2. Nadia
2
NADIA
T he cursor blinked on the screen, taunting me as I zoned out at the application form. Graduate school was my next best option, even if I wasn’t entirely interested in it. My heart just wasn’t into it. I liked school well enough to work toward a degree in Literature, but entering another program for up to four more years sounded like an obligation, not an adventure.
Who am I kidding?
Three years ago, I accepted a scholarship to come study here in London. I’d done it partly because I was a bookish nerd who enjoyed learning. But I mostly used it as an excuse to run away. To hide.
And now that I was a month from graduating, I faced too many questions of how to pull off the next phase of my life.
I can’t run forever, right?
I was committed to creating my own future, no matter what. So, would I do that by entering grad school? Or…
“Mail alert,” Zoe, my roommate, announced as she plopped into the chair next to me. This section of the library was less strictly supervised, but she kept her voice low anyway.
A short pile of envelopes slapped down to the table as she sat. After minimizing the window on my laptop—because I didn’t need to explain my indecisiveness to her, too—I reached for the stack. “What’s all this?”
“Old mail.” She raised her brows, curious and judging at the same time. “For the hundredth time, Nadia, are you sure you don’t have a stalker?”
Oh, fuck. I rolled my eyes, hurrying to mask any hint of alarm that might’ve leaked into my expression. “No. Just my dad.”
Zoe huffed, checking her cuticles as I peered at the envelopes. “I mean, letters?”
I shrugged. Dad didn’t stop with letters. He used the old-fashioned method of correspondence because I ghosted him elsewhere. I deleted his emails. I ignored his texts. I never answered his calls. I supposed he'd resorted to handwritten letters just to exhaust all possible means of getting ahold of me.
“And he’s still mailing them to our old apartment?” She shook her head. “Didn’t you tell him that we moved?”
Obviously, no.
I didn’t expect Zoe to begin to understand the rift between me and my only parent. She seemed to read between the lines well enough and understood that my dad and I didn’t get along. We didn’t see eye to eye. That was what I told her. I wasn’t the only person in the world who didn’t get along with their parents, and that was nothing new. However, the particular reason I would sever any communication with my father was not a standard story. One my roommate didn’t know. And I didn’t want her to.
“I just happened to stop by the old building earlier to hang out with Mary, and she said those weren’t getting forwarded.”
I nodded. I suspected as much. Zoe and I roomed together in that older apartment complex until they had a water leak and we were forced to relocate. Even then, it hadn’t entered my mind to tell my dad that I’d moved.
Not all the envelopes were from him, though, and I hated that Zoe had snooped enough to poke through my old mail to see who else was contacting me. Even though the name on the sender label was a corporation, I knew what it meant. I was well aware of who was trying to reach me from Dunvinov LLC. It was a blank name. A shell corp. Lots of people busy within the world of organized crime used covers and front businesses to hide behind.
My father did. Gregory Petrov was known to “own” a convenience mart in Trenton, New Jersey, but that was just a mask to slip over his real occupation.
Same as Lev Avilov did. He, or his workers, could mail me messages on fancy paper with the letterhead of Dunvinov LLC , but that freak was just a bigger person in the Mafia.
“And now,” Zoe said as she rubbed her hand over her face, “we’ll need to fill out more forms for forwarding mail again.” She grinned at me, clearly excited about the future. “Can you believe it? We’re going to be grads in, like, a month!”
I forced a smile while shoving the letters into my bag. Looking at them wouldn’t change a thing. Like a reminder of the future I refused to consider, they weighed heavily on me. “It is hard to believe.”
She sighed, noticing my lack of enthusiasm. “Still can’t make up your mind, huh?”
I’d been honest with her about not knowing what I wanted to do next. She interpreted that as my not knowing what I desired to do with my academics. Unlike her, already accepted into a graduate program in New York, I wanted to maintain distance from that area of the world. No corner seemed far enough away, but whatever I decided, I would not put myself within reach of Lev or my father.
“Well, the program in Dublin sounds interesting…” I admitted. Even though I’m not sure I want to work with old lit forever. “But switching to creative writing holds my interest more.”
She scrunched her nose. “Like, changing your majors?” She huffed a laugh. “A little late for that now.”
“No. Just to redirect where I’d go from here.”
“Creative writing?” She furrowed her brow more.
I shrugged. “Yeah. Editing and whatnot.”
“Eh.” She waved a hand at me. “AI will replace the majority of all those jobs soon enough.”
I couldn’t argue her opinion there. It hardly mattered what I decided to focus on. My priority remained the same—staying away from Lev.
Zoe sat up, noticing the time, and hurried to get her bag strap back over her shoulder. “Shit. I gotta go. Exam prep, and I can’t be late. Again.”
