by Zoey Parker
The other two pictures were of Mom. In the first, she was smiling at someone off screen. She hated having her picture taken so this one was my favorite. The last picture was of the two of us. We had gone to a mother-daughter dance back when I had been in high school. We’d dressed up in poodle skirts, really fifties style. So much fun. She was kind of smiling in this picture, too. Happy times. Now she never smiled, and I couldn’t blame her, even though I still tried to get her to.
With a grimace, I gathered everything up and laid it all gently in a large pile. It was a little hard to carry everything without a box, but I wasn’t about to go back to Matt and ask for one, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to ask anyone else if they could find me one either.
As soon as I got back to the parking lot — without dropping anything by some miracle — my phone really was vibrating from a call. I performed a juggling act of shifting everything to one arm, braced my loaded arm against the car, finagled my keys from my purse, unlocked the door, dumped everything onto the backseat where it scattered like crazy, and then got out my phone. But before I could answer, the caller hung up. Of course. Just my luck.
I checked to see who had called. It was Stacy Powers, my best friend since, well, forever. We met in the second grade and had been inseparable ever since. Now she, unlike Charlotte, I actually wanted to talk to.
I climbed inside my car and pulled out of the lot and drove down the street and parked in the back of another random office building, just so no one from my former employer could look out on the parking lot and see me. Didn’t need an audience for what might be a breakdown, which was why I figured it was better to park than to talk and drive at the same time.
Stacy answered on the first ring. “Hey, girl!” she yelled. “I can’t believe you called me back. I know how you never answer when you’re working unless you’re on lunch. I was leaving you a message.”
Must be a heck of a long message, then, unless I didn’t feel the vibration from when she left it.
“Anyhow, the reason why I called was because I thought you and I—”
“Whatever you’re planning, I can’t.” My shoulders slumped. Hadn’t had much time for fun with her before this, and now all of my new free time would have to be split between taking care of my mom and finding a new job.
“But you don’t even know the date or what I’m planning,” she whined.
“Don’t need to. Can’t afford it.” Can’t afford fun.
“I can spot you.” I could just picture her waving her hand to brush my words aside. “No worries. It’s this amazing new band—”
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. I loved listening to live music. But it wasn’t the band I’d have to miss that had me wanting to break down. It was all the weight and the worry about the future and what it would hold. For too long, I had been juggling eggs, and a large one had just cracked. I couldn’t let any more drop, and I had to add another one back into the mix.
“Oh.” Stacy quieted a moment, which was saying something because she normally never stopped talking. “Is it your mom?”
“I…” I could hardly get the word out. My throat was so tight I could hardly swallow.
“What happened?” Stacy cracked her knuckles, the sound grating me over the line. “Do you need me to beat someone up for you? I might know a guy…”
Despite myself, I snorted with laughter, but then I started to cry. Just a few tears. How could I have let this happened? I should’ve fought harder for my position. Should’ve asked for a pay cut so long as I kept the position. But a pay cut would’ve been almost as terrible as being outright fired.
“Talk to me,” Stacy said quietly. “What’s going on?”
“Just got laid off.” My only source of income gone. Three weeks wouldn’t last. Not when I didn’t just need to support myself. I had to pay for all of my mother’s mounting medical bills. And food. And Mom had taken out a home equity loan shortly a few years ago, so even though there wasn’t a mortgage payment, there was that, and all the other bills, plus food, utilities.
“Now listen to me carefully,” Stacy ordered. “Go home. Update your résumé. I’ll find out who’s hiring. You eat all the chocolate in the house. And drink all of the rum, too. I’ll do my best to help find you a new job pronto. Think you can handle that?”
I sniffed and rubbed my nose. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Good.” She sounded so take charge. Had to love her. “I’ll email you what I find.”
Click. The call ended.
Refusing to cry any longer, I drove myself home. I wasn’t in a good place at all. Yeah, sure, Stacy was willing to help me, but the economy was terrible. There wasn’t going to be another job for me most likely. I had to face facts. My mom had stage three breast cancer and she needed chemotherapy, but if I had no money, I didn’t know if she’d still be able to continue treatments. The hospital was already giving us a payment plan at least, but I wouldn’t even be able to afford the smaller payments soon. And even with treatment, there was no guarantee she would make it. I couldn’t risk losing her. I had to do everything to help her. It was all on me.
Soon, I pulled up to our house. I had moved out after college, but once Mom was diagnosed, I moved back home. Twenty-five and living with Mom. And unemployed, too. Can’t forget that. The house was bigger than we needed, but there wasn’t a point in trying to sell it. Not with the home equity loan still out on it.
I fixed a smile onto my face and walked inside. I’d left most everything in the backseat of my car. Except for the pictures. Those I placed on the coffee table. “Mom?” I called.
