Chapter Three
In which sometimes, seeing your father is the worst possible thing.
Current Day…
Liria…
My fingers run over the piano keys, soothed by the familiarity of the ivory surface, touching each one like an old friend.
The F-sharp key has the slightest indentation, created by a thousand fingers over a hundred years of the life of this grand piano.
The A-flat key is chipped on the edge, which is almost a travesty.
My piano tuner had offered to replace it once, but that would have been a greater offense, as if this piano isn't complete perfection just as it is.
Each mark or chip comes from a long line of musicians who created beauty with this instrument, and far be it from me to be the one to change that.
Slipping into Prelude in E Minor, I close my eyes, feeling the slow pull and sway of each note, fragile, almost heartbreaking.
"Miss Liria."
My hands abruptly stop, my pinky hitting two keys in a discordant thunk. I open my eyes to find Roan standing there, looking as grim as I've ever seen him.
"We need to return to your mother's home immediately," he says.
"Is she okay?" I say, standing up and shoving the piano seat back with a screech. Roan never interrupts my practice time.
"She's fine. I've been instructed to bring you there without delay." He opens the door as I hurry down the hall after him, grabbing my bag on the way out.
"You're freaking me out," I say, slipping into the car as he opens the door for me. "What's going on?" He settles into the front passenger seat and I see that Dren, a guard from my mother's security team is driving. "Seriously, is my mother all right? Has she been hurt?"
"I promise you, Miss Liria, she is fine," Roan says sternly, turning to look at me as Dren pulls out swiftly from the curb, merging into traffic and heading towards my mother's home in Marblehead. "You however, may not be if we don't get you home right away."
"Then why all the secrecy?" I demand.
Roan and Dren exchange glances. "Your father has flown into town."
"He… what?" My brain can't accept this. My father is a specter, a dark and terrifying man that I've met maybe four times in my life. He doesn't belong here, in Boston. This is our home, a safe place.
Mom never speaks of him, and when she does, it's with a hollow expression that's always shut me up before I could ask any questions.
Dritan Krasniqi, the head of his family's Albanian mob, is not abusive, exactly.
Not if we're safely here and he is in Eastern Europe.
He sends money and my mother is well taken care of.
My condo in Boston is paid for by one of his shell companies.
However, he's also the reason I've never been allowed to get a full-time job because it was, he told me, "Beneath the Krasniqi name. "
I know from his tone I won't be getting anything more out of Roan so I sit back, picking at the nail polish on my chipped fingernails as we get closer to the beach. My mother's home is a beautiful Nantucket-style mansion with weathered gray shingles and white trim.
Even though my childhood home is warm and inviting, it's barricaded behind tall, forbidding iron gates. The obvious evidence of armed security always made it uncomfortable for my friends to visit, even the ones whose families were wealthy enough to merit their own bodyguards.
My cousin Caroline is my only friend who understands our family and the forbidding presence of my father looming across the ocean from Albania. She takes it all in stride. Cursing myself, digging through my bag for my phone, I wish I'd thought to text her the minute I found out my father was here.
I know her brothers got involved in 'the business' - even though they'll never admit it - after their parents died and it was just the three of them.
Anything they pulled off was certainly not to the level of the Krasniqi Mob.
But surely, my cousins would know why my father is here.
Damn it! It's too late to call her, the big iron gates open and the car sweeps through.
My hands are sweating, squeezed together, knuckles white.
I'm twenty-four, for fuck's sake, too old be sweating and shaking at the thought of seeing my father, even though he is more of a bogeyman than a parent. Each step feels worse, knowing that something terrible is about to happen and I'm powerless to stop it.
"Sweetheart?" It's Mom, her voice is high, each syllable painfully tense. "We're in the solarium."
I'm surprised that she's meeting him there.
It's her safe place, surrounded by windows to let in the sun, where she grows flowers and experiments on different strains of roses.
It's a warm and comforting place with lots of soft chairs and colorful cushions and it feels like he's invaded it.
I suspect she would've preferred to meet him in the cold formality of the front room.
