Chapter 1 #2
The train tracks were within reach. I could climb over this waist-high fence and lunge for the next train. It was the only way out. It was a one way road when you’re born into this family. Blood spilled both ways. It was the ticket in and the only ticket out.
My daughter wouldn’t see a thing. She wouldn’t even miss me.
That was a lie. My poor kid was attached to my hip when she wasn’t hanging off her aunt like a jungle monkey on coke. I really needed to stop joking about death when I had a living, breathing, tiny human relying on me to part the sea for her.
It wasn’t like I wanted to die. I didn’t want to be here, but I didn’t want to die. The world was terrifying, and I wished I could jump into a rocket ship and disappear into the stars.
I was too lost in my thoughts to notice Papa grabbed a jacket off a tombstone beside me.
I recognized those worn-down gold stars instantly.
The giant embroidered Q on the back tugged at my heart.
The blood stain on the tail of the letter wasn’t noticeable any longer, but the small tear in its useless belt remained.
“I believe this officially belongs to you now.” Papa smirked.
I didn’t want that shit, not now. We were at his damn funeral! We rushed him into the ground and now we were rushing him out of our lives. Without taking a moment to grieve, Papa was handing me Uncle Dominik’s jacket.
Replaced. Moved on. That’s how it worked in our family.
Papa pushed the leather jacket into my frozen hands.
“Take it.” His smile twisted my stomach into knots.
Without a word, I curled my fingers around the worn leather. He let me wear it a few times before, but I always opted for mine out of respect when Dominik wasn’t shoving his coat into my face.
“I don’t think it’s right for me to wear it,” I heard myself mumble.
His brows bunched together. That stupid crease across his face dove into the scar a gun left behind. It was barely noticeable now. Papa was the one man in this family who never saw scars as trophies.
And for a man in his position, that was odd.
There weren’t many things I could say were odd coming from a family as demented as mine. We swore part of our souls to Satan, for fuck’s sake.
“I don’t remember asking if you wanted to wear the jacket.” His matter-of-fact voice pushed me closer to the fence. Where the hell was a train when I needed one? “You’re becoming one of us now. Your uncle wanted you to take his place.”
At that, I laughed, and my head shook back and forth violently. My hand dropped to my side, tightly holding the neck of the jacket as it fell to the murky grass at my feet.
“One of you?” I stepped forward. “I thought I already?—”
“Fuck, Eleanor.” He grinned, smacking my arm. “You know there’s more to being in our family than getting a few tattoos and seeming tough.”
“I trained?—”
“And you’ll need that training.”
“I have a child,” I forcefully reminded him. “A three-year-old daughter! Three!”
“Your mother has?—”
“I have a child.”
“You are my child.” Papa stepped into my space. “That alone puts you in line for work I need done, Eleanor.”
I tilted my chin back and glared at him.
“You’re eighteen now.” He rocked his jaw. “Your sister’s gone. Your uncle’s gone. It’s time. You’re ready. Show me you’re ready.”
We were too alike. I wish he hadn’t raised me to be a replica of himself. When I hated him, I hated myself. There were countless times I was angered by his actions, only to turn around and hate what I saw in the mirror. I was no different from him.
At one point, I thought being a female would save me from some of the fucked-up shit he had planned for me. Unfortunately, I learned Papa was quick to adjust to new environments. When I showed less interest in men, though he was upset, he was also ready to shove me further into his world.
You’d think they’d come up with a better name than Eleanor if they were going to bust their empty brains thinking so hard about my future.
“I don’t?—”
My head rocked to the left as he slapped me hard enough to prick the side of my face with hundreds of tiny needles.
I don’t need to raise my eyes from the tombstone beside us to know Papa’s staring at me.
His green eyes stabbed like a sharpened knife into the side of my face while his hands tugged at his slacks.
If he was going to really hit me, he would have done it when he had the chance, not given me a baby slap.
Papa was impulsive and erratic. His anger guided him over any other emotions.
That’s why he was the avtoritet. Authority.
I learned the hard way what an authority was capable of.
I grew up speaking Russian and English interchangeably.
I picked up a few other languages along the way, but that was all business.
An authority was a captain, a territorial boss, like a caporegime in Italian crime families.
My father had become the captain of our jurisdiction.
Mom once slipped and told me it was one of the few reasons Papa married into the family.
