Chapter 27
Nikolai
“No! No more talking! I will not be lied to anymore!” Peter shouts to the room at large.
If his men find his behavior strange, they make no movement. The feud between the Volkovich line and the Griffith is one that goes back at least three generations. However, I know that it escalated with my father. I know this because my father was hell-bent on destroying their line, beginning with Peter”s father, who had been dead for far longer than I had been alive. I don”t care who started it or what the specifics were at the start, but the man waving a gun around right now is nothing like the cold, calculated man who is the product of generations of brilliant schemers. This is a wraith of a joker, a shell of a man.
Anya is sobbing, pleading with her father, her sad eyes begging him to reconsider. I am certain that she’s attempted to explain things, to stop this, to end all of it. It’s the same pleading look that she gave me when she explained that she was Switzerland, and needed me to simply understand where she was coming from.
“No!” Peter shouted. “Everybody steals from me—lies to me! Even your damned Helena lied to me in the end! Fed me false information with her tricky little lies! Did you do to my Anya whatever you did to her?!”
I shake my head and drop my gun. It slides down by my hip, dangling from the shoulder strap as I lift my hands in a gesture of neutrality. He’s even further gone than I thought.
“Griffith, you need to listen to me now. See sense man, that is your fucking daughter you have tied to a chair right now. Do you realize that?” I swallow my pride, which is a heavy thing to do as I speak to him now. “You are scaring her—look, see what you are doing to her.”
Thankfully, he aims the gun at me. His eyes narrow as if he doesn’t truly see me standing in front of him. They are are unfocused, wild. “Nothing that you haven’t done! Took her, scared her—who knows what else you have done to her.”
I refuse to lower my gun, but I shrug. “That’s right. I have done all sorts of things to her—all to get back at you for what you did, for sending Helena into my home. Your issue is with me—let’s keep it that way. Come on, old man, we can finish this—here and now.”
He blinks, as if trying to get my words to register in his head, but he doesn”t seem to understand. He instead lowers the gun and points it at Elias” body on the ground. While he”s speaking, I mentally calculate the distance between us.
Can I reach him before he fires? It won”t take much; I”ve got so much weight on him that he”ll be crushed. I don”t want Anya to see it, but given the man”s obvious state, he might need it.
She said that he was in therapy for a little while after her mom died, but she didn’t say what he had been diagnosed with. Whatever it was then—it’s hundreds of times worse now.
“He thought that he could switch out my meds and I wouldn’t notice?! Just like my bitch of a wife thought that she could cheat on me and I wouldn’t notice?! I had eyes on her everywhere. I see everything,” Peter laughed. It is a cold sound—hollow, mirthless—that slithers under my skin and leaves slime in its wake.
He cocks the gun and turns it on Anya.
“That’s not your wife!” I say, my voice firm so that his attention shifts back to me. I try to step into the line of fire, a little gun isn’t going to scare me. It won’t be the first or last time that I’ve been shot. “That’s Anya—your daughter.”
Peter presses his free palm into his forehead like a pain has suddenly sprouted under his skin. He pounds the heel of his hand against his forehead for a moment, and then shakes his head.
“Nope. no, you’re not going to lie to me again, Volkovich, not after everything that you have done—no, no I know your kind.”
Anya gets the tape off of her mouth finally with her tongue, and inhales deeply. “Dad! Dad… it’s me… it’s Anya. I’m not mom, please…” she pleads, leaning against her bonds in an effort to connect with her father. “When was the last time that you took your meds? Do you remember? Just… just let me go and everything is going to be just fine. I promise. Let me go and I can help you.”
She nods for emphasis, but Peter doesn’t seem to hear her at all. He gives no indication that he is fully aware of the fact that we’re standing around him at all.
“Always meddling, always telling me what to do… who to be.” Peter shakes his head. “I showed her in the end though. Nobody cheats on me… I gave her everything.” Peter turns to me, but I can’t tell if he wants me to agree with him or not. “I married her, gave her a daughter and she runs off with a Greek bastard.” He looks at me expectantly, but I don’t move.
“Money, property, everything that she could have wanted and then some, and she has the nerve to tell me that she felt unfulfilled, that without my medication I scared her. Can you believe that? Scared of me? Then… then she has the nerve to ask me for a divorce!”
Apparently, he had needed the meds well before his wife died then, and Anya hadn’t had a clue. She looks shocked, rattled to her very core that her father could have done the unthinkable.
“What did you do?” Anya asks in a small voice, afraid of the answer.
“Nothing that she didn’t deserve.”
“What did you do!” Anya screams, and for a single moment Peter almost looks sane—lucid. He studies her face for a moment, remorse written in the crinkles of his forehead, and just like that it’s gone again.
“Did you know that he pushed a woman off a balcony?” Peter raises his arm to me, cocking the gun in my general direction while gesturing widely, and waits for Anya to react. “He did, baby, he pushed a pretty girl off of a balcony just because he was a little mad.”
Anya flicks her beautiful eyes to me and something in my gut wrenches. “It was more than that, and he knows it.”
“More than what? You decided that you were mad at her, and so you killed her.”
“She fell.”
Peter scoffed loudly. “Fell?! That is what you expect me to believe? Just like my wife had her little accident, right? Whatever you need to tell yourself, Volkovich, to sleep at night. Don’t worry, you can tell the class what really happened. You’re not walking out of here anyway, might as well have your final confessions.”
“She was a spy and that was the least of her crimes.” I cut my eyes to Anya, needing her to understand there are two sides to this story. “I didn’t push her over the balcony, she fell—but I wouldn’t have done anything to stop it though.”