Dritan Krasniqi is sitting in a huge wicker chair like it's his throne, overseeing my mother's flower kingdom. I stand by the door as she rises, hurrying over to kiss me.
"Smile," she whispers fiercely. "Show him what you're made of. He despises fear." Linking my arm with hers, she pulls me over with a bright, artificial smile. "It's been a long time since the two of you have seen each other."
"Yes," I say flatly. "Eight years."
I was sixteen the last time I was forced to fly to Albania and spend time at his estate. The memory of it still gives me nightmares, sometimes.
"Bije, daughter." His dark voice is shakier than I remember, dry and raspy, like autumn leaves. "Let me look at you."
Turning to face him head on, I'm shocked at the change.
I know part of my memory of the man is based on my fear, but I've always pictured him as tall and bulky, with sharp, carved features like a hawk's.
His eyes are still dark and shrewd, but the rest of him seems to have shrunk.
His skin is loose, with a greyish tone, and his expensive suit may be well-tailored, but it still seems to hang on his body.
"Babai, Father." I force my tone to sound respectful, dipping my head slightly. "I hope you're well?"
He seems to find this amusing, giving me a rasping, dry chuckle that holds absolutely no amusement.
"As it happens. I am not," he says, waving his hand at the door.
Roan and two guards that I missed earlier nod and leave the room, closing the door behind them.
My father does not invite me to sit. He prefers having people stand and quake before him. He enjoys my anxiety as he examines me.
"You have grown up, Bije," he says dispassionately.
His gaze isn't fatherly, more of an appraiser determining value.
"Things have changed drastically in this last week," he says, folding his hands together.
They're pale, his knuckles are large and reddish, looking sore.
"Your brother is dead." He pauses, that black gaze still examining me.
"Wait, Luan?" I ask. My precious younger brother, the heir that he'd abandoned my mother for when she couldn't produce a son for him. "I'm sorry to hear it," I say insincerely.
I'm not sorry. The little bastard made every moment I spent around my father a living hell. He tormented me whenever I was forced to be in his presence and my father would simply sit and watch the cruel exchanges without saying a word. Which only emboldened Luan to torture me more.
"Yes, well…" His jaw tightens, making his face look more like a skull with skin stretched over it. "He was a fool. He started a war with the most powerful Bratva from New York to St. Petersburg. The damage done to our organization is incalculable."
No longer waiting for him to invite me to be seated, I sink down onto the big flowered couch across from his chair, pulling my mother down with me, still holding her hand.
"I can imagine how that would enrage you," I say carefully.
Conversation with my father is always like trying to find a stepping stone over a raging, black river.
One misstep and I'll be swept away in the current of his anger.
He waves his hand irritably, offended by my attempt at sympathy. "There is no one capable of holding the Krasniqi family together," he says. "My brother's sons were fools. They died in the firefight with the Morozov Bratva, the reparations their Pakhan is demanding are severe."
I don't move, like a mouse waiting for the raptor to soar over me, hoping to be unnoticed. Mom's hand is in mine, shaking, fingers white.
"I see," I say. I don't see. I don't know why he's here. I don't know why he's telling me this. I have nothing to do with his business and never have.
"Let me be clear-" he grits out before bursting into a violent round of coughing.
The door opens and one of his guards hurries in, leaning over him.
Such disrespect would've cost the guard his life in the past. My father was always very fond of pulling out his gun and shooting a disobedient subordinate in the face.
I'd been forced to watch it more than once.
The guard, a giant, beefy-looking thing with a military haircut, deftly pulls out an inhaler for my father and a snowy white handkerchief.
He takes a shaky breath from the inhaler and touches the handkerchief to his lips.
It comes back smeared with blood. Father impatiently waves the guard away, and the man stands by the door, hands folded.
Father's gaze catches mine. "You have your father's eyes," my mother always says, which I do not think of as a compliment.
It does mean a great deal to me, though, when she describes my eyes as the 'pale gray of a stormy sky.
' His are black, like a monsoon that sweeps over and destroys everything it touches.
