2. Alexei
Alexei
It’s just after one a.m. when Dima pulls to a halt in the circular driveway between the fountain and the portico of my family compound. I wonder, as I have every day since I reclaimed the compound from the Orlovs, if it will ever, truly feel like home to me again, given all we endured here.
My father built the original mansion on an acre of prime waterfront in Coconut Grove, amid lush gardens he filled with exotic flowers and old banyan trees.
Over the decades he acquired the land around it to create a sprawling multi-acre assemblage that includes a waterfront infinity pool, loggia, and two levels of Mediterranean and Russian inspired opulence, along with guest houses and staff accommodation.
The entirety of the compound lies behind high reinforced concrete walls, coated in stucco to make them look less like the fortress they are, with integrated security systems, discreet lighting, and sophisticated gate-access controls.
“I’ll wash the boat down while you pack,” Dima says, interrupting my thoughts. He nods at the light glowing behind the curtains of the dining room. “Looks like someone has been waiting up.”
“I swear the man never sleeps,” I mutter, shaking my head.
“It’s a miracle your father can sleep in that house at all, if you ask me,” he says quietly.
He’s not the only one who struggles to sleep here. No amount of time or vengeance can erase the ghosts lurking in the shadows of my family home. “I’ll call when I’m ready,” I say as I close the truck door.
“Copy.” Dima gives the mansion a final dark look and pulls out.
He doesn’t enjoy being inside it any more than I do.
He lives in one of the guest houses in the extended compound.
During the Orlov occupation, when I’d finally won a limited kind of freedom, I spent most of my nights on Dima’s couch.
Even now, I’m more comfortable there, or in the staff accommodation, than I am amid the mansion’s luxury.
I open the heavy wooden door and step inside, dropping my keys on the side table.
The sound echoes between the vaulted ceiling and marble floors, breaking the mausoleum heavy silence.
Whatever fond childhood memories I had of the mansion disappeared during the Orlov years, lost in the concrete basement rooms that served as both prison and torture chamber for my family.
I feel a familiar sense of cognitive dissonance as I walk down the corridor toward the study.
How many times was I carried along this corridor, bound and bleeding, after a night spent beneath Dima’s knife?
Six years after I ended the Orlovs’ rule, I’ve learned that some memories aren’t so easy to erase.
Smoke swirls in the lamplight spilling from a crack in the double doors, and as I push them open, I half expect to find Vilnus Orlov’s fat figure slumped behind the heavy wooden desk, the stench of his overflowing ashtray mingling with old sweat.
Instead I find my father seated on the soft leather couch, an open book on the table beside him. A cigar lies half finished in the ashtray, its rich scent mingling with the cognac he’s drinking.
“Alexei.” The lines on his hard face soften as he says my name with his distinctive Russian inflection: Ah-lyek-SYEY. He rises from his chair, his tall frame still strong despite his advanced years, eyes sharp and piercing as ever. “Syn moy.” My son.
“Papa.” I return his embrace, then stand back, eyeing him critically. “No cane,” I say eventually, when I realize what is missing. “I thought the doctor said you should be careful?”
“Ah.” He lifts a shoulder dismissively. “Tot, kto ne riskuyet, ne p’yot shampanskoye, nyet?”
He who doesn’t take risks doesn’t drink champagne. The old proverb, spoken in the language of my childhood, makes me smile. Papa grips my shoulder with one large hand. “I am glad you are home,” he says simply.
We both know the weight those words hold.
Coming home hits different when there’s a very real chance that the alternative is never coming home at all.
“You shouldn’t have waited up.” I take the cognac he proffers, even though I’d prefer a vodka. I may have succeeded my father as pakhan, but his authority remains undiminished. Even here, in the house where he nearly died.
Especially here.
During the Orlov years, all I ever saw when I came into the study was my father’s face. Now that he is finally returned, it’s the Orlovs who cling to the air like ghosts.
Sometimes the mansion feels like a liminal space caught between those two different pasts, with the future still yet undefined.
“Your business went well?”
“The gators have full bellies.” I meet his eyes over my cognac without apology. “So yes, Papa. Business went well.”
The sadness in his eyes sends a flicker of regret through me.
But fuck it too.
I am what I was forced to become the day I helped him and my sister escape the compound when I was a teenager.
