Chapter 55 Alison
ALISON
When we arrived back at the mansion, it was almost five in the morning.
I was wet-haired, wrapped in a blanket, and smelled of lake water, and all I wanted to do was collapse.
But Mikhail ushered us towards the dining room.
Really? A war council, now? Can’t it wait until morning?
And Gennadiy seemed to agree: he wouldn’t let go of my hand and kept glancing towards the hallway and the stairs, as if he really needed to get me alone.
Mikhail circled the table, pouring a vodka for each of his nephews in turn and clapping them on the shoulder.
It was obvious his family meant the world to him.
But why doesn’t he have a wife or children of his own, I wondered.
His dogs went with him in a kind of furry entourage, surrounding each nephew with woofing affection, paws on shoulders, and furry heads butting up for head scratches.
Mikhail poured vodka for Gennadiy. For Valentin.
Then for Radimir, who was sitting there holding hands with Bronwyn while he spoke to her in a low voice.
She seemed to be flipping between flushing at whatever he was saying to her, and throwing worried looks at Gennadiy, Valentin, and me, maybe wondering what if it had been Radimir who nearly died tonight?
Mikhail started to pour a shot for her, but she shook her head.
I thought Mikhail was done, but then he circled around the table, put a glass in front of me, and poured a shot into it.
I looked around in shock. Radimir looked up at the wall, at the notes and phone records, and map, all the work I’d done to find Grushin.
And then he looked at me, pale and half-drowned.
..and nodded somberly. The others were nodding, too.
They trusted me. Accepted me. I felt myself choking up.
They all raised their glasses, and I slowly raised mine, too.
“Welcome to the family,” said Radimir.
I felt my eyes prickling and quickly knocked back the shot to cover myself.
I expected it to burn, but it was smooth, like liquid ice with a flame frozen inside.
Apparently, I’d never had the good stuff.
Then Mikhail’s dogs surrounded me, and any tears were hidden by a rush of furry heads butting my legs, wet noses in my hands, and tongues licking my cheeks.
When I’d given out an amount of head scratches and ruffles the dogs deemed sufficient, and they’d padded back to Mikhail, I explained what I’d seen at the warehouse.
“Grushin isn’t smuggling goods, he’s smuggling people.
” I hesitated. “I thought it was sex trafficking, but...there were men. And a child. I don’t get it.
It can’t be for labor, the money doesn’t come close to adding up. ”
Radimir nodded. “Life is cheap. A person is worth thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Not millions.”
“Ransom?” asked Bronwyn. “Could they be hostages?”
I thought back to the people I’d seen. “Going by their clothes, they didn’t look like they were from rich families.
Even if they were, why would he be moving them from Russia to the US?
” I sighed. “I asked my hacker friend to check the head of the gaming board’s bank account.
She didn’t find any bribes. In fact, he could have done with a bribe; his wife’s hospital bills had almost cleared him out. ”
“Maybe Grushin blackmailed him,” said Radimir.
Mikhail snorted. “I told you, the man’s a Boy Scout. He doesn’t have any dirty secrets.”
“Maybe Grushin threatened his family, then, like he did with Yakov,” I said.
But it didn’t sound right. It was one thing to threaten a gangster, who couldn’t go to the police.
This guy was a respectable, high-up official.
I looked at the web of information on the wall, feeling the case pulling me in.
“There’s something we’re missing,” I muttered.
“And it can wait until morning,” said Gennadiy. “You need to sleep.” And he stood up.
I started to argue and then caught myself.
He was right. And he was—I melted inside—he was looking after me, just as I’d looked after him.
I nodded goodbye to everyone and let him lead me up the stairs to his bedroom.
He took my hands in his and turned me to face him.
There was a look on his face I’d never seen before. What’s going on?
He squeezed my hands, struggling to find the words. “I am...violently in love with you. Even when we were enemies, all I could think about was having you. Now I can’t imagine a life without you in it.”
The words, carved into weighty, silken ice by his accent, resonated through me.
The fragile, silvery filigree that had been growing inside me for months vibrated and sang.
I tried to answer, but I didn’t have the words, and I wouldn’t have been able to get them past the lump in my throat anyway. I just nodded hard.
“I’m…” He gave a long sigh, and when he spoke, I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound more Russian.
“I am not used to this.” He gestured between us.
“And even less used to talking. But…” He took a deep breath.
“I want to tell you why I’m angry. Why I can’t stop.
Because I’ve realized there’s only one thing that scares me more than facing this, and that’s losing you. ”
I nodded and guided him to the bed. He sat on the edge, and I knelt behind him, my arms around him as I listened.
He told me what happened when they were kids, when Radimir was fifteen, Gennadiy fourteen, and Valentin twelve.
How their father, a good man, had tried to expose corruption in the Russian government, and one of his co-workers, a man called Olenev, had stabbed him to death to silence him.
And then he’d framed the three brothers for their father’s murder, and with the help of a corrupt prosecutor, had them sent to a brutal borstal in Vladivostok.
All three of them were tortured, starved, and beaten by the staff for three years.
I got it, then. Why the Aristovs hated the justice system so much, why they’d chosen to live outside it. No wonder Gennadiy had hated me...just as I’d hated gangsters.
