Chapter 12 Viktor
VIKTOR
It’s been two months since the incident at the abandoned building. Thankfully, my little outburst seems to have soured Tati on my company. It makes watching over her easier.
She doesn’t really talk to me when we’re together. I take her where she wants to go and bring her back to Nikolai’s. It’s an easy enough job, especially lately. Nikolai hasn’t called me about her in almost a week now. Perhaps the little bird has settled into her gilded cage.
Tonight, I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Somewhere along the line, I started keeping old photos of Nicki and me in a beat-up old shoebox. They’re mostly things from when we first joined the Bratva, but a few of them have some of the Red Devils in them…
I’m sitting on my couch, glass of vodka warming on my coffee table, box of photos on my lap.
Most of these pictures are starting to fade after so many years.
Twenty or so, I think? It certainly seems like it from the style of clothing and the cut of our hair.
Nicki’s hair was wild and curly when he was a teen following me around all the time.
I find a photo of him when I was first assigned to be his mentor.
He was around fourteen to my early twenties and the two of us are sitting in Nikolai’s living room.
I’ve got a drink in my hand and he’s holding an unlit cigar between his teeth as he mugs for the camera.
I used to tease him about that hair, call him a Q-Tip or a drumstick because he started off so skinny.
He’d probably have stayed skinny if I hadn’t started whipping him into shape.
I pause on a photo of the two of us the summer we went to Muscle Beach in California.
He’s standing next to a friend of Teddy’s, I forget his name.
But I remember he was three times Nicki’s size.
It certainly looks like it in the photo where Nicki stands next to him, snarling as he shows off the tiny muscles in his arms next to the wall of flesh that was Teddy’s buddy.
I flip through a few more photos and stop when I come across the one of both of us, taken during the Leukemia charity drive about a year or so before his death.
We’re standing together, two grown men in our expensive suits.
The vaguest memory of the curls he had could only be seen in the waviness of his hair on top.
He was starting to go gray prematurely, but only in his head.
It had almost completely gone white at that point, which he was particularly proud of since mine was only starting to go gray.
He looks fully formed here, finally a man after years of missteps, of trying to prove himself to his father and to the Bratva, no longer unblooded or untested.
I think this is the last photo of him alive that I possess. I wish there were more. I wish I’d thought to take more.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I glance at it and see that Nikolai is calling. It’s late. Well after midnight. Maybe he needs me for some actual work.
“Tatiana’s snuck out. Again,” he says when I pick up. I have to hold in a sigh of exasperation. “I want her found and brought back immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” is all I say and hang up. There goes the peace I’ve been granted over the last few days. I suppose I shouldn’t be terribly surprised. Tati is unpredictable. She’s like a storm that no one ever sees coming. Not even me.
I get up and go to my room to get dressed. Guess I’ll try her friend’s house first.
“Viktor,” Marla says when she opens the door. She runs a hand through her mussed, multicolored hair as she stands there in her robe. “What are you doing here so late? Is something wrong?”
“I’m looking for Tati. Her father says she snuck out again.”
She sighs and rubs her eyes. It’s clear that she was in the throes of sleep when I knocked on her door. “She’s not here. But you’re welcome to come in and check if you want.”
“If you don’t mind.”
She shakes her head and steps aside. I walk into her apartment and immediately, I know she’s not here. I’m not sure how. Perhaps it’s because I don’t smell her perfume, or maybe it’s just her aura that I can’t feel. It always seems like I know she’s entered a room before I see her at all.
I walk into her living room, anyway, casually glancing through the kitchen door and down the hall to the bedrooms. Nickolai’d have my head if I couldn’t at least say that I looked properly.
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Marla shrugs and yawns. “Yesterday or the day before, I think. Nikolai granted me visitation rights.”
I scoff. “How fortunate. Maybe he’s finally starting to lighten up.”
“Maybe,” she says with a weak smile. She steps all the way into the living room and asks, “So, you haven’t seen her since the last time you took her out?”
I shake my head. “No.” Then, “How did she seem when you last saw her?” The question entered my mind as proper. The thing you ask when you’re looking for someone, but as soon as I hear it, I realized how selfish the question really is.
