Chapter 36
NATALIA
We fall into silence as we reach the port.
Because there’s nothing here.
It looks like a war zone from the news. Nothing but smoldering ashes and smoke drifting in the sea breeze. This doesn’t feel real. My heart squeezes at the emptiness of the whole area. How many people died? What happened?
There are paramedics and fire-fighters everywhere. They glance at me and Vera in confusion, but seem too busy to do anything to stop us.
I float past them, not noticing anything except the faces on the stretchers. There’s only one that I’m interested in seeing.
Without the warehouses standing at this end of the docks, there’s nothing between us and the wide grey expanse of the ocean. Just charred, twisted remains of what used to be here.
I walk past the emergency services into what used to be my home. Leks’s home.
Our home.
The loft has burned to the ground. The warehouses where Yuri’s office was, too.
“Where is he?” My voice cracks. I turn to Vera with a plea in my eyes. “Where is Leks?”
Vera looks shell-shocked, her horrified expression matching my own.
The knowledge that he’s dead and it’s my fault drops into my stomach like a stone falling into a lake. It settles there, unmovable and certain. The ripples take hold of every limb until I’m shuddering with fear and regret.
“He’s dead.”
I drop to my knees in the ashes where the loft used to stand. I don’t know what I’m hoping for. A sign that can show me it’s not true.
Vera tries to pull me to my feet but I stay there, casting my eyes out to the horizon. The ache in my chest deepens.
My whole body feels frozen in place. He didn’t love me, at the end. He wanted me, but he didn’t trust me.
And yet I know that I’ll never move past this. Never be able to shake this love for a man who didn’t feel the same way about me.
“Oh my God,” Vera gasps. “Natalia, look.”
A flash of hope flares in my mind.
I blink away my tears and follow her pointing finger to see movement in the ashes. For one wild second, I hope that it might be Leks.
It’s not, but the sight still makes me sob with relief. Apparently, not everyone at the port was killed in this explosion.
Dasha is picking her way through the ashes, remarkably unscathed. I watch, stunned, as she makes her way over to us. When she reaches me, she brushing her soft fur against my legs and purring.
She’s okay, even if the ashes have turned her fur to a sooty grey. She mewls at my feet. I scoop her up into my arms and press a kiss to her ashy fur. “I missed you, Dasha.” Her purring vibrates through my chest, warming my frozen heart.
If Dasha’s alive, that means Leks could have survived too. I cling to that hope and start to think.
The sight of her reminds me of my family. That my father has been spying on Leks and I this whole time.
I don’t know where Leks is, whether he’s dead or alive, but my father will know.
“We’re going to get your Daddy back, malyshka.”
I tell Vera where I want to go and she nods, her jaw set. As we get into her car again, she turns to me with a raised eyebrow.
“You really think he’ll tell you where Leks is?”
I don’t know the answer to that.
But I do know that, even if my husband is dead, I still owe it to him and my brothers to bring down my father.
My mama is seated in the living room, pretending to concentrate on her embroidery. When she sees me with Vera, she purses her lips.
I can’t believe that she can be so delusional at a time like this. Acting like it’s a normal day where nothing out of the ordinary has happened. I can see it now, the fragility of her fake smile. Like a glass-blown sculpture that could shatter at the slightest touch.
“Where is he?” I demand.
The tone of my voice must make her realize my urgency, because she doesn’t even tell me off about the lack of polite greeting.
“In the office,” she says, shuddering viscerally. “Malyshka, they are doing Bratva business in there. It’s not the kind of thing you want to be involved in.”
The way she says it makes me think that my mother knew the whole time about this darker, awful side of my father and she went on pretending everything was normal. That she blinded me to it by keeping me wrapped in cotton wool.
“Mama, I can’t bury my head in the sand the way you do.”
I have always known I am very different from my mama, but in this situation the contrast is stark. She must know that my father is in danger from Leks, and she’s not lifting a finger to do anything about it.