“When our mother tried to visit us,” Gennadiy said, his voice shaking, “the warden raped her. When she was dying of cancer, we weren’t even allowed to say goodbye.”
I remembered the two of us holding each other beside Master Sun’s grave, and I pressed myself to him, hugging him tight. “That’s terrible,” I told him.
He nodded stiffly. “But it wasn’t the worst thing that happened to us.”
He turned his head to look at me, our faces only a few inches apart.
We were close enough that he could speak in a murmur, and I think that was the only reason he could get the words out.
But we were so close, I could see every bit of pain in those pale gray eyes, and it was absolutely heartbreaking.
“It wasn’t just the guards,” he told me.
“The other kids were all violent offenders. There was one, called Svetoslav, eighteen, a big tattooed piece of shit, who hated me as soon as he met me. He tried to break me from the very first day. He didn’t just want to hurt me; he wanted me to crawl to him.
But I wouldn’t give in. Our father—” His voice cracked.
“Our father always told us that if you lose your dignity, you have nothing. So I wouldn’t give in, even when he beat me almost to death.
So, after a few months, Svetoslav found another way. ”
He swallowed. “They came for me after lights out. Dragged me to someone’s cell.
I thought they were going to kill me.” He closed his eyes for a second.
“I wish...I wish they had killed me. But they locked me in there, alone. Then Svetoslav struts around the corner and I assume he’s there to beat me.
I stand tall. And then I see he’s dragging Valentin. ”
I could hear Gennadiy’s breathing speeding up as decades-old panic resurfaced.
“I start trying to talk to Svetoslav. Telling him that it’s okay, I’ll bow down to him, to not take it out on Valentin.
But he just ignores me. He drags Valentin into the cell next to mine.
I can see them through the bars, but I can’t reach them.
Valentin’s trying to fight; he’s being brave, but he’s only twelve.
I start pleading with Svetoslav not to beat him, saying he’s just a kid, but he ignores me again. ”
Gennadiy stopped. Closed his eyes again. The room went silent.
“And then,” Gennadiy said, his voice like a wire drawn too tight, “Svetoslav starts pulling Valentin’s clothes off.”
I felt my stomach drop through the floor.
“I scream no,” said Gennadiy. “I keep screaming it and screaming it, until my throat is raw. But Svetoslav doesn’t stop.
I promise to do anything he wants. I tell him I’ll bow down to him, I’ll be his fucking slave.
I say...I say do it to me, instead. But Svetoslav isn’t interested anymore.
He wants me to see what happens when I defy him.
He wants me to be an example to all the other kids: don’t be proud, or this will happen to someone you care about. ”
Gennadiy’s face had gone pale, and his eyes were distant. He was there. I tightened my arms around him, rubbed him gently, trying to anchor him here, in the present.
“Valentin’s screaming,” said Gennadiy. “Screaming in pain and... screaming for me to help him. And I’m standing pressed against the bars, reaching into their cell, fucking clawing for Svetoslav, but I can’t reach. I can’t help him. I can’t help my baby brother.”
He wasn’t crying. I think he was too focused on struggling through the story to cry. I was crying for both of us, silent tears coursing down my cheeks.
“I killed him,” said Gennadiy. “A week later, I got Svetoslav alone in the showers, and I broke his fucking neck. But it didn’t change anything.
” He met my eyes, and the pain in his face was beyond anything I’d ever seen.
“I let it happen, Alison. I let it happen to my baby brother. I was six feet away, and I couldn’t stop it. ”
He hiccoughed and sniffed, and now the tears did come, flooding his eyes and spilling over, and I clutched him tight. “It wasn’t your fault,” I told him gently. “It wasn’t.”
I kept holding him, and after a while, I felt his body ease a little. But when he drew back so that he could look at me, the pain in his eyes was still there. “I’ve told myself that so many times. But it doesn’t help.”
I nodded slowly. “Maybe what you need is to talk about it with Valentin.”
Gennadiy’s eyes went wide with horror. Then he shook his head fiercely.
“It might help, even though it’s been a long time. What did he say when it happened?” I asked.
Gennadiy looked away.
I frowned. “You didn’t talk about it?” Then, with dawning horror, “You’ve never talked about it?!”
Gennadiy scowled. “We don’t talk about things like that.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant men or Russians, or Bratva. Probably all three. “Gennadiy…” I took his face between my hands. “Listen to me. You have to.” He tried to look away, but I wouldn’t let him. “This has been eating you up since you were a teenager, and probably eating him up, too!”
He tore out of my hands and marched away across the room.
I watched his muscled back rise and fall as he fumed.
He shook his head, trying to deny it. Eventually, he turned back to me.
“I never thought I’d trust a cop,” he muttered.
“But I trust you.” He rubbed at his stubble. “This is really what I need to do?”
“Yes,” I said firmly.
He blew out a long breath. And nodded. Then he came back to the bed and pulled me into his arms. We were both exhausted, and as soon as he lay back on the bed and his chest became my pillow, I felt sleep descending like a blanket made of lead.
As we drifted off, he stroked my hair. I glanced up at him, and I could see him frowning, thinking.
I hadn’t freed him of the guilt, not yet. But for the first time, he had a plan.