Chapter 40
There’s times in life where I’ve experienced true happiness. Being officially inducted into the Cosa Nostra; Serafina’s birth, despite how she came to be; and every moment spent with her and Madre.
There’s also times where the horrors got too intense. When my father carried Madre back into the Mancini villa and her tormented screams painted the walls with a sound I’ve yet to run from. When I witnessed Padre’s death at the hand of the same man who destroyed my mother’s soul.
This moment doesn’t fall into either category. Instead, it’s right down the centre, straddling the line of good and bad, a dream and a nightmare. This is revenge exactly as I’ve always envisioned. When tearing apart the Bratva from the inside out is as good as murdering every one of them. On the flip side, this is also pain. Horrible suffering that I’m dredging up when it changes nothing of Vanessa’s fate.
From her spot across the room, she sways, stumbling back a step until the footboard keeps her upright. It’s a similar place to where I found her last night, passed out with her neck bent at an awkward angle. I should have let her deal with the discomfort in the morning instead of going against every shred of logic and carrying her to the mattress, which she stripped and tore from my bed frame. Laid her amongst her throne of destruction.
“Tell me then.” Her gentle command weaves its way into my heart, lodging there until it’d be impossible to consider any other course of action.
“The Bratva and Cosa Nostra have been in a battle for some time. Long before either of us were born. Hell, I think our fathers inherited the history of hatred and continued it. Couldn’t begin to tell you why because I honestly have no clue. A woman? Land? Trading goods? Who knows.” I shrug because past reasons might have influenced her father’s decisions but different ones decided mine.
Vanessa’s slowly nodding. “Yeah, that’s the only history my people dug up when looking into the Cosa Nostra. Nothing recent, though.”
“It’s purposeful you didn’t. Anyway, whatever round of battling our fathers were on, mine started it. Or, continued it.” A decision I wish he never made because if he didn’t, none of what came after would have occurred.
Vanessa remains quiet, which says more than words could convey.
“My father sent soldiers into Moscow and shot up one of his bars, taking out both civilians and Bratva soldiers. Not sure why that particular place. He only told me he knew your father’s emotional investment in it, so he felt it would do the most damage.”
“I know the bar,” she interrupts, nodding. “He never spoke about what happened to it, and truthfully, I never asked. It was a sore subject for him because it was the place he and my mother first met, after their arranged engagement. He bought it after their wedding. Someone in your organization must have learned of his attachment to it.”
Life for a life. If Padre destroyed the place that held Ursin’s earliest memories of his late wife, then Ursin decided my mother was the best revenge he could get.
“A few weeks later,” I continue, “your father led an attack on this place. Stole my mother right from her bed and took her to Russia.”
Vanessa’s face whitens.
“He kept her for a few days, but it was a few too many. The destruction was done. The horror was lived. And my mother returned an abused, changed woman, raped by your father. A month passed before she learned she was pregnant, and it threw the entire organization into chaos. The child was either a bastard of an enemy,” I quote words said by others that I overheard as a nine-year-old boy, “or a potential Cosa Nostra heir. All came down to the timing of a few days’ difference.” I grimace. “She insisted on keeping the child, no matter the outcome, even when her own family and mio padre pleaded with her to not. She didn’t listen, and everyone turned against her.” I look down at my feet, despising the next two words. “Including him.”
My father wasn’t like Ursin Volkov. He was never abusive to Madre. Never cruel. But he was a cold-hearted capo and it was a generational trait from his father, his father’s father, and so on. He strived for the best organization and lost a lot the day his wife was taken from him. More, when she was returned, but his biggest fault—one even I recognized then—was that he didn’t understand that Madre had more stolen from her than he ever would.
“My sister was the only good that came from your father’s violation. Once Madre gave birth, it was easy to tell from physical traits alone whose DNA was in her. Padre kind of…lost it.” I pause, considering how to phrase the scenes I observed through a child’s eyes. “He couldn’t see past what happened. Couldn’t see past his own role. Stopped viewing my mother as the woman he was in love with.”
His love for her ensured she was set up and cared for in the smaller villa in Ostia, protected from everyone and everything, including herself, but his greater love for his role separated them.