Their love is so different from the urgency I feel to see Leks, to know if he’s okay, that I can barely fathom it.
Yuri’s standing outside the door to my father’s office, his arms folded across his chest. Despite the harsh look in his eyes, I feel relieved to see him there. It means that Leks is here. My heart beats an unsteady rhythm, the pace picking up as hope floods my veins again.
He shakes his head when I reach for the door. “Don’t, Natalia. You’re not going to like what’s happening.”
Ugh. Why does no one think that I can handle violence when it’s apparently fundamental to my family’s existence?
“I can handle it.”
“Maksim blew up the whole port. I don’t think Leks is going easy on him.
” Yuri’s jaw clenches. “Leks was right there when Maksim blew up the warehouse. The only reason he survived is that the blast threw him straight into the sea instead of through a window like the other unlucky bastards who were still inside.”
“My papa did that?” I breathe. The whole port, destroyed. All those bodies on stretchers…
“He knew Leks was onto him about the paintings.”
“How?” The thought lances through me with horror. “Were you the spy, Yuri?” Is this a trap? What if I walk through the door and find that Leks is dead?
He lets out a snort. My husband tortured me about this for days and he’s fucking laughing?
“Tell me who it was, Yuri!” I demand. “Do you even know what I’ve been through?”
Yuri holds up his hands in surrender. His glaze flicks behind me, to where Vera’s holding Dasha. If there’s one creature on this planet I can trust…
“It was her,” he says simply. “Your cat.”
“Dasha?”
“Your father put a listening device in her collar during your first visit home.”
It clicks into place. My father was listening to us the whole time. Fury and horror mix together. Not only has he killed countless people, he’s been spying on me as well?
As outrage burns through my veins, I know that I’m ready for whatever lies inside my father’s office. I’m not sure that any fate is too horrific for him.
“Get out of my way.”
“Leks told me not to let you in.”
That makes me furious. This is my battle as much as it is his.
“Too bad,” I spit at Yuri. “He’s lost every right to dictate what I can and can’t do.”
“Natalia, don’t go in there,” he pleads. But he lets me push past him through the door.
My father is tied to a chair, Leks standing above him with a silver-handled knife, his midnight-blue eyes wilder than I’ve ever seen them.
Blood gushes from my father’s hand, his pinky finger on the ground. One look at the bruises covering his face and his swollen eyes, shows that he’s been on the receiving end of Leks’s punches too.
That’s not what disturbs me. It’s the blood staining Leks’s forehead, the ash that covers him, and the burns on his forearms. He looks like he’s been to hell and back.
“I told you she was on the way here,” my father crows. He turns to me, his pleading voice making my stomach churn. “Malyshka, stop him. Your husband is trying to kill me.”
I ignore him.
I expect Leks to be furious with me, to accuse me of coming here to save my father. Instead his lips part on a gasp when he sees me. He drops the bloodied knife in his hand and turns to me, closing the distance between us with long strides.
I look at him without really seeing him. He could have died. And I wouldn’t have known where he was. The thought makes my throat choke with anger.
He stops in front of me, a few steps away, as if he’s not sure whether he can touch me.
“Zolotse,” he chokes out. “I am so fucking sorry.” His voice is raspy and ragged.
I don’t accept his apology. “I didn’t know where you were. Why did you leave me?”
He steps closer, like he can’t resist the impulse. I step forward, ignoring how comforting it feels to be this close to him again, and pound my fists against him. He’s warm and solid beneath my hands.
He’s really alive. He really abandoned me while he went to put his own life in danger. Like a fucking inconsiderate idiot.
His hands close around my shoulders and he pulls me closer, even as I keep hitting him. He takes a deep, ragged breath, his face burying in my hair.
“I don’t care how angry you are, zolotse. Take out all of that rage on me. I deserve everything you’ve got for me.”
I sob against his chest, breathing in his cedar scent and hating myself for how much I crave him.
When I look up at him, he’s smiling down at me.
