Chapter 2
Zoya~
My feet hurt, but I really wasn’t in a position to complain. After applying to a dozen places, I’d been fortune enough to finally get hired as a waitress at a local diner, and with my options limited the way that they were, I couldn’t afford to start feeling ungrateful.
Only a year ago, my life had been fine, relatively speaking.
I’d had a good-paying job, lived in a decent neighborhood, and had even been saving up to put a really significant down payment on my own home.
Apart from my love life being a little dull, I’d had no real complaints.
My job as a bank teller had even educated me on things such as stocks and money-market accounts, and I’d been living a very comfortable life.
Then everything had changed.
Though I couldn’t speak for my father’s side of the family, on my mother’s side, I’d had her, Darya Orlova, my uncle, Armen Orlova, and both of my grandparents who were living back in Russia, the United States too ‘unstructured’ for them.
Russians were normally bathed in tradition since birth, and so my grandparents hadn’t adapted that well to all the freedoms that came with living in such a different country, so when my mother had married my father, they had moved back to Russia, and I couldn’t tell you the last time that I’d spoken with them. It’d been over a year, for sure.
As for my father, Mark Kuzmin, according to my mother, theirs had been a whirlwind romance that had fizzled out rather quickly.
He’d been working as a shestyorka for the Korolev family, and my mother had found that exciting and glamorous.
However, the joke had been on her. My father had been a simple associate to the Korolev Bratva, and he hadn’t even been a good one.
According to my mother, he hadn’t really committed to the bratva way of life, and so when they had cut him loose, instead of getting a real job to support his family, he’d left us to fend for ourselves.
Twenty-five-years later, I still had no idea where the man was or if he was even still alive.
Luckily for us, with no wife or kids of his own, my Uncle Armen had stepped in to help my mother raise me, and for years, he’d helped her with the bills, so that she could be a stay-at-home mother to me.
It hadn’t been until last year that we’d found out how he had really made his money, and the shock from it all still kept me up some nights.
Last year, it had come to light that my uncle had been working as a driver and guard for the Korolev family and not for a tech CEO like he had led us to believe all this time.
He had claimed that all his money had come from a very good salary and generous bonuses, but that hadn’t been the case at all.
Instead, my uncle had been working for the Korolevs, and it had ended up costing him his life.
Granted, that wasn’t exactly a fair assessment since my uncle had brought his troubles all upon himself, but I still couldn’t ignore how he had helped raise and take care of me most of my life.
Even when I had turned eighteen, he hadn’t insisted that I go to work right away or to college.
He and my mother had given me the space that I’d needed to find my way, and after a few odd jobs here and there, I had finally landed a job with Clover Bank & Trust, and for eight years, I had been one of their most dedicated employees.
However, all that had changed last year. When the rumors had started circulating that my uncle had betrayed the Korolevs by arranging a hit on Aurora Marchetti, I’d been fired because the bank did a lot of business with the Korolevs, which had been the case with most of the banks in St. Moran.
Now, it wasn’t that the rumors hadn’t been true, because they had been.
My uncle had conspired with a member of the Marchetti family to kill Aurora Marchetti because they’d been against the marriage between her and Viktor Korolev.
In their twisted minds, they’d thought that they’d be saving both families by eliminating the bride, nullifying the union and truce between both families.
Of course, they had underestimated how Viktor Korolev felt about his new bride, and so all hell had broken loose, and Kasimir Korolev had been let loose on the entire Korolev underground, torturing answers out of everyone that had been unfortunate enough to cross his path.
Including me and my mother.
At any rate, no bank would hire me after that, and when I couldn’t even find a job as a cashier somewhere, I had suspected that the Korolevs had put the word out about me and my family, making it almost impossible for us to survive in Korolev territory.
Now, while some people would argue that revenge had no limits, my mother and I had been and still were innocent of my uncle’s crimes.
We’d had nothing to do with his attack on the Korolev bride, and truth be told, we’d been so ignorant that we had believed that my uncle had been a driver for a tech company.
Still, the truth didn’t matter when dealing with crime families.
An Orlova had betrayed a Korolev, and there was no forgiveness in that.
