Chapter 22
NATALIA
Idon’t think I’ve ever seen Leks nervous, but a shadow passes over his face. When he looks back at me, he’s deadly serious.
I start to feel a hint of his nerves as I think it through. If I don’t believe his story… If there is no story and he just made that up to get my agreement to the marriage… Then the past month has been wrong.
I don’t know if I’ll ever look at Leks the same way again.
Not if my father’s story is true, and he did kill my brothers in cold blood, for political motivations.
The alternative, that my father is a liar, doesn’t make any sense to me either.
I look away from the nervous tension in his square jaw, the unnerving deep blue of his eyes. He’s ready to tell me the truth. I just don’t know if I’m ready to hear it.
“Before you tell me what happened…” I press a hand to his chest. “Tell me about them. My brothers.”
Leks squeezes my waist. “You remember them, don’t you?”
I lift a shoulder. I do remember them, but only through the eyes of a child. They were tall, and funny, and always willing to piggyback me around the corridors of the house.
While my parents were serious and boring, Fyodor and Pyotr showed me a side of the Bratva that I wanted to be a part of. One where teenagers could sneak out at night, where you could have fun, where being from our family wasn’t a burden but a kind of power over everyone.
I never did get to experience that. And for them, it was short-lived. As they became adults, my father placed a lot of pressure on both of them.
They were twins, so in his eyes they had to compete to show him who was the most worthy heir.
He was vocal about how neither of them met his standards.
I remember family dinners where my father would point out how neither of them had tied their ties correctly, or some other small details, which he would berate them for.
They were no longer fun and raucous but irresponsible and lazy.
My father had the highest standards for everyone.
“What do you want to know?” Leks tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Anything. Everything. How did you know them?”
Leks laughs. “I fucking hated them at first. My dad worked here for a long time, at the port, and he had a chip on his shoulder about your family. ‘Never trust a Bryusov,’ was one of his favorite sayings.”
“That’s catchy.”
A smile spreads across Leks’s face. “We started middle school together. So, once I found out who your brothers were, I punched Fyodor in the face one time at lunch, Pyotr stepped in to defend him, and we all ended up in detention together.”
I will never understand men. Leks is talking about this like it’s a fond memory.
“Our friendship formed quickly after that. We were inseparable. We would get in trouble together. Twins can pull the best pranks, and we were always jealous of them for that. I didn’t exactly get invites to their birthday parties—”
“Because of my parents.”
“Well, yeah, but that didn’t stop your brothers once they got older.
They’d be down here every Saturday buying drugs like all the other Bratva rich kids, except they actually knew us.
By the time your father decided they should take on more responsibility, everyone down here already knew their names and loved them. ”
The bittersweet knowledge that I never got a chance to know these people, not really, forces hot tears into my eyes. I bury my face against Leks’s chest and he strokes my hair.
“Fyodor was great at impressions. Especially your father. He would give us all these performances, just get up there and prance around like an absolute idiot. Still, no one could look away. He could make the break room shut up for a minute and watch him. Such a show pony.”
“And Pyotr?”
“He was quieter. Good with numbers. You could ask him which ships were in on a given day and he could tell you all of them, off the top of his head. He had a wicked sense of humor, though, which people didn’t expect because he was quiet. He was better at fighting, too.”
Of course there hadn’t just been one fight.
“Fighting for fun?”
“For fun, over girls, for any reason. We were teenagers. We would’ve fought if we disagreed about our favorite movie.”
“What was their favorite movie?”
“The one they told people? Pulp Fiction. The real favorite? Austin Powers. They could never stop quoting stupid lines from that movie.”
I give a shocked laugh. I have only seen snippets of Austin Powers, but it’s so… Silly.
“There was something different about them. They were like you.”
That confuses me. I’ve never considered my brothers, who were loud and confident and tall, to be anything like me.
“Like me?” I look up at Leks with a sniffle.
He’s not crying like I am, but the soft smile touching his lips is something distant and special. I glide my hand over his bicep.
“They didn’t judge anyone. They could get along with people from any background. It’s unusual, for someone from a family like yours.”
I make a noncommittal noise. I was so rude to Leks and the others here in the beginning. I didn’t trust them at all. I wish I was as non-judgmental and kind as he’s implying.