“In here,” she said quietly.
I winced. Her voice came from her bedroom. She hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet. This morning couldn’t get any worse — for me or for her.
Still wearing that faux smile, I helped her wash up and even blow-dried her hair as a kind of bonus treat. Her body tended to be weak, and I did whatever I could for her. She was all the family I had left.
It wasn’t until I offered to make Mom something to eat that she noticed the time. “Why aren’t you at work?” she asked, trying to glare at me. When I had been a kid, her glare had me shaping up real fast, but it had lost its punch with her being sick.
I slowly straightened from having bent down to see what was left in the pantry. The cabinet was looking a little sparse. It would be time for a grocery run soon with money I didn’t have to spend.
I faced Mom. “I thought I would check in on you. That’s all.”
No way was I going to tell her I lost my job. Mom had more than enough to worry about as it was. I didn’t want to cause her more stress, more worry. But I couldn’t help feeling helpless. Helpless and worthless. Like I was a failure. Like I was going to be the reason why she might not be able to beat her cancer.
And when Stacy emailed me later that night to say she would keep looking, that she hadn’t even found one lead for me, combined with my own fruitless search, I felt even more helpless.
What was I going to do?
Chapter 2
Andrei
I was outside my bar, on the third story balcony that only my men and I had access to, smoking a fine cigar, when the back door opened behind me, and I just knew my night was going to turn upside down. Just what I didn’t need. This cigar was too good to be ruined. The night was pretty good. Cool. Quiet. Some nights I wanted nothing more than to go out, enjoy myself, maybe have a romp in the sheets. Other times, like right now, I just wanted a little peace.
Peace that was about to get ruined, I had a feeling.
Luckily, my associate knew better than to bother me and to wait for acknowledgement, so I attempted to enjoy the rest of my cigar before acknowledging his presence, but worry colored the taste of it. I growled out, “Yes?”
A stark white envelope was thrust forward. I snatched it, and the man slinked back inside, music and the sounds of drunken good cheer floating up to me for the few seconds the door was opened. While I appreciated t
hat he was giving me space to read my business alone, that he didn’t wait to be dismissed but dismissed himself raised a red flag in my mind. Who sent the note?
I reached down, inside my boot, and removed my concealed dagger. With a flick of my wrist, I unsealed the envelope and read the short note, my peace shattering into a billion pieces that could never be brought together again.
V. G. back in town. Thought you would want to know.
It was unsigned, unmarked. No way to tell who had sent it, and my man’s disappearance made me think that the person who had dropped off the note was either a possible associate of V.G. or else the note had been discovered without anyone seeing the drop off. I certainly hoped it came from a friend and not an associate of V.G.’s. The thought that someone, friend or foe, could drop off a letter unseen and unnoticed by any of my men was enough to start a rage inside of me, but that was nothing compared to what the contents of the letter inspired.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and despite the warm nighttime air, goose bumps appeared on my exposed arms. I’d rolled up the sleeves of my blue dress shirt earlier. My fingers curled together around the hilt of the dagger still in my hand, to the point that my hand started to cramp up, but still I held on, relishing in the pain.
Mikhail Vasilev. The bastard had returned to town, to my town. How dare he show his ugly face around these parts! He had no right to return. No right to step foot on my soil. How long had he been sneaking around in the shadows? It better not have been for long. If my men had grown so lax that they had missed him for weeks…I would not abide by such a lack of dedication.
My other hand had tightened into a fist, and I forced myself to relax, to uncurl my fingers, to return the dagger inside my boot, and to smooth out the letter. I tried to read the words again, but the letters swam on the page. My mind had already been transported back to the worst time of my life.
I had only been eight years old when my life had been forever changed by the likes of one Mikhail Vasilev. Memories of my parents’ death reared their ugly head. Vasilev and his men had killed my family, every last one of them, and they had managed to get away before they had been caught. The bastards. I would never forgive them. Death might be too kind for them.
It had taken me years to get over it, survivor’s guilt. I had been a coward. As soon as I heard Mother’s screams, I hid away in the safe room she had shown me when I had turned two. I knew that was what she would have wanted, what my father would have wanted, as well, but even then, as I hid away, I hated myself for it. I had curled up in a ball and waited, trying not to sob but failing. I cried as I heard them shriek and scream and attack, and then they made no more sounds.
Of course, the safe room had been soundproof, so as soon as I had closed the door, I hadn’t actually heard the screaming or the fighting back, but I knew my father would not have accepted death easily. My mother either, for that matter. That I did not actually hear the sounds did not make what I heard in my mind any less real. Therapy might have been good for me, but I had pushed through the guilt and the grief and reforged my role, taking on my father’s place as leader of the Petrov mob. Now I was thirty-two, and I would never allow what happened to my parents to happen to me. I would not be the next to fall.
