Chapter 39 Ivan
IVAN
“Gabriella’s on her way,” I say to Yuri where he’s with the girls who are playing with playdough. “If she’s a bit off today, let her take a rest.”
He nods. “What about Milana?”
“I’m going to talk to her now.”
He gives me this stare that says sort that shit out or, and I bite down on my jaw.
She’s my sister, for fuck’s sake. What does he want me to do?
Lock her up like I did my wife? With the same end result?
I mean, Darya’s end result I orchestrated, but Milana might just take matters into her own hands. I don’t know what I’d do if she did.
I’m quietly fuming at Yuri as I head to her suite, knocking on the entry door and then walking down the corridor leading to the various rooms. A normal man would avoid these rooms, haunted by everything that had happened in here, but I feel nothing, cold-hearted fucking devil that I am.
Her bedroom door is open, but she isn’t in it, so I head to the soundproof music room.
I knock, and after a few seconds, open the door.
Milana is sitting at her Steinway, in the same position I’ve seen her a million times.
In my mind’s eye, I have a stop-motion video of her growing up, a bit bigger with each clip, the music she plays more complicated, the dresses she wears more beautiful, more expensive.
Now she’s just staring into the void, hands in her lap, fingers not dancing over the keys like they usually do.
She’s deathly pale, but at least she’s not sobbing anymore. Gabriella’s magic. But no magic on this planet can stop her from self-harm, and what’s the point of keeping her locked up if she’s going to kill herself?
“Here,” she says, as she pushes down a key and it makes a forlorn, lost sound. “And here, and here.” She plays several more, creating a warped, harrowing tune. “The notes. They just didn’t feel the same anymore, you know?”
“What do you mean?” I step inside and cross the room to stand by the piano.
Now she’s adding her other hand, playing more keys, and the haunting composition wants to suck out my soul, saying everything we can’t find words for.
“If you know this instrument as I do…just listen. I’ve composed a requiem.”
Great. A tune to accompany the souls of the dead. The mere word sends a shiver down my back because this room is where it all ended, leaving this house riddled with bullet holes and me stumbling over the bodies of my men.
Her gaze meets mine. She doesn’t know what happened in here.
She lifts her hands off the keys, presses down on one, and points to its neighbor. “I investigated and found this. Is it his, Ivan? Tell me, because if it’s Dimitri’s, I can never play this piano again.”
I lean in and clench my jaw. Dark, dried blood has stained the wood, visible only when you play the adjacent keys and look for it. We cleaned, I fucking scrubbed, but it was all surface level. There was just too fucking much of it.
How appropriate that she’s composing a requiem for him, on the piano still stained with his blood.
“Is he really dead? And if he is…how did you do it? How could you do it?” she whispers. “You were like brothers? Dimitri a son to our Pakhan.”
“And a traitor, as you know. He had half this household flipped to his side. Why do you think I sent you away?” My jaw clenches, as do my fists.
Surely, she can’t be this clueless, this naive.
“Why the fuck do you think I have that evil woman locked up in a fucking junkie’s health spa for as long as it takes for her to die?
Do you think it was easy? Knowing he was coming for the Pakhan and then for me?
Fuck, Milana, I sent the girls away just in time—”
“It would have been a blessing for the Pakhan—”
“To hand over everything we have, everything we control, to a fucking psycho like Chertnikov? Dimitri was just his tool, Milana. We would’ve been next. Me. You. The girls.”
“Chertnikov? You’re sure?”
“Yes! Sergei confessed.”
Her hands fall away from the keys and the room turns menacingly quiet as I wait for her to digest this information.
“There’re no bullets in this room,” she says eventually. “No holes like the rest of the house, which looks like a fucking Swiss cheese. I ask again, how did he die?”
She has a right to know. Didn’t I force her to leave, to go hide out in Russia when I sensed something was very off?
As for Dimitri, I always had the weight and height advantage.
I keep fit for my girls, to stay alive for my family, something Dimitri didn’t have to fight for, couldn’t possibly understand as he never had children of his own.
He let his exercise regime slack over time, too focused on arranging the perfect coup for the Fourth of July, where gunshots wouldn’t be heard over the ruckus of millions of dollars’ worth of fireworks on the only day of the year when you can get a permit in this area.
No. She isn’t clueless or naive. This is the fucking world we live in, as she well knows. Her heart still aches, just like mine still does, with the loss of a man who was like a brother to us.
“I sliced his throat. Right here.” The fountain of blood was horrifying, a flooding river gushing with adrenaline.
He didn’t have a chance. He never had a chance.
“Hand to hand combat. After he shot me twice and Yuri managed to kick the fucking gun out of his hand. It was noble, if you’d like to phrase it like that.
He fought with everything he had. In the end, it was quick. ”
And part of me died that day. The last bit of innocence scraped from my eyes.
My best friend actually did what he’d been planning to do for six long years.
That day, the world lost color, and ever since, all I can see is black and white.
Good and evil. Life and death. Six fucking years.
Time during which he sat at my table, served as my best man at my wedding.
Was one of the first to see my girls after they left the neonatal unit.
He held my tiny first-born in his hands as water was poured over her head, his prerogative as godfather at her baptism.