Once she hustled away, I drummed my fingers on the table and debated putting more energy into the graduate programs I’d considered so far.
What’s the point, though? With these letters showing up—late—I couldn’t escape the nagging pressure to fall in line.
My father owed Lev in the stupidest, sickest way possible. Lev Avilov expected my father to hand me over to him as his bride, and marrying that old dude was the last thing I wanted to consider for my future.
Cringing as I thought about it all over again, I zoned out at the wall ahead of me. I stared unseeing, tuned in to only the dreadful thoughts that consumed me day and night.
Since my birth, I was arranged in a marriage. I’d been “engaged” prior to the day I entered the world, and all my life, I’d dreamed and planned to avoid it.
“Fuck that,” I muttered, turning to my laptop and running a search on the Mafia lord who thought he’d own me.
Lev Avilov was over forty years my senior. The first few pictures of the oligarch showed a trim, fit man on yachts and at fancy galas. Just looking at his pictures showed evidence of his wealth. He wasn’t ugly, per se, balding but not hideous. But he was too damn old.
I’d just turned twenty-one, and the gap to his sixty-four was a heinous equation. Age differences aside, I did not want to be stuck with him.
A sadistic Mafia mobster? Someone known to torture and kill people?
Hard pass.
Besides the fact that I. Don’t. Want. Him.
My father expected me to marry this weirdo all because he had made a promise with the guy. Not me. Nothing of my doing. And that was the hardest pill to swallow, knowing my life and happiness would be forfeit for my father’s actions.
He thought he could hide in Jersey. He assumed for most of his life that he’d never have to actually repay Lev Avilov and own up to his debts. But using me as a payment for his past issues was bullshit.
If I were to ever marry anyone, I’d want it to be someone of my choosing, a man I desired and thought worthy of my time.
Forced into a union with an old dude like Lev…
“No.”
I rubbed my stomach, hating that it was tense once again with this stress. Ever since I turned seventeen, I’d been suffering from this predicament, this dreadful awareness that my life, my freedom, would be over just because of my father’s order.
I refused. Before I graduated from high school, I told my father no. When Lev sent his minions to speak with me at home, I snuck out the window and ran to a friend’s house. And as soon as high school was over, I flew across the ocean to go to school here.
It didn’t matter how often I ignored my father’s pleas to come home and prepare to marry Lev, I wouldn’t change my mind. What sickened me, though, was the fact that Lev was pursuing me too.
Calls, texts, emails. I scowled at my bag, where I’d shoved the letters out of sight.
He was coming for me.
I felt it in my bones.
More and more often, he’d been contacting me and my dad. Each time I ignored the summons, Dad would call or text twice as much to complain about how I was forcing him to make up excuses for why I hadn’t married Lev yet.
They weren’t excuses. They were reasons. And there was a difference.
I wouldn’t marry Lev because I didn’t fucking want to. If it took fifty more times to repeat that for them to understand it, then fine.
My phone pinged, showing both my reminder going off that I had a lecture to attend and also that I’d missed another text from my dad.
Dad: You need to come home. Now. You will marry him.
“Screw you,” I mumbled as I stuck my phone into my bag with my laptop. Packed up, I headed out of the library’s study room.
I didn’t want to marry Lev. And if I had a chance to tell my dad the truth, I didn’t want to marry anyone else anytime soon. I was too young to settle with anyone. And I was too young to settle with one set-in-stone path for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t decide my major, really. And I got antsy when I considered where I could work or even live after I wrapped up this degree. My life was nothing but a big question mark, and I bet the many other students I walked past on this campus right now felt the same.
But none of them are fighting to have the freedom to decide.
No one else was stuck, forced into an arranged engagement with someone three times their age. A controlling criminal who wouldn’t let me study, work, or do anything of my own interest.
As I passed a couple making out, leaning against a fountain in the courtyard, I couldn’t help a sigh. That was what I wanted.
The freedom to kiss a sexy guy because I desired him. The ability to show affection whenever and however I pleased because I wanted to.
I’d want the chance to breathe without the oppressive expectation to stay in the Mafia circle of acquaintances my father knew. I’d wish for the opportunity to pick and choose, to get to know men closer to my age.
I wanted…
My phone buzzed again, and I cringed as I looked at it. It served as a reminder that I shouldn’t have dared to concoct an image of my dream man.
Dad: Stop ignoring me. You MUST come home.
Home? What a joke. Going back to my dad and agreeing to be that creep’s bride was nothing more than surrendering myself to a life sentence.
And I refused to do it.
I tightened my bag’s strap over my shoulder and picked up my pace to reach the lecture hall. Almost as though the more desperately and quicker I ran—anywhere—the faster I could escape my fate chasing me right on my heels.