He stuck us with a stupid last name and a dumber life sentence chained to the crimes of two Russian families.
His parents were promised money, Papa was promised high star opportunities, and my grandfather was promised loyalty. An arrangement for fools.
In my heart, I believed my mother would let him go with some encouragement. She was a member of the family, after all. It took strength to swallow being initiated.
“I’m down a torpedo, Eleanor,” Papa reminded me. “Puts me in a tough spot with all these contracts coming up. I got an important one coming up.”
There was a man here, underneath us, in the ground. He was under our feet, wondering why the hell we were talking so openly about plans to kill someone.
Kill someone. Fuck. I thought I could avoid this shit again.
“I can’t go back to juvie,” I said, my eyes wandering over the train tracks. “It was hard enough last time. They . . . they nearly stuck me with crimes I didn’t even do, Papa! Everyone knows I’m with the mob.”
“Ah, Zaya.” Bunny Rabbit.
His big palms cradled my cheeks as his lips curled into a devilish smile, shaking my head lightly.
“I told you I would take care of it, didn’t I?” He chuckled. “Didn’t your papa take care of that pesky ankle monitor?”
“My patrol officer knows, Papa. If I get involved with anything, he’s going to know,” I reminded him. I craned my head to get a better view at Dominik’s jacket. “I’m . . . I’m not making any hits and risking Estelle. I’m sorry, but no. Hire Oscar.”
“Oscar’s a loose cannon.” Papa scoffed and threw his head back, as if the idea was beyond humorous.
“So am I,” I huffed.
He shook his head with a stiff neck. I hated the way he gawked at me—his lips tugged down, eyes dull of concern for my daughter’s safety, as if he couldn’t believe I’d feel such a way. I took everything I said back—he didn’t give two shits about me or his grandchild if it kept his business in gear.
Papa leaned back against the tombstone of the unlucky man below us.
I took a step back into the iron fencing, disgusted by his actions.
We were feet apart, and still, he held me by the invisible chain around my neck.
The leather jacket hung over the side of the fence as I leaned back into the rust, my gloves protecting my porcelain fingers.
“Here’s the deal. I got word an old friend is coming into town.” He nodded his head over my shoulder. “See that trailer over there?”
Hesitantly, I turned my head and spotted the towing trailer. Someone had parked it in the alleyway between two of the oldest houses in Cross Key Grove.
I didn’t understand why we decided to gather out in the open within Coven. We buried Dominik apart from his mother in Murdafest. It was mindlessly inhumane to separate them, but I had a twitching intuition Papa was about to tell me why.
“My old friend knows that Kane cop. Word is, he’s moving into the Groves.”
And there it was.
I shouldn’t have put it past him. He was low, a man of no morals and sick in the head. Dominik deserved to rest in peace with his family and friends, but instead, he was buried beside some man and woman he didn’t know, a few hundred yards from Leo’s perfectly tended gravestone.
My eyes fluttered over to the stone for a fleeting moment before returning to inspect the trailer. A tool belt hung off the front rail where the hitch was unhooked from a white work truck on the curb. The truck’s tire was half on the grass before the low sidewalk.
Part of me wanted to tell him to fuck off and go about my day before school started back up, but that’d be absurd. If I even imagined denying his wishes, I’d risk my daughter more than my stupid choices already had.
She was the one thing keeping me from crawling inside myself and giving up. Estelle was the best damn mistake I’d ever made. I had to protect her, even if it meant playing into his bullshit and striking against my own morals.
“He’s got a daughter your age.” Papa rolled his eyes and made his staring at the house painfully obvious. “Sweet girl. Seventeen, with a love for old things. I happened to remember, like the great father I am, that you love old things.”
I scanned his wrinkled forehead and crossed my arms over my chest. “Not all old things.”
“You’re going to put a tracker on her car.
When it’s time to move in, I’ll let you know when to take it to the shop and .
. . deal with the girl.” Papa used his pinky to pick at something in his teeth, digging his fingernail in as I rolled my eyes.
“You’ll make some money. I’ll work on making your record go away. Estelle and you will be happy.”
My shoes scuffed in the loose grass. Deal with the girl. I didn’t like the sound of that. It could mean anything coming from my father. The water sloshed as the tip of my combat boots manipulated the goopy mud hidden within the yellowing blades.
“Eleanor.”