Chapter 35
At the sound of an explosion, Nadia drops the Monopoly money she was stacking. Paper rubles scatter across the board, and wide eyes search mine for answers.
I lean over to take her hand and pull her to her feet. “Let’s go find Nona,” I say, leading her away from windows and into the hallway.
Vadim bursts into the house, flinging the screen door open behind him. He’s panting, rushing toward me with a frantic expression and grasping my shoulders with shaking hands.
My first—and most irrational—thought is to comfort him. I slide my hand up his scarred cheek as Nadia peeks out from behind me.
“It’s okay,” I whisper softly. “I know what to do.”
He pulls both of us into the circle of his arms for a second, and I can feel his heartbeat and smell the pine and salt on his skin as he mumbles into my hair. “It’s my fault.”
I take his hand. His huge palm wraps around mine, and I squeeze a couple of times as I lead him toward a wall panel beneath a light switch. After sliding it away, I push my fingerprint against the glass screen. The door to the bunker under our little house opens, an eerie blue light shining up from the steel steps. I push Nadia ahead of me.
“Mom, can I?—”
“No,” I snap. “Just go. For once, don’t argue with me.”
I push her toward the steps and she stumbles, turning back with narrowed eyes to glare at me before obeying. Heavy footfalls ring on the steel as I look down the wooden corridor to see Nona bustling toward us, resolute and comforting as she follows Nadia through the narrow doorway. They disappear into the eerie light.
Wide hands knead my shoulders, and Vadim turns me toward him. He slides an enormous hand up my neck and into my hair to tilt my head toward him.
“Zolotaya, you need to go.” His brow furrows as his wide eyes search mine.
“You’re not coming with us?”
He pushes me through the doorway, and then his lips press into mine, hard and bruising, before he tears away. Biting his lower lip, he shakes his head. “Let me protect you. Please.”
Gunfire erupts outside, and I’m stuck with the ghost of his stricken face as the door shuts, leaving me in the eerie, steel-lined silence.
I make my way down the steps on shaky legs. As Nona lays out a board game that looks similar to Monopoly, I sink to a soft couch and let my eyes roam over the boxes of bottled water and tins of food lit with blue LED lights.
“Mom, did we build this place because you knew my dad was a badass gangster?”
I spin to face Nadia, who’s kneeling by the board game and grinning the way only a ten-year-old can when they’ve got a captive audience. With a bowed head, she moves the pieces around the board, and thank the heavens she’s still na?ve enough to misunderstand the danger we’re in. Vadim looked terrified.
“No, we didn’t. You have to have these things when you’re famous.”
She starts stacking green cards with a sickle on the back and red cards with a star. “These ones are cool. They’re secret police cards.”
Nona catches my eye and tilts her head toward the sink, beckoning me to the other side of the room. She opens a huge fridge and calls over her shoulder to Nadia. “Finish setting up the board for me, then we will all come and play.”
I reach her, grab a bottle of lemonade from the fridge, and press the drink against my forehead, taking a deep breath and letting the cool glass soothe my frazzled nerves. Unscrewing the bottle top, I glance back at Nadia. She’s still laying out the board game as if this is a normal afternoon.
I turn back to the woman who has been like a mother to me for the last decade, and Nona strokes my arm and pulls me closer.
“I know him,” she whispers, as if anyone can hear her through the steel walls.
“Who?” I already know the answer.
“Your man. Back in Moscow. He used to work for the Night Governor.”
I lean against the sink, the walls closing in on me and the artificial light bathing everything in a blue glow. “He’s not my man.”
Nona just smiles at me like she knows I’m lying.
“The name sounds familiar, but who exactly is the Night Governor?”
“Nadia’s father worked for the ruler of Moscow’s darkness. The Kremlin runs the government, but the clubs, the drugs, the smuggling routes? The Night Governor controls all of those.”
“How do you know all this?”
The woman bustling in front of me flicks a switch on the kettle and pulls out two mugs as if this is a normal afternoon. She leads me to a small table and pushes me to sit. “I worked for a billionaire called Antonov. He owned mines, trading companies, and a vodka distillery.”
Nona looks over at my daughter as the jigsaw pieces slot together in my mind.
The nightclub gig in Moscow.
Vadim patrolling the club with his gun.
The threatening man with the gold tooth at the bar who knew Vadim and Sasha.
Nona settles opposite me. “The Night Governor killed my boss. Vadim works for him,” she says in a low voice, glancing at Nadia to see if she can hear us.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the harsh truth. “So he’s a gangster.”
Nona takes my hands into hers, rubbing the tips of my icy fingers. “He’s a good man, in a way. He saved me. Saved Antonov’s children. Without Vadim, none of us would be alive and I wouldn’t be working for you.”
With that, she stands and strokes my hair before walking to the kettle and leaving me to run my fingers along the table’s knotted wood as I try to figure out what I’ve done, who I’ve invited into my life, and how to untangle the mess of relationships around my daughter.
Aside from the clink of teacups, the room is quiet. We’re so shielded from the outside world that Vadim could be murdering Dex or setting the house on fire, and I wouldn’t know until it was too late.