Milana stands and runs her trembling fingers over the ivory keys. “I loved this piano. It was my life, my raison d’être. Now I’ll never touch it again.”
She closes the keyboard cover over the keys, reminding me of a coffin. A fitting end with a requiem’s notes the last to be played on it.
“I’ll get you a new piano.” Burn this one, erase the evidence, slowly over time, in the wood fireplace in one of the lounges.
“Don’t bother. But do you understand why I can’t breathe in this house? Death is everywhere. People I knew just gone.”
I nod. Breathing is hard here if you only look backwards, to what has been and how it ended. The past suffocates you. The only way to breathe is to look forward, to the future I need to secure for her and for my family. And for that, I’ll have to do whatever I have to do.
“I can’t promise you anything, Milana. I won’t.”
“This place is haunted, Ivan. I don’t even want to know what you did with the bodies.”
But I bet she’s figured it out already. All sixteen men torched to obscure their faces, to burn off their fingerprints, teeth pulled, bodies frozen in the freezer in the basement’s industrial kitchen until we were ready, and then buried under the new swimming pool.
Yes, I want to see the Feds figuring that one out.
Before the Pakhan’s first stroke, we got wind of a coup, so we put our own plans in place, for all to see.
Paperwork, permits, zoning approvals, and inspections already in place, everything was above board.
The hole dug by local contractors who do this all over the city, extra deep for a diving board and a slide for the girls.
Extra-long so I can swim lengths in the summer.
Going a bit deeper by ourselves one night, dragging bodies out one by one and covering them again, compacting the whole lot in a mass grave.
The concrete was poured by another contractor who had taken on too many jobs this summer—of course he had; we saw to it—and only did a surface-level inspection before he poured. The rest is history.
“It’s been dealt with.”
“I bet it has. I’m never setting foot in the basement again.”
So that’s where her mind went. Good.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and she drops her gaze.
“Best you take that call. I’m going to check in with Papa. Sit with him a bit.”
I glance at my phone screen. Matteo Scalera. As if he knew I needed to talk to him. Are we fucking telepathic now? I follow Milana to the door and close it behind her, twisting the lock. This is a business call I’d like to take in private.
“Don Scalera,” I say in greeting as I walk to the window, mentally forcing myself away from the hard conversation about the past I just had with Milana to focus on our future.
“Petrov.” A beat of silence. “How is my sister?”
I watch Gabriella run across the lawn with the girls. Irisha and Katya have new sweaters and rain boots on—she must have sent Kostya shopping for them—and each girl holds a small basket. They’re heading toward the chicken coop to collect eggs.
Fuck, she’s a natural. Beautiful. And I can’t wait.
“She’s fine.” More than fine. Perfect.
“Good. There’s only one way we will honor the agreement, and that’s by evening the odds here.”
Honor the agreement? They don’t have a fucking choice.
“Evening the odds?” I say, disappointed when Gabriella and the girls disappear from view.
“We need a guarantee that our sister is going to be safe with you. If you can’t fulfill our demand, we’ll come fetch her, with whatever force it takes.”
I still, dissecting his words. “Sounds a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”
But somehow, they’ve stumbled on my Achille’s heel. I don’t have men to offer up in a futile battle. I’ve buried sixteen of my best under the new swimming pool and still have a Ziplock bag of pulled teeth to dispose of. I’m technically sitting with a tiny forensic nightmare waiting in the wings.
“What’s your demand, Scalera?”
“A woman for a woman. I want Milana as guarantee. She’ll be married to our brother Luca and looked after for as long as you return the courtesy.”
I brace my hand on the windowsill, digesting. Milana for Gabriella.
Not only would it secure a long-term alliance with Il Consiglio, strengthening my network, my borders, my infrastructure, it would secure my girls’ future. Children would be born from both marriages, weaving our destinies irrevocably together.
I’d have a whole new network of men to call on in case of an emergency or an attempted coup like the one we barely survived. I’d have brothers in arms.
Milana wants out of the house. This is an opportunity to get her out but secured in the safety of another organized crime ring.
I’d bet if I ask her now if she’d enter an arranged marriage, her answer would be yes without flinching.
When Boryslav was still around, she balked at the thought, but that was Boryslav, and I couldn’t blame her.
Hopefully, Luca Scalera will live up to her standards and expectations.
“I planned to call you today. I’m marrying Gabi this Friday.”
A quiet beat of silence stretches to snapping point over the phone. “So soon?”
“No point in waiting. I’ve seen what I needed to see.” You don’t know me. Gabriella’s words should caution me, but there’ll be time to get to know all of her once we’re married. “We can do a double wedding and have this locked in.”
“Your place or mine?”
I’m in no position to host, and I only trust my new alliance so far. “Let’s keep it neutral. Registry office in Boston. I understand you have a contact in that department. We can do it during office hours, though.”
Matteo huffs into the phone. “Fuck. I don’t know how you do it, but I’m sure as shit going to find out.”
“Good luck with that,” I say on a dark chuckle. “From my side, I’ve only one condition, but it won’t impact Il Consiglio at all. It’s to protect my sister from other Bratva.”
“Sure. If it only affects your sister, it shouldn’t be a problem. What is it?”
I have her covered until the wedding, then she’s in Luca Scalera’s hands. “Milana must never set foot in Russia again.”