There had been a clock and food and clothes and other provisions in that safe room with me. Once a single day had passed, I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to check and see what had happened. Certainly it had to all be over by now. My mother hadn’t come for me yet and I was prepared for what I would see.
Or so I had mistakenly and foolishly thought.
The carnage, though, the stench…my parents’ bodies lay in a puddle of their own blood. Furniture had been overturned. Everywhere I looked, there were signs of chaos, of fighting. My house looked foreign to me. Everything was out of place, out of sorts. It was all wrong.
There were a few other bodies, too. Father had not gone down without taking out others. I knew from the red and gold they were Vasilev’s men. Father had never shied away from telling me the truth about his life, and what would be my life one day. He never thought Vasilev would go after him, but that hadn’t meant my father was careless. We all had bodyguards. I learned to ignore mine, but his presence was a comfortable shadow. I never wanted a bodyguard, but I accepted why one was necessary.
My bodyguard was dead, too. So were my parents’. So much for the protection they offered.
Just before I had left their bedroom, I spied another dead Vasilev man. Buried in his ear was my mother’s dagger. She had fought back, too, a fact that did not surprise me. She had been the one to teach me martial arts. She was born into this life, too, not married in. It was a part of her, just as it was my father. Or, rather, it had been a part of them.
I tried to remove the dagger from the dead man’s ear, but it had been buried too deeply. I could hardly budge it at all. Luckily, I did find another knife on the floor, and I grabbed that, just in case. Despite considering whether or not this was wise or if I should return to my hiding spot, I searched the rest of the house.
A lot of good that did me, though I had been smart to arm myself at least.
The living room and the dining room were empty, but another man was lying in wait in the kitchen, his back to me as he rifled through our refrigerator. My hand trembled, and my arc was too wide. I thought I could do it, be like my parents, that I could put up a fight, that I could take him on despite being so much bigger than me. If I had wiped my palms first so they weren’t sweaty, if I hadn’t been so afraid, if my nerves hadn’t gotten the better of me, I might have been able to strike him.
But he must have heard me because he whirled around and knocked the knife from my hand. I didn’t even have time to see the gun before he shot me.
I collapsed immediately, onto my stomach. I didn’t cry out. I didn’t move. I just lay there. My father had died. My mother had died. And now I was going to die, too. That fright I felt just vanished. I was almost…at peace, strangely enough.
Dimly, I heard voices, one of which belonged to Mikhail Vasilev. They thought me dead. They didn’t double check. And then they left.
This time, I waited longer to make sure no one else was still around. I might have even slept some, but I could never figure out if I had or not. If anything, I probably had passed out from the pain and blood loss more than actually falling asleep.
Eventually, some of our men returned, and they took care of me. They took me to a safe house and brought a doctor there to operate on me. During those early days of recovery, I berated myself for leaving the safe room, but no one other than my parents knew where it had been located. And with hearing the screams that were and weren’t real…I might have gone insane had I stayed in there for much longer.
Plus, I could use what had happened to my advantage. I could twist things around to suit myself because that fear and nervousness I had felt when I tried to attack that man had been reborn, just like I had been given a second chance at life. The fear and nervousness were now power and rage.
Mikhail Vasilev, that horrible villain, thought I was dead.
But I had survived. And I vowed revenge.
And now the fiend had dared to return.
I shook my head to blot out the memories and held onto the railing of the balcony. I could barely stop myself from hunting down Vasilev right this very moment and executing him right where he stood, but I knew I had to do more than that. I had to ruin Vasilev and his family completely before enacting my vengeance, or more like as part of my vengeance. I’d never forget how I felt when I realized he had also killed my aunt and uncle and my ten-year-old cousin. Every blood relative of mine he had killed. A swift death would be too kind.
Quicker than a snake, I reentered my bar and took my private stairs all the way down to the basement. In addition to the bar, I also ran an underground gambling ring. It was past time for tonight’s game of cards. Everyone would be waiting on me, and while it might be a good idea to keep them on their toes, I did
not want to be alone right now.
My men greeted me warmly, but I had no smiles to share. I retrieved a bottle of imported beer and drank all of it before sitting down to play. After the obligatory game with everyone, during which I only had one more beer, I broke off to a side table with my right-hand men, Aleksey and Dima.
Aleksey cut the deck and dealt the cards. “What is it?” he asked quietly out of the corner of his mouth. An old knife wound caused the left side of his mouth to not move. It gave him a startling appearance. It also made him too distinct to be able to melt into a crowd, so I tended to keep him close by me.