Chapter 23 Tati
TATI
The shower was dirty and there was nothing but bar soap to clean myself with, but I made do. The clothes that were brought to me are ugly, but they’re clean. They’ll do for the night. A T-shirt, a pair of jeans, underwear, socks and boots…
After the shower, I put on the T-shirt and panties and walked out to the bedroom… and I sat down.
And I’m still sitting here, rubbing my stomach and thinking about my future. Trying to, at least.
How could I have made the decision to bring a baby into this chaos?
I’m not even sure anymore of what I was trying to prove in getting Nicki’s journal.
Was this all just for myself? To give Marla’s death some meaning, maybe?
If I knew that Nicki wanted out and she was just trying to bring around some justice for him, then maybe that would make the randomness of her killing seem…
meaningful? It all sounds fine and good in a sane world, but my world has really never been that.
I’m a Pakhan’s daughter. Even when it seems sane on the outside, it’s always been chaotic.
I feel like a fool. Viktor said that he wasn’t the one to pull the trigger, but he can’t tell me who did. Who else would it be but my father’s most trusted enforcer?
I try to set it aside for the moment and walk over to the pile of clothes I left on the floor by the bed. Among them is Nicki’s journal. Might as well read through it. Maybe I’ll get a better picture of what was really going on in my brother’s head.
I found the page I was on before relatively quickly. It’s written in his scrawl. It makes me smile to see his terrible handwriting once more. On the next page after those short paragraphs, he writes about a week later.
Marla said that this whole journalling thing might be a good idea. She thinks it’ll help me get a handle on the noise in my head. I’ve been doing it for a while now and I still don’t know how well that’s working. What I do know is what I’m thinking is akin to blasphemy.
She’s got this idea in her head that there has to be a way.
What she doesn’t know or maybe doesn’t understand is that there is no getting out of the Bratva.
I knew that when I took the oath, and I’ve known that my entire life.
She’s never been a part of this world. Everything she knows about it comes from me, and I suppose I can’t blame her for thinking there’s a solution to something that has such a hard line to it.
I keep thinking back to when I was a kid and how I’d sneak and listen to my father when he had his meetings with his staff.
And I think about the first time I met Vik.
He seemed to have it all together. Always dressed nice.
Never flinches. Never even blinks when I fuck up and he’s got to be the one to clean up the mess I made.
Vik is the coolest motherfucker in the brotherhood.
And he’s the one guy that my father seemed to turn to for almost everything.
Well, him and Yanov, but Yanov always seems more like an authority figure.
Vik has always been the big brother I’ve needed.
More than all that, I thought he was the one guy who could show me how to be the man that my father was expecting me to be.
I thought that once I became an enforcer, it would all finally come together. Papa would see me as a real man, Vik would respect me as his equal and not just a student under his wing, and Tati… Well, I don’t think I could ever do wrong in Tati’s eyes.
I smile at that. I loved him so much, even when he nudged me aside for his life as a Bratva. I honestly thought that he forgot all about me after he took the oath. I guess nothing could have been further from the truth…
It’s all changed, though. And I guess I haven’t given too much thought into why. I know where it started, though. With Sturov.
I pause, trying to remember if I ever knew anyone by that name. I don’t. It doesn’t even sound vaguely familiar. I read on.
The rat bastard has been dead more than a month now, and I can’t stop thinking about him.
We caught him hiding out in the basement of Stiletto’s Deli…
or what used to be Stiletto’s. When we told Nikolai who had been hiding him, he decided that the deli didn’t need to be around anymore.
I hear the fire smoked for days after he made the call.
But I can’t get Sturov’s words out of my mind.
We dragged him out of that basement, and he rode around in the trunk of the car a good hour before we found a place to dump him after the deed was done.
Standing over him with nothing but the moon to light up his bruised face, he looked at me through his one good eye and said, “I did it for Ellen, Nicki. I did it for her.”
I didn’t really know what he meant by that other than he stole that brick for his wife. The bad part about that, though, is that now I know for a fact that it wouldn’t have mattered. The call had been made and his life was forfeit.