Still, I feel a little proud at the comparison to my brothers.
“I miss them.”
“Me too.”
Over the next hour, I make Leks tell me every story that comes into his head.
I hang on his every word as he describes them.
I realize that they weren’t just colleagues or drinking buddies — they were two of his best friends.
He talks about them like they’re right in front of us, and I feel like I know my brothers for the first time since I was eleven.
Eventually, Leks runs out of stories to tell. He stops talking.
The silence feels heavy between us.
The panic is setting back in as I realize that if Leks did kill Fyodor and Pyotr, but he’s also able to talk about them with such warmth, he must be a real psychopath. In the literal sense of the word.
He notices the shift in me and nods firmly, his jaw clenching.
I sit up straight and wipe away my tears, curling myself to rest against the arm of the sofa instead of Leks.
Dasha, as though sensing danger, comes to curl up at my side. I lift her into my lap and kiss her head.
“What happened?” I ask in a whisper.
Leks gives a sigh and leans forward, his hands clasped between his thighs. He speaks slowly and carefully, like he’s practiced how he’s going to say this.
“I was working that night. Your brothers weren’t, but they were around anyway.
They boarded a new arrival to inspect a shipment of paintings — one of your father’s shipments.
We had special procedures for dealing with those, still do.
This shipment, though, blew up about a minute after they stepped on board. ”
That doesn’t make any sense.
“All hell broke loose. Your brothers weren’t meant to be in that night. Shipments are not supposed to blow up. There were accusations and name-calling and panic. Someone called your father down to the port.”
I chew my lip.
“I went straight to Yuri’s office. We replayed the security footage for the day. It showed that Maksim was the only person who had been in the area that day. That he’d boarded the ship as soon as it arrived, removed a shipment, then left.”
What?
“You think my father planted the bomb?”
Leks lifts a shoulder. “No one else appeared on the CCTV. And when your father left, the security footage was wiped. No records of him being there.”
“Couldn’t it have been an accident? Or a coincidence?”
Leks shakes his head, his eyes still fixed on the window.
“There’s no way to blow up a ship by accident or coincidence. Especially not if you’ve spent your life running the Bratva operations at the port.”
I take a deep breath, quietly sure that there is another explanation. My father couldn’t have accidentally blown up my brothers. Not the quiet, strict man I’ve grown up with.
“If Yuri saw the footage too, I don’t see how you got blamed for it.”
Leks gives a twisted smile, his fists tensing. “Yeah, but the word of two nobody port enforcers against a Bratva Council member wasn’t gonna cut it. Maksim said he’d seen me on the footage. So according to everyone, it was me.”
“That’s so unfair.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
Leks’s gaze flicks over to me, more intense than ever, and that’s when I realize there’s more to the story. He waits patiently until I ask the obvious question.
“Why would my father blow up one of his own shipments?
Leks narrows his eyes.
“I wondered that too. I think I finally figured it out earlier this year.”
He tosses me a file. In the same kind of padded envelope he used a month ago to give me information about Anton.
I carefully thumb through the documents. The pictures are familiar to me, but a little off. I agree with the conclusions of the expert report included.
“Forgeries,” I breathe.
Leks shrugs. “Needed to destroy the evidence, I guess. Someone had been tipped off about it. I told him earlier in the year that if anyone found out about the fakes the entire New York Bratva was at risk.”
I nod my head.
Of course. If there’s one thing I know about my father’s business it’s that authenticity is crucial. Fakes are replaceable, but there’s always a way to identify an authentic painting. They’re irreplaceable, in this business.
“You should let me look at the paintings. I want to see them for myself.”
Leks raises an eyebrow. “So you can cover up for your father?”
“No, I’m good at spotting forgeries.”
I point out a detail near the bow of a ship in one of the photos. “See that? The color on that is all wrong.”
He nods. “We can discuss that… later.”
The pause has an obvious implication. If there is a later. Because Leks isn’t done with his story yet.
His eyes shift away, his posture straightening. As if he’s bracing for impact.
“We don’t think your brothers were sent there accidentally.”
He lets out a breath at the exact moment that I suck in one.