“She’s fine,” she says a little too quickly.
“Fine? Really?”
She sighs and crosses her arms across her chest. “She’s… dealing with some things. Stuff that I really shouldn’t be talking about without her being here.”
I cock my head. “Maybe you should talk about them. Especially if it’ll help me find her.”
“It won’t,” she says. “Trust me on that.” Her eyes drift past me to the coffee table, and she stiffens. She walks over to it and starts gathering up a collection of papers strewn across the glass surface.
“Anyway,” she says, “you know the anniversary of Nicki’s death was a few months ago. She hasn’t exactly had time to reflect or anything on that. Maybe her escape has something to do with that.”
“Hmm.” I watch her put away her papers, shoving them all in a manila envelope. “Any idea where she might go to reflect, as you say?”
She pauses and thinks for a moment. “There’s Mercer Department Store, maybe.”
“Mercer?” The abandoned building where I found her that day I took her to the mall. I’d forgotten that it was a department store around ten years ago.
She nods. “It was Nicki and Tati’s place to go to get away from everybody. You know, after it closed down. They used to go there and drink and break windows. Nicki used to say that it was cathartic.”
Oh. That suddenly makes a lot of things make more sense. “I did not know that.”
“Nobody did. Nicki only told me about it once we got serious. It was their place, so…” She shrugs as if to say, you understand.
I nod and thank her as I start to leave. “If you hear from her tonight…”
“I’ll call you.”
As I walk back out into the night, all I can think about is how upset she looked that day I found her at that old building. She’s in pain. Of course she is. I was a fool for not seeing it.
I see her shadow well before my headlights shine on her.
She’s sitting in the middle of the lot, her legs crisscrossed, her face turned up toward the ruins of what used to be a department store.
Like before, she doesn’t acknowledge my car and she doesn’t move once I’ve gotten out and started walking toward her.
“Tanechka.” I say it softly, but my voice still carries over the empty lot. She flinches a little at the nickname I gave her so long ago.
“Of course you’re here,” she says. “My father is so predictable.”
For the first time in recent memory, I’m at a loss for words.
I know that my line in this particular scenario is to tell her that it’s time to go back home.
Time for me to take her back to her cage.
But honestly, I know the loss that plagues her.
I know it well enough to understand why she keeps coming back here.
“So, this is where you take me back, right?” she says, half turning so I see her profile. “Sucks to be you right now because I’m not going anywhere. Not with you. Not with anyone.”
I sigh and look up at the looming modern castle above us. “Marla told me that you and Nicki used to come here.”
“Did she?” She scoffs. “Well, isn’t she chatty tonight. She tell you anything else?”
“Only that the two of you used to break these windows out together. That it was cathartic.”
She nods slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what we used to do.
What she probably doesn’t know is that Nicki and I used to talk here.
About things that we couldn’t tell anyone else.
Not in the whole world. He was the last person alive that I could really confide in, and now he’s gone. Seven years in the fucking ground…”
Her voice starts to crack and she stops herself. In the dim light I see the shine of her eyes as tears well up in them. I kneel down next to her. “Tati, I’m sorry—”
“Do you know your fearless leader wouldn’t even let me mourn him properly?
” she says, looking directly at me in the darkness.
“After the funeral, he told me that I was allowed to cry about it that day, but by tomorrow, I had to get myself together and be a ‘paragon’ of strength. The family name was at stake, he said.” She shakes her head as tears roll down her face. “Such bullshit.”
“He just wanted you to be strong, Tati.”
“He wanted me not to embarrass him in front of the troops. I mean, honestly, how psychotic is that? My brother just died.” She sniffles and wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
“At the hospital when they were working on him, they told my father that there was a good chance that he would be on life support. My father told them if that happens to just…” She trails off and shakes her head, the words caught in her throat. “He let Nicki die, Viktor.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I know that Nicki wouldn’t have wanted to be kept alive on machines. I imagine his father knew that too. It was a kindness to let him die with dignity.
“And I get this whole thing about the brotherhood,” she continues, “and being a bunch of big, strong, virile, able-bodied men… but I’m not part of that. Not really. I should have been allowed to… to cry.”