Chapter 18Vasily
Vasily
Maribel stares at me with impossibly wide eyes.
Why do babies have such big eyes, I wonder to myself as Miguel hands her over to me the moment I arrive at his home— the house Kseniya, Artyom, and I grew up in once we came to America.
Once upon a time, it was gigantic, but it’s barely any bigger than my penthouse apartment.
Kseniya keeps talking about how she wants more kids, but it seems impossible in such a small house.
But the three of us had all the space we needed.
Maribel gives me a skeptical look at first, like she’s not sure why her dad has handed her over to a stranger before a proper introduction but she hasn’t decided yet if she should just trust it or not.
She may have a mop of the blackest brown hair, matching her dad’s, but those giant blue eyes are her mom’s. Mine, too .
Her bottom lip, the sweet, squishy, pouty bow, begins to wobble.
I tighten up the grip I have on her ribs, under her arms. It’s not so much I’m worried about dropping her as I’m worried she’s about to flail or something.
“Don’t you do it,” I say sternly to her. I know not to show fear, but I still mutter, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
She does move suddenly, but it’s a tightening of her arms and legs before she kicks just once and squeals with laughter. Her little hands grab at the air, and Miguel says, “She wants you to hug her.”
“Okay, yeah,” I agree, and shit, I do hear fear in that. But I rest her weight on my chest and one hand on her back, patting her. It feels weird and uncomfortable at first, but then she sighs and drops her head to my collarbone. Seems she decided to trust her father.
I close my eyes and let myself breathe for a few seconds.
This isn’t how I wanted to meet her, but I’m glad I finally am.
Kseniya was right; I should have come a long time ago.
I do my best to be careful as I squeeze Maribel and let myself be filled with the soft scents of baby powder and clean shampoo.
I have a ton of questions to ask Miguel, an entire list to go over that will keep me sane enough to stop thinking for two seconds about what terrible things might be happening to Kseniya or might no longer be happening because...
Well . . .
The thoughts all hit me in the gut as they’ve done so unendingly today, no matter how many pills I take.
Kostya talked me into handing them over in one of the few moments of quiet I’ve had, when I tricked myself into thinking that Kostya was right, I didn’t need it anymore and might absently overdose unthinkingly if I keep them in my pocket.
And now I’m thinking about Kseniya’s body discarded like trash in a ditch somewhere.
I hug Maribel just a little more tightly, but she seems okay with it. And I want to immediately leap into those questions, but I can’t stop myself from starting with, “I have a son.”
Miguel gives me the blankest expression imaginable, but I get it.
He was already looking shell-shocked when he opened the door.
After all, he started out handing me a baby.
Not even in a “I can’t handle this right now” way.
It was so mechanical that I’m guessing there’s been a stream of people coming by, and they’ve all had their hands out to take Maribel from him, just to relieve him of any responsibilities when he has to be freaking out, too.
He blinks, tilts his head to the side, and narrows his focus so much on Maribel that his pupils begin to vibrate.
Then he says, “What?”
Not in alarm. I’m not sure if he processed it.
And that’s fair. I’m not processing super well either.
The sole reason for me to take this detour was familial responsibilities, but there is the added bonus of giving my brain some extra time to work through that ill-advised combination of anxiolytics.
I clear my throat. My second pass at, “I have a son,” doesn’t go as cleanly as the first. I stumble over it, and the words come out with a reckless momentum that ends up building onto the story. “Ana. Ana had my son. His name is Artom, and I met him yesterday and he doesn’t know who I am.”
My hold tightens a little more as Miguel continues to stare at me, but then Maribel lifts her head and turns it, I’m thinking to just rest on her other cheek, but she manages to crack the top of her skull against my jaw.
That wakes me right up. Gets Miguel, too.
“Shoot,” he whistles, reaching for her, but I wave him off. I gotta learn how to hold babies.
“Yeah, this whole week has been—shit, you don’t care about my week. Doesn’t matter.”
Miguel’s a good man. He looks at Kseniya like she hung the moon.
They were high school sweethearts, then both moved away for college.
Only a couple hours though, in opposite directions but really, what’s four hours to see the person you love.
Neither of them lasted the full four years outside of Flagstaff and away from each other.
I know Kseniya dated a couple guys while she was in college, but Miguel confessed to me the night before their wedding that he’d lied and told her he’d dated too.