That’s the truth. Even if we hadn’t been engaged, I would execute any spy that managed to work their way into my ranks. I wouldn’t hesitate and I certainly don’t regret it. What I regret is how close I let her get, how much I confided in her.
“What if my darling daughter does something that you don’t like? Will you kill her too?” Peter laughs.
I don’t have a chance to answer, Anya does so for me. “No. He would never hurt me again,” she says simply, but firmly. I know she believes that. “No more of this. Dad, let me go, I want to go now. I’m not going to be in the middle of this for another second. Not one more second. Let me go,” she pleads, and nods down to the bonds around her.
“I’m sorry, baby, but I can’t do that. You’re trying to leave me too—just like your mom. But don’t worry, honey, I will make it quick—you won’t feel a thing. Not like your mother, she had to suffer—I can only imagine how scared she must have been driving down that snowy mountain road. I have pictured all of the possibilities in my mind over the years, her driving down that narrow road, the look of terror when she pumps the brakes only to find that they aren’t working. Sometimes I think she screamed, tried to throw herself from the vehicle before she crashed, but she couldn’t get the jammed seatbelt to work.”
Anya shakes her head and tries to press her shoulders up to cover her ears. Despite how tightly she has her eyes scrunched shut she can’t ignore the words coming out of his mouth.
“No, you said it was a drunk driver… she was in an accident.” Her chest heaves a sob as she struggles to regain control over her breathing.
Peter presses his lips together. “I love you, baby,” he inhales sharply before raising the gun to Anya and nodding to himself at some internal conversation he was having. “I know it hurts right now, but you’ll see that this is the best. You will be with Mommy soon, okay? Nothing will ever hurt you there. I promise.”
Time seems to slow as he squeezes the trigger.
Anya’s eyes snap open and she starts to flinch like she can dodge the bullet.
My feet push off the metal flooring, and my legs burn from the sudden movement as I launch myself forward, not thinking as my feet leave the ground and I”m suddenly airborne. I twist and throw myself in front of the gun, causing the bullet to fly from the chamber and strike me in the chest.
As Anya begins to scream again, pain erupts across every impacted nerve ending, and Peter throws his head back and begins to laugh. The sound drowns out herscream, and it”s all I can think about as I fall to the ground. Elias” corpseis only a foot away, his blood still warm as it soaks through my shirt and sticks to my skin whileI groan in pain.
Signals in my Kevlar vest activate, alerting my waiting men to the shift in my vitals. Then everything happens in a flash..
Gunfire and the pings of metal drown out the other sounds in the rest of the room. Everything smells like smoke and rust. With Peter’s men actively busy with my own, I roll, coughing to clear my airway from having the wind knocked out of me. His gun packed more of a punch than I was expecting. I get my knee up underneath me, and my fists press into the viscera on the ground as I roll upward.
Peter has the common sense to look frightened when I rise back up to my full height.
The fighter in me is awake and ready as I hurl myself toward him, knocking him down to the ground. I knock the gun out of his hand, and it goes skittering across the floor until it’s lost in the distance. It doesn’t take much to knock him out cold; two well aimed punches to his kidneys and jaw and he’s out. It would only take another couple to end the sorry bastard.
“Nikolai!!” Anya screams, her voice is hoarse and bordering on broken as she pleads. “Please! Nikolai!” she must have been trying to get my attention for a moment and I turn my head to her slowly.
“Let me go… please… please, he isn’t in his right mind… he needs help… and jail… he… he…” her voice breaks and my chest burns for her.
I move to Anya and pull the tape off her face the rest of the way, undoing the bonds that were holding her in place. She practically leaps from her chair into my arms.
“Is… is he...” she can’t ask the question; she can’t force herself to say the words. I shake my head softly.
“Not yet, but he needs to be.”
Anya shakes her head, and I suppose a part of me understands. “There is no rehabilitation for men like us, Anya… your father is too far gone. It sounds like he has been going under for a long, long time.” Her teary eyes turn up to me as she bites down on her bottom lip.
“There is no prison on this earth that could hold me, it would only delay me. Money, connections, those would never allow me to stay locked up long. If you think the police can help him, or getting back on his meds…” I shake my head. I know she understands, even if she doesn’t like it.
“He and I have a score to settle, and we have to end this here and now.” Her small fists are wound up in my shirt, she doesn’t want to let me go but I pull her hands from mine.
“Turn around, Anya. You don’t have to watch this.”
No matter which form of traditional justice she chose, he would always find a way back which means she will always be in danger. The only way to know she”ll be safe, truly safe, is to end this now. There is no alternative.
Anya tightly wraps her arms around herself and closes her eyes before slowly turning around and nodding.
Over the din of everything else, you can”t even hear the two shots I fire into Peter”s head.
The ship we”re on groans, the distinctive groan of a ship on the verge of breaking.
“We have to get out of here, now.”
Everything shifts a split second later, sliding to one side. As the gunfire around us stops, I grab Anya by the waist, and for a brief moment, shouting breaks through. We”re racing against the clock as we make our way up the now-uphill stairwell. I shove Anya up the stairs while holding her with one arm and the railing with the other.
When we reach the top, I scoop her up again as she desperately clings to me the rest of the way out of the ship. She doesn”t even breathe again until we are back on the dock. My men race one by one, out of breath and some nursing bullet wounds as the ship tilts awkwardly and begins to slide backward into the harbor. Anya buries her face in my neck and clutches me so tightly that she nearly chokes me.
“Home,” she says softly to me. “Take me home.”