Chapter 37 Natalia
NATALIA
Boris crosses the room before I can get up.
His shoe lands on one of the scattered photos, pinning my mother’s face to the floor. He smells like cigarettes and cheap aftershave, and up close, the broken capillaries mapping his nose look like something I’d study under a microscope if I had the luxury of clinical detachment.
I don’t.
I grab the edge of the desk and pull myself up. Kneeling in front of Boris is not where I want to be.
“I was just…” I start, but the lie dies before it gets anywhere. The folder is open. The photos are everywhere. My mother’s face is staring up at both of us.
Boris looks down. His expression doesn’t change the way I expect. No alarm. No fury. Just a slow, spreading recognition, like he’s greeting an old friend.
“Well.” He picks up the photograph of my mother outside the hotel. Holds it between two thick fingers. “Haven’t seen these in a while.”
My mouth has gone completely dry and my fingers are trembling against the desk behind me. I lock them there and try to keep my face neutral. The same face I’ve worn my whole life in this house. Calm. Compliant. Nothing to see here.
“You know what these are?” Boris asks. He’s not looking at me. He’s picked up the photos and is flipping through them like he’s thumbing through a scrapbook, casual and almost fond.
I don’t answer.
He snorts. “Proof your mother couldn’t keep her legs closed or her loyalties straight.”
Heat creeps up my neck, but I bite my lip.
He finds the one of my mother kissing the dark-haired man. Tips it toward me. “That’s Santino. Andretti consigliere. Your mother was fucking him for the better part of a year.”
The name roots me to the floor. Santino. I’ve heard my father say that name. Heard him brag about having him killed. A message to the Andrettis, he called it. A necessary correction.
“She was going to leave.” Boris sets the photo down and picks up another. “Had the whole thing planned. New city, new life, take the baby and run off with her Italian boyfriend.” He makes a sound in his throat, something between a laugh and a grunt. “Stupid woman.”
My palms are slick. I press them flat against my thighs and hold them there.
“My father knew,” I say. Not a question.
Boris doesn’t answer. He flips to the next photo in the stack and holds it where I can’t look away.
My mother on pavement. A dark hole through the front of her head. Eyes open.
“That answer your question, sweetheart?” Boris grins. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen on a human face.
I double over and retch. Nothing comes up but bile, hot and acid at the back of my throat, and Boris laughs while I’m still choking on it.
“Your father gave the order. I did the rest.”
I force myself upright. My eyes are watering and my mouth tastes like acid and I can still see the photo even though I’m not looking at it anymore.
A sob rises into my throat so violently I have to swallow it back like I’m choking on broken glass. I will not give Boris that. I will not let him stand there and watch me come apart for his entertainment.
It takes everything in me not to lunge at him. This man killed my mother. He’s standing in her husband’s office bragging about it, and he’s smiling, and I want to tear his face apart with my bare hands—but he’d snap me in half before I landed a single hit.
“Funny thing,” he says. “How history works. Your mother tried to run off with an Andretti, and here you are, thinking you can do the same damn thing.”
The air leaves my lungs.
He knows.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised.” Boris tilts his head, studying me like I’m something pinned to a board. “You think your father doesn’t have eyes everywhere?”
The blood leaves my face before Boris even finishes.
“Your brother came back from that little beach visit talking about how you had textbooks lying around. Playing student.” Boris shakes his head slowly, almost amused. “Made your father nervous. A daughter with ideas is a dangerous thing.”
I want to break something. Specifically, my brother’s nose.
“So we put a camera in your room.”
I freeze. I think of every night in that room. Every text to Luca. They were watching it all?
Boris picks at something under his thumbnail. “Found the phone pretty quick after that.”
The walls of the office seem to press inward. Every precaution, every secret I thought I’d kept—none of it mattered. I was a rat in a maze thinking she’d found the exit.
“That little hotel meetup wasn’t exactly subtle, sweetheart,” Boris continues, tossing the photos onto the desk. “Made it almost too easy to set the hook.”
Cold floods my body.
“What hook? What did you do?”
Boris smiles. “What your father always does. Removed the problem.”
Luca. My mind goes white for a second, nothing but his name and a fear so sharp it leaves me lightheaded.
“Where is he?”
“With your father.” He says it like he’s telling me the weather.
Partly cloudy, chance of rain, your lover is in the hands of a man who had his last Andretti problem shot in the head.