Really, it was only ever Kseniya for him.
He was proud of that; he just worried Kseniya would feel guilty if she found out.
I promised I would take that secret to the grave.
Not much longer whispers in my mind, but I shoo it away. Yeah, fate— and the IRA fuckers— have dragged me to Flagstaff and thrown so much on my plate that if I take inventory of it all, I’ll go mad, but I gotta figure out how to outsmart fate. I have a son. He needs to know he has a father.
A father who loves him even if he never met him.
So I feel a selfish satisfaction when, despite the most pressing issue at hand, Miguel is spun enough that his first words are, “Kseniya has a nephew?”
Regret stirs in my chest. I have a niece, and it took me months and a disaster for me to meet her. Kseniya will walk her ass to Phoenix the moment she finds out about Artom if I refuse to take her immediately .
I nod, knowing that emotion is going to make my voice rough. I’m not trying to act the tough guy for Miguel; he’s family family in a way my Bratva brothers aren’t. But he’s teetering on the edge. I can see it in his glossy, red-rimmed eyes.
“And Ana? You two are . . .?”
I have to clear my throat for this. Maribel grumbles, so I sway back and forth. It’s instinctual. “It’s... complicated.”
Miguel chuckles hoarsely. “It always was. God, Kseniya’s going to be so pissed when she finds out you told me first.”
“She’s gonna be pissed she wasn’t here for me to meet Maribel, too.”
That has us both laughing, but only for a second. And then Miguel blinks, and I see it.
I see his fear.
“I can’t do this without her.”
“I will get her back,” I promise, refusing to entertain the possibility that I’m lying to him. I embrace Maribel snugly, protectively, as I vow, “I will find her, and I will kill whoever did this. They will feel pain so acute they will wish for death, but it will come to them slowly.”
Miguel is middle management at a boring job in a boring industry.
The khaki chinos and baby blue button-down he wears is his work uniform, although the buttons are a mess right now.
The time they got squirrels in their attic, he insisted pest control use humane traps, and he cries at other people’s weddings.
But he gives me a stern, encouraging nod.
“Is there anything you know?” I ask. “Anything you thought of?”
“Nothing I didn’t already tell Janson. It wasn’t late.
Not even seven. Kseniya got a phone call.
It sounded urgent but nothing to worry about.
I didn’t know what it was about. She was talking in Russian the whole time.
I didn’t think anything of it. She’s got a new mom group, girls from the church.
Some of them don’t speak a lot of English.
She got off the phone and said she was going to meet someone at the café around the corner.
Didn’t say who, but she didn’t look worried.
” With a weak laugh, he adds, “I was more worried. Been a lot of vandalism, some purse snatching. Stupid stuff, but I told her not to stay out too late. She said she’d be back in an hour and. .. that was last night.”
Fuck. I hate this so much. Not just that Kseniya’s missing either, although I have a feeling that’s because I’m also feeling some shock.
I hate that Flagstaff is no longer safe.
It never was for me, but for Kseniya? It was a sleepy little town, perfect to raise kids and have a normal life.
To have a quirky aesthetic without getting hassled and to feel safe walking to a café after dark.
I kept it safe. I contained the black underworld. I buried the chaos. Artyom did that, and when he died, I inherited it, and I fucked it up because I was so worried about my own life.
I never even fucking lived it. I hid in Los Angeles while my life, my actual life, was happening in Florida. In Flagstaff.
“I’m going to find her,” I promise again. “We had a shop ransacked last night; Janson thinks it’s the same guys. I’m going over there now, I’ll see if there’s any trails to follow. But if you think of anything else, you call me, okay?”
He nods, but his brows furrow. “Yeah, of course, but listen. I did try calling you. It rang through. Didn’t even go to voicemail.”
“Fuck,” I snarl, moving Maribel to my hip to fish out my phone. Nothing in missed calls. “I got some new app, supposed to be more secure. But this shit keeps happening. ”
Miguel tries calling it, puts it on speakerphone for me to hear it ring twice, then get answered by voicemail, except the typical feminine voice says, “Goodbye,” and then it disconnects.
With a nervous laugh, he says, “I kind of thought you blocked my number.”
“No, I don’t even know how to block numbers.” I want to see every single call I get. I need to know who’s calling me, even if I don’t answer.