And every time my father comes to visit, it feels like I’m living in two simultaneous realities.
One where I am the feared pakhan of the Petrovsky bratva, home after dumping bodies in the swamp, and another where I’m a scared teenager trying to put on a brave face for my sister, standing in the dark Miami night, telling Darya that I can’t leave with her and Papa.
“I paid the guards outside our bedrooms enough to keep them quiet until dawn. That gives me at least six hours to kill them both and get rid of their bodies. More than enough.”
“Kill them?” Darya’s mouth falls open. “Are you mad? You’re not a killer, Alexei. This isn’t you.”
“It has to be me.” I step forward, gripping her shoulders.
“I need to become a killer, just like you need to become invisible. These are our lives now, Darya. If we want to survive, if we don’t want to lose everything Papa worked for, this is the only way.
I stay here and make peace with the Orlovs. You go and save Papa. You must.”
“No!” Shaking her head, she touches my face. “They won’t believe you. They’ll torture you—”
“Worse than they already have?” My laugh comes out more harshly than I intend. “Pain I can take, Darya. Watching them torture you and Papa is far worse. You’ve been flirting with the guard on the gate for months. They’ll believe it was him who bribed the other guards, just like we planned.”
She looks down at Papa, who is watching us in silence. “You don’t agree with this, Papa. You can’t.”
But seeing the pain in his eyes, her face falls.
“You worked this out together.” She looks between us in shock. “You were just waiting until I was safely out to tell me. You always planned to stay.”
I nod, trying not to think about her out there alone, on the run with my invalid father, hunted by the Orlovs.
“I’m sorry, Darya. But we knew you’d never agree otherwise.
And this is the only way. Papa will die if we stay here.
It’s only a matter of time until they decide to rape you, for fun if not for answers.
The only surprise is that they haven’t done it already.
If we run together, the three of us will be caught before the day is out.
But this way, you have a real chance. The Orlovs won’t hunt you as hard if they still have me to answer their questions . . .”
I take a large mouthful of cognac to drive out the memories, the burn of the alcohol pulling me back into the room.
This is one of the reasons I find it so hard to be anywhere near family. The memories are almost harder than living through the actual events.
Almost.
I’ve never regretted my decision to stay. But nor can I change what I became in the hard years that followed. My father might not like the man those years created, but he’s seen enough hardship himself to know better than to question it.
“I have good news.” I smile at him now, in an effort to drive away the darkness. “I’ll be joining you in Paris.”
“Ah.” The look he gives me is sharp enough to peel paint from the walls. “I suppose I should be grateful I don’t have to make lies to your sister.”
A younger version of me might have leaped to my own defense. But I learned the power of silence a long time ago, so I meet my father’s penetrating eyes with the same opaque stare with which I learned to meet Vilnus Orlov’s.
Unfortunately, my father is rather less easy to deceive.
“Should we expect your visit to be brief,” he says dryly in Russian, “or is a more extended vacation required?”
“Uncertain.” I sip my cognac.
“Will we travel together?”
“Unwise.” I meet his eyes blandly. “I’ll book a later flight.”
To his credit, Papa doesn’t ask anything further. We sit for a time, sipping our drinks.
“I want to make a gift,” he says eventually, this time in English. “For Ofelia. This performance, it is a big occasion for her.”
Don’t say her name. Just hearing it is enough to set my every nerve on edge.
I keep my expression carefully neutral. “What did you have in mind?”
He tilts his head toward the door. “Will you come downstairs with me? I would like to show you what I am thinking of.”
Downstairs.
Such an innocuous word for such a dark fucking place.
But I don’t show my father my loathing. He lost just as much in that basement as I did.
The Orlov coup took place when my father was lying comatose in a hospital, after a stroke everyone thought would kill him.
Instead, he survived long enough for the Orlovs to work out that they couldn’t get into the vault in our basement without him.
After he came back to consciousness they kept him strapped to a bed, facing a window through which he was forced to watch his wife and children tortured.
Since my father held only one of the two keys needed to open the vault, and didn’t know the whereabouts of the second, the torture was in vain. Unfortunately, the Orlovs never believed that. Not even when my father remained silent after being forced to watch my mother raped and tortured to death.