I pause, frowning deeply at the entry. Nicki regretted killing someone. Sturov. It wouldn’t take Sherlock to figure out why he did it. Even I’ve always known that stealing from Nikolai Aronin is a death sentence.
But that’s irrelevant to the fact that for some reason, that was the one hit that got to Nicki. That was somehow the last straw.
I regret it. I hate it that I do. I’m not supposed to regret killing a thief any more than I should regret any of the jobs Vik and I have gotten.
But I do. It’s been spinning around and around in my head.
It’s my own damned fault. I should have left well enough alone and not went to check on Ellen after the fact. That’s where I fucked myself.
I have to pause, imagining what it must have been like to be the one to talk to a woman grieving her husband’s death.
Or did she know he was dead? When Nicki showed up, did she realize why her husband hadn’t been home in days?
In that moment, did she understand that he’d paid the price for trying to gain something for their freedom?
I imagine having to stand in somebody’s pain like that might make you change your way of looking at things.
These entries aren’t long from when he was killed. He had to have seen a lot by this time. Things that must have hardened him.
But the tears of a woman who would never see the love of her life again… it must have hit him where he lived. If I don’t know anything else, I know he loved Marla. Maybe he saw himself in the sadness of Sturov’s widow’s tears.
The door to the bedroom opens, and I look up just in time to see Viktor as he walks in. I close the book, pulled back into my reality. He closes the door behind him, but he doesn’t make any other moves to come near me.
“So… what’s next?” I ask.
“We need to talk,” he says.
I toss the journal back into my pile of clothes and keep my eyes trained on the wall in front of me. “Okay, so, talk.”
He pauses. I’m sure he’s noticed that I’m not looking at him.
I don’t want to get sucked into those deep brown eyes of his.
He’s got a way about him that makes me want to follow him into fire, and he can exact his will with just a tilt of his head.
I can’t let that happen this time. I’m going to listen to him, but I need to stay objective.
“The moment I saw her,” he says, “I knew I couldn’t do it. That I wouldn’t do it. You need to understand that. There’s nothing on this earth that would have made me betray your brother’s memory that way.”
I nod. “So, then, what was the plan?”
“Excuse me?”
“You saw her. Realized that it was her you were supposed to kill, and then what? Did you get back in your car and drive to my father to tell him to fuck off, then? Clearly, that didn’t happen.”
“Truthfully, there wasn’t time to think that far ahead.
In that moment, the only thing I knew was that Marla was in danger and I needed to warn her.
” He steps closer to me and sits on the edge of the bed.
The whole thing shifts under his weight.
I scoot a couple of inches away from him to give myself space.
“I was only told that my target would be wearing a red jacket,” he continues. “And that she would get a phone call when she walked out of the bank. Sure enough, she walked out, and the second I realized she was the target, I went to her.”
“To shoot her?”
“To talk to her,” he says, his words measured.
“I guess I thought there might have been a chance that she wasn’t the target and just happened to be wearing the wrong jacket on the wrong day.
None of that mattered, though, because I only got a few steps away when a gunshot went off behind me and hit her in the neck. ”
I flinch and turn my head away. I didn’t want that image in my mind, and the unexpected description throws me. “I’m sorry, Tati,” he says. “That’s how it happened.”
My eyes are stinging with tears. I swallow hard in an effort to stop them. “Go on.”
He pauses, then his voice is softer. “She died in my arms. There was no helping her. She was gone in seconds. But she stayed conscious long enough to give me that key. When I realized what it was, I hid it thinking that once I knew more and once I felt the coast was clear, I’d go back and see what was in the safety deposit box. ”
Dammit. The tears are coming anyway. Fuck. I wipe my face and look over at him. He’s not looking at me. He’s leaning over his knees, looking down at the floor.
“So… that’s your story?”
“That’s the truth.”
“Why would my father tell you to kill Marla? He knows that you and Nicki were close. He had to know you’d have a problem with that.”
He shrugs and says, “At first I thought it was to test my loyalty. Now I’m pretty sure he was setting me up to punish me for being with you.”
I scoff and stand up. “That’s another thing. How would he even have known about us, anyway? If he knew we had something going on, there’s no way he would have had you chaperone me. He’d have shipped me off to Siberia if he’d even suspected.”