Chapter 37 Gabi
GABI
“You have brothers,” Milana says, urgently. “Unmarried brothers. We make a deal. You tell your Don you’ll only feel safe here if there’s an exchange, a swap. You and me. I get married to one of them—”
“Wait. What?” I can’t believe she’ll marry just to get out. And to one of my brothers! She hasn’t even met any of them.
“Hear me out, Gabi,” she says, leaning forward, urgent. “Once I’m married, I’m halfway out. I just need out of the house, away from all the surveillance.”
God, we are being watched. All the time. I feel it to my bones, every day. “I’m leaving, Milana, I’m not staying. Ivan is getting married and his wife—”
She smirks. “Those fucking assholes. Should have known. They’ve told you nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not leaving,” she says flatly. “Do you know how many women Ivan has let into his life? Into this house? Allowed to sleep here? Be with his daughters as you are, day in and day out?” She holds up one finger.
“Their mother. He married her in an arranged marriage. To strengthen our alliance with Russia, because the Pakhan thought we had to, pushed into it by our stepmom. Darya came here with one goal: to weaken the Pakhan, to weaken Ivan, to prepare for a coup.”
A coup?
The Fourth of July party that got a bit wild. A pit opens in the bottom of my stomach. Now it makes sense.
Ivan with his two bullet wounds.
“We didn’t know that Darya was already sold into the Chertnikov Bratva.”
And there’s that name again. Chertnikov, a surname based on the word chort, the devil in Russian.
A ghost sweeps over my back. My stomach clenches into a fist. What did I step into here? Willingly. Blindly. Without knowing anything about these people. My sure-fire escape has turned into a trap, and like an animal, I pushed my head through the wire loop while admiring the circle it makes.
Milana is sitting up, and I become aware of the photos burning on my lap. I almost jolt when she gives my forearm a tight squeeze.
“You don’t want to acknowledge this, but Ivan has a hold over your brothers, and you being here is the repercussion.”
How could Ivan have a hold over me? Just like that fucking decrepit Russian has? And through my brothers? I was a secret for so long, they thought I was dead.
“Repercussion?” I breathe, repeating her last word on autopilot, not knowing what else to say. But somewhere, a shiny penny glitters in the light, and it’s dropping in slow motion.
“Ivan had only one woman in this house, Gabi…one.”
His wife. I feel the color drain from my face in a rush of pinpricks. No. She can’t mean this. It makes no sense whatsoever.
“I’m just here as the nanny—” I break off, staring flabbergasted at Milana who is on the verge of rolling her eyes at me. “But nobody’s asked me about marriage,” I say, the innocence and the stupidity of the question slapping me in the face at the same time.
This whole fucking set-up I’ve so innocently gotten myself into is a prelude to an arranged marriage my brothers stealthily guided me into, me so eager because I thought I had agency.
“Nobody asked you because you don’t have a voice or a choice. You’ve been played. It’s the Bratva way.”
A pawn. I’m never going to be anything else.
That morning in Central Park rushes back to me. Dominic’s brewing anger, the feeling that something was going down that he couldn’t control. Matteo sketchy and avoiding looking me in the eye.
But I’ve been promised to another Russian and he is looking for me. Something none of these people know. There are so many secrets here, and they’re straining to burst out.
“I…” Being a secret has kept me safe for years in Italy—as safe as I could be. Whatever happens, nobody can know about the Russian on my trail.
With steel fortitude, I slip my mask back on, scared I’ve already revealed too much in front of Milana, but she’s too deep in the clutches of her own dilemma to be aware of mine.
I’m custodian of her secret now, and it’s way weightier than my knowledge of Russian.
And it isn’t something I could ever hold over her head. Not with what I’ve lived through.
“Don’t feel bad, Gabi,” she says, oblivious to my inner turmoil.
“I’ve been played, too, so fucking hard, held hostage by my own choices, my own mistakes.
” She wipes at her cheeks as if she’s wiping all her bad decisions off the page.
“I’ll never allow a man to do that to me again.
Not a brother, not a lover, not any man.
” Her hand drops to the photos, and with decided, unflinching precision, she tears them up into strips.
“In retrospect, Boryslav was my solution, but I was blind to it. And now he’s dead. ”
“Boryslav? Who?” She’s going on a different tangent now, and I drag my focus back to her, stepping into character. Later, when I’m alone, I can digest everything.
“My fiancé. Boryslav Petrenko. He could have taken me back to Russia, I could have—”
“Your fiancé? Oh my…” She’s lost her fiancé; no wonder she’s sad. “I’m so sorry.”
She clambers off the bed and goes over to a console where she opens a drawer and pulls out several candles and matches. “It was an arrangement like everything else, there was no love, but I was too blind, too fucking naive about how far Ivan would go, to know he was my only hope.”
She’s been engaged in an arranged match before, no love lost between the parties. No wonder she’s prepared to grasp onto a marriage with a stranger as a solution—and be so flippant about marrying a random brother of mine. But I don’t like it, not one bit.
“You’ll do this swap just to get out? Marry a stranger to get away from your brother?”
Marry into another organized crime stronghold…to escape another. The solution surfaces in my mind as much as it turns the bile in my stomach.
“My groom wouldn’t be a total stranger. He’d be your brother. I don’t care which one. Trust me, men are all the same, and it hardly matters—”
“Just listen to yourself for a second.” I’m not keen to serve one of my brothers to her with this praying-mantis attitude of hers.