Even though we had managed to convince Kasimir that we’d known nothing, that didn’t matter.
It was all about optics with people like the Korolevs, and if they didn’t make a statement when betrayed, then it might give their enemies the impression that they weren’t as strong as they let on, which wasn’t the truth in the slightest.
It also didn’t matter that my uncle’s disloyalty had taken place over a year ago.
Forgiveness wasn’t something associated with the Korolevs, and they had long memories, something that’d been proven just last month when I had tried to apply for another bank teller job.
Despite all of my experience, I’d gotten an auto-rejection, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my name hadn’t been set up with an automatic red flag when applying to anything.
Still, as much as I wanted to leave St. Moran to start a new life elsewhere, I didn’t have the money.
Plus, my mother was still struggling with the fallout from my Uncle Armen’s actions, and whenever I brought up leaving town for something better, she argued that leaving would make us look just as guilty as my uncle, but so what?
We’d be gone, the opinions of these people the least of our concerns.
“There has got to be something better than this.”
I turned to see one of my fellow waitresses, Marcelle Jensen, leaning up against the counter, jarring me out of my depressing thoughts.
Being fairly new to Ruby Red’s Diner, I’d gotten stuck on the evening shift with Marcelle, but that wasn’t necessarily a complaint.
She’d been working here for over three years, so she’d been a huge help in showing me the ropes when I’d gotten hired.
“Oh, I’m sure that there is,” I snorted. “It’s called winning the lottery.”
Marcelle grinned. “I buy a ticket every week.”
“If only I could afford to buy one every week,” I joked, though I really wasn’t. Still thinking that she didn’t have to work, my mother had gone through most of my uncle’s estate, leaving me to pay the bills as best as I could.
“You gotta live a little, Zoya,” she replied airily, but that was easy for her to say. Unlike me, Marcelle was your typical blond bombshell, and so she always made good tips during our busy nights.
“It’s too expensive to live a little, much less a lot,” I quipped. “So, I’ll stick to boring.”
Before she could say anything to that, the little bell over the diner door rang, signaling that we had another patron, and when I looked over, it was to see two regulars, and they immediately walked over to Marcelle’s section.
Now, while I wasn’t exactly sure how well she knew the two men, they always sat in her section whenever they came here, but I never took it personally.
For all that Marcelle might look like a flighty blonde, the woman was smart, charming, and very good at her job.
Luckily, it was Thursday, and for whatever reason, people loved eating here on Thursday evenings, so it wasn’t ten minutes later that an older-looking couple came walking through the door, sitting in my section this time.
When Lowell Hendrickson, the night shift manager, finally locked the front door at ten o’clock, we had only two patrons still sitting at the counter, drinking their coffees, and so the rest of us began cleaning up, our routine like a well-practiced collaboration of teamwork.
When everything went well, we were all able to get out of here by eleven, and even though that was still considered late by a lot of people’s standards, it didn’t feel as ominous as walking out of here at midnight.
We were also lucky in that Lowell was very good about walking the women to their cars, making sure that we got through the parking lot safely.
Of course, I didn’t have a car, and I often relied on Marcelle for a ride home, always giving her gas money on payday, though she always tried to refuse the money, reminding me that my house was on her way home anyways.
Still, that nonsense with my uncle had given me some issues, and I made sure not to owe anyone anything.
After the patrons had left, the diner had been cleaned, and Marcelle had driven me home, I had walked into the house to see my mother asleep on the couch, and my chest ached with how worn she looked.
In fact, I could see how my uncle taking care of my mother had done her no favors now that he was no longer here to carry life’s burdens for her.
She was fifty-three-years-old and didn’t know how to take care of herself, and I had no plan for that.
In fact, right now, I could barely take care of myself with my minimum-wage job and no other financial prospects.
Shaking my head, I left my mother asleep on the couch, then headed towards my bedroom to gather my stuff for a shower.
As grateful as I was for my job, I always smelled like grease and despair whenever I got home, and it never made a difference how hot the water was, I couldn’t wash away this past year, and I wasn’t sure that I’d ever be able to.