by Coco Miller
“That’s impossible,” Kazimir replies and his voice makes a silly grin wash over my face.
“Do you remember the rule I made for women?” Viktor asks them.
“Da,” Vlad replies. “You do not abuse women, harm women, or kill women. It is your number one rule.”
“It is and it all started with her mother. Vlad, this has to deal with you too.”
Oh, it’s getting good. It’s like a Russian soap opera.
The sound of a stack of papers hits the desk followed by a long sigh.
“Alegra Wilson is the daughter of Danielle. I’m afraid I do not know the woman’s last name.”
My stomach drops.
They’re talking about me?
They’re talking about my mother?
“My mother’s name was Danielle too,” Vlad says with pride. “What a coincidence.”
“Where is this going father?” Kazimir asks. “I want to get back to Alegra. She’ll be up soon.”
“Danielle was Bratva whore, spreading her legs for all the men. She wanted a place here. She thought she belonged, but it isn’t that easy to join the family especially if you’re not blood. You can’t just fuck your way in.
“Anyway, Danielle told us once that she left family behind to have a life here. She disappeared to them, but inside these walls, she was well known. Until she got pregnant—”
My stomach turns with what he says and I hold my hand over my mouth to keep the bile in. Tears splash against my cheeks.
No, not my mother.
My mother…it’s then I remember, I don’t know much about her. My dad rarely spoke of her. Did he know she was a mafia whore?
I’m going to be sick.
“—with you Vlad.”
“Me?”
“Da.”
“They were turbulent times. Your father was in over his head with a few things. Mostly drugs. As you know, he tried making a deal to snitch on me to the cops.”
“Da, I know.” Vlad responds as if it is his greatest shame.
“And so you know I had to eliminate that problem.”
“I understand.”
What the fuck?
“Your father was also mixed up with Danielle who was pregnant with you after his…death. She gave birth to you and she thought because she had a baby that was born into the mafia that she was in now too. But Danielle was a drug user and nothing more than a mafia whore, so that was never going to happen.
“Once she realized that I wasn’t going to support her, she gave you up, left you in my hands and said she wanted nothing to do with you. A few years later she cleaned herself up a bit and came back. I was raising you as my own but she was your mother after all, so I let her hang around.
“I soon discovered that the only reason she was back was to act as an informant for the cops. She got busted dealing drugs and they cut her a deal, information on me to get probation instead of prison time.”
“No,” Kazimir hisses. “No! That means—”
“That Danielle is the one and only woman I have ever killed and it haunts me to this day, Kazimir. I probably could have handled it differently but we have a code. You both know this.
“Vlad, I’m so sorry you had to find out this way but you deserved to know that I am responsible for killing both your snitch parents and that Alegra, the woman in Kazimir’s bed, is your half−sister.”
“Fuck,” is all Vlad says.
“I knew something was different about her, but it took me a minute to put it all together,” Viktor adds. “That was all such a long time ago.”
“You didn’t know when her father borrowed the money from you that he was that woman’s ex husband?!”
“No, I never knew who her family was. I didn’t care. I always thought she was just a whore and a junkie that Vlad’s father had a thing for. Nothing more.”
I lean against the wall and finally tune them out. I have heard everything I need to hear.
Kazimir’s father killed my mother.
Vlad is my fucking brother.
My mother was a whore.
I am the daughter of a whore.
I don’t want to believe that this ridiculous tale is true, but right now this is all too much for me to handle.
I need to get out of here.
I’m hyperventilating.
I can’t breathe.
My stomach won’t stop twisting, turning, knotting, and lurching. How can I love a man that has this kind of sick connection to my family? How can I ever look at Kazimir knowing he and I are connected through murder and that Vlad and I are connected by blood.
“It’s haunted me deeply,” Viktor’s voice comes closer to the door. “It’s something I’ll never forget.”
The handle turns and I realize I need to go, I need to get out of here before they see me and I get caught eavesdropping. I’ll probably end up getting a bullet in my head just like my mother.
Luckily I am only in socked feet, and I begin to quietly run into the direction I came, crying as I pump my arms furiously. I take a sharp left and then a right. I have no idea where I am going, I just know I need to be away. I need to think.
By the time I run out of breath, I’m at a door I have never seen, a concrete passage way, old and wet with time and cobwebs. I bend over when the bile becomes too much to hold down and puke all over the floor.
They stole me from my father.
They killed my mother.
These are horrible people.
I have to go.
“Oh god,” I cry as my heart breaks, shattering into a million pieces that can never be put back together.
“Alegra, where are you? Moya Dusha?”
Kazimir calls for me and my soul tugs, telling me to go to him but my brain tells me something all together different.
Get as far away from these killers as you can, Alegra.
I can’t trust a man whose family is so lethal, so dangerous, so heartless. My mother, Vlad’s mother, a woman I have always wondered about died at the hands of a heartless Russian gangster.
A Bratva boss.
The father of my captor.
Is Kazimir like his father?
I never want to find out.
I take the door handle and turn it, surprised to find it unlocked and when the tall grass of the back of the grounds comes to view, I do the only thing I know to do.
“Alegra!” Kazimir calls again with a roar.
I run away from my sick Bratva addiction.
And I never look back.