"I am dying, Liria," he says flatly. "Pancreatic cancer, stage four.
" I don't like my father, but I still wince slightly.
I had a professor who died of pancreatic cancer, I know it's terribly painful.
"I'm no longer in a position to defend our family," he continues.
"The Morozov Bratva will absorb the Krasniqi Fare.
It is better to offer reparation than have my life's work torn apart in an attempt to keep hold of it. "
This must mean Mom and I are on our own, no more money, I'm thinking feverishly. That's fine. I can get a job. I know Berklee College would hire me in a heartbeat to-
"You will be married to one of the Morozov sons," he says abruptly.
Mom's hand goes to her mouth. She stifles a sob, eyes wide. "Dritan," she gasps, "you promised me that you would never involve our daughter in-"
"You will not speak again," he says, not looking at her. His gaze is still fixed on mine. "If you want to live long enough to leave this room." She swallows another sob.
"You do not get to speak to my mother like that-"
It's so fast that I don't even see it coming.
The guard leaves his post by the door and hits me across the face, hard enough to knock me onto the slate floor.
He's standing over me and I want to bite into his leg.
Just take a fucking chunk right out of the meat of it and listen to him scream and bleed and oh, my father's talking again.
"This is not a discussion. I am doing you the courtesy of letting you know what will happen. In three weeks’ time you will travel to New York for the wedding.
You will behave properly as the last of the Krasniqi lineage.
This union is the key link that binds our family to theirs and prevents them from destroying the organization completely.
They'll be forced by honor to keep our people intact. "
Mom is deathly silent, tears streaming down her face. Getting to my feet. I brush the back of my hand against my mouth; it comes back covered with a generous smear of blood. Spitefully, I hope that the bout of coughing that made my father bleed into that handkerchief was unbearably painful.
"If I say no?" My lips are moving without me thinking this through and that's a mistake. The guard glances at my father, no doubt, waiting for the order to punch me in the face and knock me back to the floor, but my father holds up one negligent hand.
"You do not have a choice," he says, his tone bored, as if he's discussing what we're going to have for dinner, or how rainy it's been this week. "If you do not behave perfectly and honor this decision, I will have your mother killed."
Mom lets out a choking gasp.
"You, Liria," he spat, "will be sold to a brothel and you can live the rest of your life chained to a bed, soaked in men's cum."
My stomach gives a convulsive heave, and I press my lips tight.
"There is no refusing this," he continues. "There is no disagreement. You will do everything you can to charm the Morozovs, you will be a beautiful and obedient wife. The only way our family continues on now is through you and your children."
I'm about to say something biting, like "Why don't you just have some willing new wife pop out a couple of more sons for you?" Then, I realize that he's not going to last long enough.
"You're out of time, aren't you?" I sound indifferent, but why pretend to care?
"Yes," he says. "Weeks, maybe a few months. Long enough to make sure that our family's legacy is preserved."
Our family's legacy… I think, disgusted. The Krasniqi name and everything associated with it should burn in the pits of hellfire, reduced to nothing but ash and cinders and then drowned in holy water and covered over with cement. I wisely keep this thought to myself.
"You will have a new security team here," he says, rising painfully to his feet.
The guard steps over, hovering behind him, hands just slightly extended in case he's needed.
"You will be taken to Manhattan in three weeks" His raptor-like eyes settle on Mom.
"Make sure she does what she's told, Allegra.
You know the consequences for misbehavior. "
Mom rubs her upper arm, and I remember the long scar that's always been there, stretched from her elbow to her shoulder.
Fucking bastard. She's never told me how she got the scar but I've always wondered why she rubs it when she gets upset or worried.
"I understand," she manages, still sounding calm, even though the tears are coursing down her face.
I put my arm around her, staring at the monster who's just threatened us both.
There's no goodbye, no more threats. He knows he doesn't need to make them.
We watch him leave, his back slightly stooped and depending more on the cane he's holding.
Viciously, I hope that every fucking step he takes hurts like hell.
***
Fare - the "family" of an Albanian mob