time to find out exactly what they wanted and needed, and he gave it to them. He let them know that the things they enjoyed weren’t silly little hobbies. He encouraged them to pursue their passions, to excel at them. Anastasia, too.

  Yeah, he was being a dick and making a point when he let her know that he was aware she had been taking computer classes, but he could just have told us that he knew what we were up to, without giving any of us a damn thing. Instead he built these wonde
rful rooms for the kids and made sure that my aunt could finish studying and get her online certificate.

  No man in our family would have done that; the women and children only existed to be molded into the shape the Toporov men desired.

  After our practice session, I go back to my room to shower before dinner, and it’s as if I never left. A closet full of beautiful clothes, all brand new, that are exactly the styles I love.

  Art supplies on my desk.

  And a laptop. That’s new.

  I wonder how much Sergei knows about what I’ve really been up to. My aunt and I have both been obsessed with teaching ourselves how to hack, and we’ve gotten good at it, better than we are at physically defending ourselves. To protect ourselves from our enemies, we needed to know what they were doing. Vilyat has gotten sloppy since Sergei drove him out of the country, and we at least had some idea of his comings and goings.

  While we were in Ohio, I also tried to find out anything I could about Sergei. It wasn’t easy. He’s very careful. He owns many businesses, including an international shipping company based out of a port city in the Leningrad Oblask, a chain of warehouses both here and in Russia, and a construction company.

  One day, I managed to hack in to the email of one of his vendors, and they were talking about Vilyat and “Operation Salvat”, but they were very vague. The next day when I tried to sign in, I was blocked.

  I feel like it has something to do with my family, with whatever plan Sergei has for my two surviving uncles, Vilyat and Edik. For whatever reason, Sergei bears a ferocious hatred for the Toporovs. I want to know why.

  I log in to the laptop that Sergei has set up for me and check all the programs on it. There are security programs that I don’t recognize. For now, I just do some pointless web-surfing to throw him off track, looking up shoes and turquoise jewelry, and then log off. I could create a virtual private network on there, and I don’t think he could see what I was doing on it, but I don’t want him to find out my new skill level yet.

  That evening, I eat dinner in the dining room with my family. Sergei doesn’t join us. I could almost have predicted that. Sergei hates that he needs me, because he sees it as a weakness. He’s the type who’s into self-denial, and right now he’s proving to himself how strong he is by making himself wait until he sees me again.

  After dinner, one of the servants takes us to a media room with soft leather chairs, and we pick a science fiction flick to watch on an enormous screen, and eat fresh buttered popcorn delivered by a maid.

  The night stretches on and on, and finally we go back to our rooms. I get to see Anastasia, Yuri and Helenka’s suite, at the end of a hallway, rooms grouped together.

  “You’ll sleep in my room,” Anastasia declares to her kids, and they don’t even argue. A normal thirteen-year-old girl would argue about being treated like a baby. Helenka’s life has never been normal.

  I head back to my room and toss and turn, wondering if Sergei will come for me. Wondering why he’s not there.

  In the morning, I wake up with a start. Someone is pounding on my door. The clock says I’ve slept in until nine a.m. Helenka is yelling something about breakfast.

  As I hurry to the door to answer her, I stop short. Someone’s been in my room while I was sleeping. Someone has left turquoise necklaces, bracelets, and earrings on the desk next to my computer. On the floor by the desk are at least fifty pairs of shoes; sandals, espadrilles, ballet flats. They’re the shoes I was looking at online yesterday afternoon – a pair in every color.

  I feel the bars of my gilded cage shrinking in on me.

  Chapter Eight

  Day two, morning…

  I pull on a pale-pink cotton maxi dress with embroidered flowers at the neckline, and a pair of the macramé sandals that appeared in my room overnight thanks to the Shoe Fairy, and then I join my family.

  A silent butler guides us outside. We’re served breakfast in the rose garden. We can see the ocean from where we’re sitting. There’s an obscene amount of food on the table, and we dive into piles of fluffy pancakes and salty bacon and buttery scrambled eggs.

  Maks and Jasha sit down with us. Sergei’s still not here.

  “Do you want some pancakes? They’re really good.” Yuri asks them politely, and my heart aches. He is such a good kid, despite everything. I mean, he’s offering pancakes to his freaking kidnappers.

  Maks is curt. “We already ate.”

  “Then why are you here? Jerkhole?” Helenka snaps at them. Sometimes she gets crabby with her brother, but nobody else is allowed to be rude to him.

  Maks fixes his cold gaze on her. “Because it’s our job.”

  I snort in contempt. “I’m just curious,” I say to them. “What exactly are you afraid we’ll do if you’re not watching us? Do you think we’re going to dive into the ocean and swim for it? Or try to run for the gates and climb over the razor wire?”