“I missed you,” I admit in a whisper. I missed him looking at me like this, with tenderness in his eyes. I missed his smiles.
He takes a deep, rasping breath. “When I thought you’d betrayed me, I didn’t care if I lived or died anymore. It wasn’t worth it without you, zolotse. I almost lay there on the floor while the vault exploded.”
I loop my hands around his neck and pull him down to my lips. “I’m glad you didn’t,” I murmur against his mouth, the familiar rasp of his stubble finally bringing it home that he’s alive. He tastes like ash and blood and gunpowder, but he’s alive.
Then I remember my father is in the room and rage replaces the happy haze that’s washed through my veins.
I pull away from Leks and go to my father, whose face is so swollen that he’s almost unrecognizable. However much pain he’s in, it’s not enough.
“Malyshka,” he says. I think he’s trying to smile, but it’s hard to tell with his injured face. The sight makes my skin crawl.
Leks’s voice is soft behind me. He steps beside me, looking down at my father in that chair, stained with blood. “I won’t do it, zolotse. Not if it hurts you.”
I meet those midnight-blue eyes and see that he’s telling the truth. After everything he’s been through, Leks would let my father keep living if it makes me happy.
“I have something to ask him, first.”
“Of course.” Leks turns to leave the room, but I grab his hand. I want him to hear this, too.
“Why, Papa?” My voice trembles. “Pyotr, Fyodor, why?”
He makes an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “They weren’t like you, malyshka. They never listened to my advice.”
He’s trying to turn this back on me, thinking that I will save him if he praises me. Instead, it just fills me with regret that I trusted him. That I followed him blindly, without knowing better. I don’t know how I was so easily misled.
He nods to Leks. “These unionists had got into their heads and distorted everything.”
The patronizing tone of his voice is familiar. I stare at this man, bleeding out in his own office, finally facing the consequences of his own actions. He’s so self-deluded that he doesn’t know these might be his last words.
“You understand me? They would have brought it all down, malyshka.”
I do understand. I understand he killed my brothers because he couldn’t control them. Because of his own greed.
“They wouldn’t stop going on about what these two had told them about the paintings. What the workers at the port suspected. Not even after I told them that their information was shoddy and unreliable.”
“But that was the truth, Papa. That was what you were doing. My brothers were right.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “This is exactly why we had to keep you safe from the rest of the Bratva. Like your brothers, Natalia, you’re too easily influenced.”
“Don’t you dare talk about them. I can see why you never did for all of those years. Because you were guilty of their deaths.” My voice cracks on a sob.
He nods at Leks. “Who knows who you would have opened your legs for, if you would sleep with scum like this?”
The awful glint in his eye brings everything he’s done into focus.
This is who he has been all along.
Even as he’s about to meet his death because of his own actions, he can’t help insulting me further.
“Give me the knife,” I demand, the rage turning the blood in my veins into icy vengeance.
Leks slides the cold metal handle into my hand. With a scream, I plunge the blade deep into my father’s chest. I can feel it cut through layers of fat, muscle and sinew until it hits his heart.
A trail of blood runs from the corner of his mouth, his eyes going blank. He’s still breathing, in shallow, rasping breaths. Not dead yet, but in pain.
Good.
“Goodbye, Papa. This is for Fyodor and Pyotr.”
He tries to say something, but all that comes out is a bubble of blood. I don’t have the slightest interest in hearing whatever it was.
I wrench the knife from his chest and pass it to Leks. “Your turn.”
“You’re sure, zolotse?”
I think of my mama downstairs, pretending that everything is fine. She’ll miss my father. I’ve never wanted to hurt my mama…but there’s no point protecting people who have never done the same for me.
I meet Leks’s blazing eyes. “I’m sure.”
He slips his fingers through mine. I don’t flinch, or close my eyes, as he tears my father’s throat open with one slow drag of the blade.
No, I don’t feel anything but relief as I hold my husband’s hand tight and watch the life drain out of my father’s eyes.