“I’d be more worried about yourself right now, Natalia.
Your father is not happy. And when Anton Kozlov isn’t happy.
..” He trails off and gestures vaguely at the photographs of my dead mother spread across the desk.
I jerk backward, my hip catching the heavy wood of the desk. Run. The instinct flares hot and vicious in my blood. But the doorway is already gone. Boris fills the frame, a mountain of muscle cutting off my only escape.
“Sit down.”
“Get out of my way.”
“Sit. Down.” There’s no humor left in him now.
“Your father had plans for you.” He jerks his chin toward the door. “Restrepo’s people are already on their way. So you can stop thinking this ends with you running anywhere.”
He comes closer, near enough that I can smell the cigarettes on him, stale and clinging to his clothes.
“You’re going to your room. You’re going to stay there until it’s time to leave. And don’t worry. You’ll see your boyfriend soon enough. Assuming your father leaves enough of him to recognize.”
The world narrows to his voice and the pounding of my own heart.
His gaze drags over my face, slow and contemptuous. “Your mother was stupid enough to forget her place. Don’t make the same mistake.”
The words hit below my ribs, sharp enough to steal the breath from my lungs. I want to scream. I want to claw his eyes out. I want to crumble right here on my father’s expensive carpet and never get up.
Instead, I run.
I make it two steps before his hand closes around my upper arm and yanks me backward so hard my shoulder screams. I twist against his grip, but it’s like fighting a wall.
He’s got ninety pounds on me, easy, and he uses all of it, dragging me out of the office and into the hallway with my feet barely touching the floor.
“Let go of me!”
He doesn’t answer. I fight him the whole way down the hall.
I dig my heels into the carpet, grab uselessly at the trim, twist and shove and hit where I can reach, but it’s like trying to move a wall with my bare hands.
He curses once when I catch his wrist with my nails. That’s the only victory I get.
By the time he shoves me into my room, my hair is half fallen down, my arm is throbbing, and I’m breathing in ragged bursts.
He throws me hard enough that I stumble against the bedpost and have to grab it to stay upright.
The door slams. The lock clicks from the outside. Boris’s footsteps thud down the hall.
I stand there for a long time, staring at the wood grain.
Then I sink to the floor.
One second I’m upright and rigid and trying to hold myself together with will alone, and the next I’m folded in on myself beside the bed, arms wrapped around my middle like I can keep all of it from spilling out.
My mother tried to leave.
She didn’t die in childbirth. She lived. She held me. She made plans. She wanted us to run.
And my father had her murdered for it.
A sob breaks loose before I can stop it. Then another.
I have carried the guilt of her death for my entire life. Every birthday that felt like a funeral. Every time my father looked right through me. Every time I apologized for existing, silently, in the back of my own mind. All of it built on a lie he told me before I was old enough to question it.
She didn’t die because of me.
She died because of him.
The sobs slow eventually. Not because the grief runs out but because something else pushes through it. Something colder and harder and more urgent.
My father has Luca.
Which means every second I stay here is another second they get to hurt him.
I wipe my face with the heels of my hands. My eyes burn. My throat is raw. But my mind is clearing, and what’s coming into focus is simple.
If I stay in this room, Luca dies.
That’s it. That’s the whole equation. The grief can wait. The rage can wait. The twenty-three years of lies can wait. Because if I do nothing now, my father takes him from me too.
I stand up. My legs are unsteady, but they hold.
Think.
I stuck the bobby pins back in my pocket after picking the desk drawer. I don’t know if Boris is still nearby, but I can’t stay here. I can’t sit in this room waiting for my father to decide when Luca dies.
Kneeling in front of the door, it takes me two tries because my fingers are slick with sweat, but the mechanism catches on the third. A small click sounds from inside the knob.
I freeze, listening, then slide the door open a fraction and peer into the hallway.
Empty.
The stun gun is in my nightstand drawer where I left it before sneaking to the office. I grab it. The weight of it in my palm is the closest thing to safety I’ve got.
I slip through the door and move toward the stairs. Feet light on the carpet, silent as I know how to be. Every shadow looks wrong. Every creak in the house sounds like a footstep. The corridor stretches ahead of me, the landing visible at the far end, the staircase just beyond it.
I’m four steps from the stairs when Boris’s voice cracks through the silence behind me.
“Hey!”