  “Would you like to tell me how to do my job, Willow?” Maks grabs a silver coffee urn and pours himself and Jasha some coffee. “I’m all ears. I’m sure you’ll have some really good suggestions.”

  I give him one of the smiles I’ve learned from Sergei – the smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, and says, I’d rather be stabbing in you in the jugular than talking to you. “None I could repeat in front of the children.”

  “Jeez, like I’m five. I’ve heard people swear before,” Helenka says with annoyance.

  I wave her off and turn to Anastasia. “So, I was web surfing yesterday, looking at some jewelry and shoes, and this morning when I woke up I found that someone had been in my room and, lo and behold, everything I was searching for online was now by my desk. Someone managed to buy all that stuff, that fast, and sneak it into my room. That’s not at all creepy.”

  She grimaces in sympathy.

  Maks bangs his fist down on the table. “Don’t insult Sergei’s generosity!” he barks at me.

  Anastasia looks at him and says something in Russian that makes Jasha choke on his coffee. Maks stares at her in surprise, and actually looks mildly offended. I know conversational Russian, but nobody’s taught me the really good insults. Anastasia knows them, apparently.

  Seriously. I do not know my aunt at all.

  Jasha’s still coughing.

  “I got certified in CPR while I was in Ohio,” I say to Jasha. “Ask me if I’d use it to help you if you choked right now. Go on, ask me. Oh wait, you can’t, you’re choking.”

  Maks says something in Russian that I partly recognize – something about me being a very cheap prostitute – and he slams down his coffee cup and storms off.

  Helenka glares and waves at him as he walks away. “Buh-bye,” she says, and then she and Anastasia high-five each other and exchange the kind of secret smile that only mothers and daughters share. It makes me miss my mother so fiercely that tears sting my eyes.

  I don’t think about my mother very much, because when I do, it feels like the hot jab of a knife in my heart.

  My lovely mother, Tatiana. She was soft and strong at the same time, steel wrapped in cotton. I grab my coffee and drain an entire cup, blinking hard, and I wrap the image of my mother up lovingly in her blue comforter and shove her back in the corner of my mind where I keep her memory safe but hidden.

  “Willow! Willow!” A familiar voice calls out.

  It’s Lukas, rushing towards us, followed by his caretakers Kris and Marya. He’s wearing Ralph Lauren jeans, expensive leather loafers, and a polo shirt. His cheeks are pink, and he’s glowing with health, if not happiness. He’s dressed up like a child model in a catalog.

  He slows down when he gets to me, and pats my arm. He doesn’t try to cling to me like he used to when he first met me. “You are my friend,” he tells me, in thickly accented English. “Not mother. Friend.”

  The look on his face brings tears to my eyes. It’s the look of a child whose heart has been broken. When he saw me in the garden in April, he was so sure that I was his mother. I tried at the time to ex
plain to him, gently, that I wasn’t, but he refused to believe me.

  And then, thanks to Sergei’s abuse, I went on the run with my family and vanished for two months, without saying goodbye to him. I hurt Lukas. I made the world feel less safe for him. I didn’t mean to, but I can see the pain in his eyes.

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “I am your friend, always,” I tell him. “How have you been?”

  “I am very well, thank you.”

  He couldn’t speak a word of English the last time I saw him. “Your English is excellent, Lukas!”

  He lights up, and a little of the sadness fades as he nods vigorously. “Yes. I am learn it very good.”

  Helenka and Yuri smile at him. How could they not? Lukas is a little bundle of sweetness. He’s a walking bag of sugar.

  I introduce him to my aunt and cousins. They try to talk to him in Russian, and he looks confused.

  “He’s Czech,” I tell them. “And how is he related to Sergei again?” I ask Jasha. Jasha gives me that stone-faced stare that all of Sergei’s men have perfected.

  Anastasia looks from Lukas to me and back again, with a tiny frown. Then she shrugs and ruffles his hair with her hand. “He can come play with Helenka and Yuri,” she says. She glances at Kris and Marya, who both nod their approval.

  “You bring him back after,” Kris says to her. Then he says something to Lukas in Czech, probably reminding him to say please and thank you. Kris and Marya leave us.

  Lukas’ eyes light up with excitement. “I show you the garden? Come, come, I have jungle gym. It is very high!”

  We follow him, winding through the sweet perfume of the rose garden, down gravel paths, towards the little house where he and Kris and Marya live. There’s an amazing wooden play structure there, shaped like a castle at one end and a space ship at the other. Sergei always buys the best of everything.

  Frustration bubbles up inside me. There’s a puzzle here. Sergei’s part of it, my family is part of it, Lukas is part of it. If only I could figure out where the pieces fit into the whole, I might have a better idea of what Sergei ultimately plans for us.