In some ways, what he did was worse than even Ursin’s crimes. Abandonment by the one person who should have been by her for better or for worse was a pill she never quite swallowed, even up to his death.
“They divorced?”
I shake my head. “For her protection and good name, they remained wed, but he moved her out after the birth. Besides, she wanted nothing to do with the Cosa Nostra anymore. Simply being in her bedroom traumatized her, so it was probably for the best.” I pause, swallowing around the rough truth. “I spent so much of my life looking up to my father, wanting to be him…But what he did—how he hurt her—I hated him. Fought time and time again to convince him to reconnect with her, bring her home, and rebuild our family.”
“I’m sorry, Zeno.” Based on her tone, I think she really could mean it.
All these years later and my family finally gained an apology from hers, but it was never Vanessa’s to give. And not mine to accept. That’s the fucked-up part.
“For the course of her pregnancy, Padre never retaliated against the Bratva. I think the entire situation made him numb. Madre was torn between wanting your father dead and to forget the entire thing. After the birth, it seemed to wake him up and it sparked four years of ongoing war. But both sides were so evenly matched. For every hit your father sent our way, mine returned with equal force. I was only ten when it began, so I don’t recall everything, but his second-in-command told me that it felt endless.
“Then,” I sigh, memories heavier now than they’ve ever been, “that’s when the tides changed. I don’t know what, or how, but your father managed to get the leg up on the next round. He stormed one of our bars, destroying everyone and everything in his wake. Padre’s men stood no chance against his battalion. And then…he murdered my father.”
Vanessa winces, and with a knowing gaze, states, “You were there too.”
“Wept over his dead body and everything,” I reply bitterly with pinched lips. “Witnessed it. Was forced to kneel beside him by your father.”
She rolls her lips together, a sudden awkwardness filling the space. “If the two organizations were so equally matched for all those years, how’d my father manage the attack?”
I shrug, shooting her a pointed glance. “Wouldn’t you know something about that? Your father never had hidden records or anything of the time?”
She snorts. “Papa wasn’t one to write anything down. He didn’t exactly keep a journal.”
Figured as much but it was worth asking. “We assumed he struck a deal with someone for the extra manpower. Trained more soldiers or something. In the end, does it matter?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but one she still ends up answering, her tone muted, expression downtrodden. “Guess not.”
“He left me alive,” I continue. “Claiming that he wouldn’t harm children.”
She snorts again, looking out the window. The skin around her eyes tighten, and I wonder if she’s thinking about her own past, when she was the same age.
“I vowed to him that his entire family would be brought down. The Volkovs destroyed us. My mother. My father. Me. I couldn’t do anything for years, not until the organization was under my control. We had our hands tied: weren’t allowed to attack.”
The skin between her eyes furrow, but I skip past the dark history when Elio was Capo because it isn’t relevant to her and isn’t something I wish to revisit.
“It was seven years later before I was finally promoted.”
Her eyes shift to the side of the room, her mouth parting as she mutters something beneath her breath before stating, “You were twenty-one then?—”
“Seven years,” I repeat, tone hardening. “I was finally able to do what the fuck I wanted. Finally able to target your father, and he disappeared. Like he knew I’d be coming for his ass. Five fucking years.” My hands form tight fists by my sides, a swell of anger that’s only caused by visiting the shitty past causes. “And every single time I got close to him, he seemed to slip underground.”
Her shoulders stiffen. “That explains it.”
“Explains what?” It comes out as a harsher bite than I mean it to, countering my true curiosity. Vanessa’s expression is one of a person just discovering the answer to the ultimate question.
“He was always gone, not that I minded. Being home from boarding school sucked, so the less he was around, the better. But there was never a pattern to his...” She lifts her hands, making air quotes. “...business trips. He just came and went all the time.”
Of course, he’d only tell her he was leaving for business and not going into hiding. “No matter who we caught and tortured, no matter how many of his businesses we blew up, he never came up for long. Then, a couple years ago, spies found him in New York. We couldn’t risk an attack on Famiglia territory, but he never returned to Russia.” I stop talking since we’re both well aware how that story ended. “That’s why you’re here,” I finish. “My vow was to destroy the Volkov line, and even though your father’s gone, his bloodline lives on.”
I’m sorry are the final words that come to mind but remain unspoken.