From what I’ve seen, my brothers might be Mafia, but they love their women deeply and would want the same for me, if I were ever to get married.
But if they have promised me into an arranged marriage, without even consulting me…
whatever Ivan has on them must be huge, and I might never know what it is.
“I can figure it out, trust me, once I’m on the other side of these walls. Just—” Milana shakes her head as she places the candles in the sink, lights them, and in an almost sacred ritual, starts to burn one photo strip after the other.
“Switch on the vent.” She points to the switch on the wall, and it noisily starts sucking up the black ribbons of toxic smoke to release outside the house.
She’s destroying evidence of how she’s been played.
She’s fully in control of herself again, even if her fingers are trembling.
Ruthless, calculating, but not cruel. Not yet.
I could learn a lot from her, from her quiet determination now she’s hatched a new plan, me still firmly on my leash, ready to be dragged along in whichever direction pleases her.
“How do you know Russian?” she asks shooting me a side-glance as she gets into a rhythm, burning strip after strip.
“I studied it.” Obviously.
“In an Italian convent?”
“I did go to school while in the convent, you know. I had access to language programs.”
“But why Russian?”
I don’t miss a beat. “To protect myself.”
I have a strategy, too. My learning curve has been steep, and I’m facing some unexpected twists and turns, but I’ll work with those as they come along.
I planned to protect myself from that man, who lurked in the shadows.
We weren’t properly introduced, but I knew I was being sold to him.
A man at least five times my age at the time.
He had to take a call, and I listened to him speaking on his phone, his voice deep, guttural, dense with the harsh rolling r’s of the Russian language while Randazzo waited.
Then Randazzo got impatient. Told the woman to get on with it while they looked on. Randazzo, supposedly my father, looked on, helped restrain me.
At thirteen, my fate was negotiated, sold to the Russian who stood by as Randazzo held me, telling me that what was about to happen would be sealing a vow, serving as a reminder to never be with another man, to not even touch myself. That woman strapped me down, forced open my legs—
I swallow down the memory, of how everything went white for a long time, and when I came to, I was alone. Well, Randazzo was gone, the Russian was gone, but the woman was just sitting there, waiting for me to wake up from my drugged state, with some handy aftercare instructions.
It was the last time I saw Randazzo, but he left me Bianca’s Bible, the one he still had from when she was a child in his house. Sometimes, I wonder if he had done the same to her, but these are secrets we take to the grave.
“I learned Russian so I could play him,” I say softly, admitting to myself, maybe for the first time, I never planned to be cattle willingly led to the slaughter, but I always default to running.
“Him?” she asks, curious. “Surely not Ivan?”
“Nobody, just a phase.” I know her secret, and she might know mine, but I should watch my tongue in front of this woman. She’s already using me; she will play me, too.
Milana shoots me a weak smile, and her gaze catches mine. “I honestly don’t know what to make of you. Sometimes, you’re so startlingly naive, and then you pull shit like that and show me just how perfect you’d be as Ivan’s wife.”
Ivan’s wife. Mother to his girls. In his bed—more kisses. More. Just more.
“He joked about it this morning,” I say, wanting to choke on every sign that this is real. That Il Consiglio sold me out. That Ivan has a hold on my brothers, that I’ve been negotiated into an arranged marriage to even the playing field.
“What do you mean?”
“Katya asked if I’m going to be their new mommy, and Ivan said, as a joke, that he wondered what my answer would be if he asked me.”
My knee-jerk reaction had been a yes, because I thought I had agency. Now, I’m not so sure.
“He’s easing you into it. My brother…he’s a good man, Gabi.
He will be good to you if you are good to him.
It’s more than what Darya ever was, and in our world, there’s no such thing as love, never mind marriage for love.
God knows I learned that the hard way. But there are things like good, solid marriages, built on mutual respect, built on playing by the rules and sticking to your part. My parents had one of those.”
“This isn’t my plan. I can’t marry Ivan.”
The old Russian isn’t going to stop looking for me. My heart beats faster, already at a racket with everything that’s come to light. I managed to get to this household to protect my brothers, and now I’m going to get out of it—to protect Ivan and his girls.
I already sense it’s going to be like sawing off a limb, but I’m being hunted by a Russian for an inheritance I don’t have.
Stripped of anything to do with Randazzo, I’m just a body.
He’d have access to hundreds of other women.
Why me? Why is he so determined to find me, to the point that he murdered Mother Lucia?
“Okay, don’t marry Ivan,” Milana says, somewhat annoyed. “It’s not as if you’re walking down the aisle tomorrow, but I need out, as soon as possible.” She reaches for me, squeezing my shoulder. “And I promise to help you in turn, to get you out of here.”
She’s like a dog with a bone, and now I know why. Everything I’ve witnessed of her in the time I’ve been here makes complete sense, and I can’t, not in good conscience, refuse to help her.
“I’ll speak to Matteo today, but you must promise me—” I stall, knowing I’m fighting more for my soul than for any vows ever made. “You must promise to get me out of here and away before I can be married to Ivan.”
Before I fall in love with him. I’m already half-way there and it scares me.
“We’re in this together.”
I nod, not feeling it. This situation feels like treason. Like the sticky web of organized crime and its secrets are wrapping tighter around me. Like I’m making friends in places that would make it harder to leave. That I’m trapped by her secret—a secret more dangerous than my own.