When I expect her to fight, to yell, something, she merely breathes, and with her next breath, pins me with her crystal ocean eyes.
“I’m sorry, Zeno. For your mother, father, Serafina, and you. I understand the name I took on, the crimes he committed. I’m a Volkov and his blood taints mine. His sins are mine to carry. You’ve heard how much I despise him, but selling my virginity isn’t even the entire reason.” She huffs, almost amused, and shakes her head. “I’m not even that surprised by your story, given how sick his mind was. Women meant less than nothing to him. Do you know what I’ve been doing since becoming Pakhan?” Her words come faster, harsher. “The Bratva owned trafficking rings. There were warehouses packed with women and children, forced into unspeakable acts to be ‘trained.’” She lifts both hands into mock quotation marks. “And then sold to rich assholes who tormented them. Raped them. Used them in their sick games. For two years, I’ve been tracking every transaction, every sale, every trade. Every person out there who lost their freedom because of him . Because he was a sick fucker who made cash over other people’s misery. Children who now live with traumas that I don’t know how to fix! Not properly. And then there’s the ones who didn’t make it.” Her voice fades for a second. “Who angered their owners and are a corpse in their yards, but I’ve realized those are the lucky ones. The ones whose pain ended and they’re at peace. I supplemented the rings with brothels of hired women and men who earn a salary. No guest raises a hand to them because they know better. It’s a one-way trip to one of my incinerators if they try.”
I knew that. Some of it anyway. I’ve been watching since her takeover and saw when she shut down the rings and opened brothels instead, but hearing her side sends a different emotion through me. Pride, almost, that she’s done all that. That she’s so different from what her name makes her out to be.
But I don’t know what to think about it either.
In between deep breaths, she speaks again. “The name Volkov is defined by a lot of evil. A lot of cruelty. But not all of us are like that. I’m trying so hard not to be, and my cousin, Dimitri, he’s the only reason I’m in this role. They wanted him to be Pakhan since he’s a man, but he insisted it be me, being Ursin’s child.”
“You’re Pakhan because you worked for it, Vanessa. Your cousin might have supported you, but you did all the hard work to achieve it.”
The words slip out before I can stop myself, and a strange look enters her eyes. She blinks before shaking her head, a half-smile tugging on her mouth. I like that smile more than I should. There’s a sweet innocence to it that I could easily find addicting, so before dwelling too long, I say the next thing that comes to mind.
“You broke tradition. It’s no small thing.”
She looks at me again. The weight of her gaze unsettles me. Makes my insides clench with untold emotions.
“I can’t fix the past.” She stands, her glance dropping to her makeshift weapon again, and I straighten against the door, preparing for whatever action she might take. “Kidnapping me doesn’t change anything, Zeno. It would have been better off for you to kill me when your men invaded. After failing in my bedroom, you had the opportunity. Me and my uncle were both there, and then it’d be one Volkov remaining. Instead, you chose a different path and it makes me wonder why,” she muses, tipping her head to the side. All signs of empathy, of sympathy, are long gone and she’s inquisitive again. Thoughtful. Round three of our game begins after this intermission of truth.
“Just like I’m wondering why you’ve been playing the ideal prisoner. Other than this show of…whatever this is.” I wave my hand toward the mess. “You’ve gone along with everything I’ve demanded. Why?”
Her perfect mouth spreads into a deceitful smile. One reminding me of inside the club, when she lured me in. “Seems we both have more questions.”
“You get to ask one,” I offer. “I’m not in the mood for games.”
After the answers she’s gained, I expect her to re-ask her question regarding her fate, and need to decide when I’ll break the news to her: before or after Nero gets the documentation. Instead, she asks something completely different. Something that has my walls re-erecting and the previous conversation returning with full force, with a sense of needing to protect Serafina.
“What does Serafina know about her heritage?”
“She’s aware she’s the offspring of Ursin Volkov, and that he’s now deceased.”
“Does she know who I am?”
“You’re Ursin Volkov’s daughter.” And no one more.
“And technically?—”
“Nothing,” I cut her off, shoving away from the shut doors. “Nothing but my broken queen, Volkov. La mia regina distrutta. You’re nothing to her and never will be.”