Chapter 2 #2
Two months ago, I was at my father's brothel on Trudovaya Street. Not for the girls, although I’m not above paying for sex.
In fact, it’s my preference since I don’t do relationships.
There’s too much at stake for me to bring a woman into the mix.
The women I choose to fuck are high class escorts, not the bottom of the barrel whores at the brothel.
No, that day I was there as a favor to one of my men. He’d left his wallet behind and didn’t want to risk going back to get it, being married and all. It was supposed to be a quick in and out. Not a big deal.
Except it wasn’t.
On my way out, I passed two of the girls in the hallway. They didn't see me. They were too focused on each other, talking in low, urgent voices. There was something about the way they sounded, so damn scared, it made me slow my pace.
"I told you not to go down there,” one of them hissed. “You know the rules. You’re lucky Belova didn’t kick you out."
"I know, I know, but I heard something. I thought someone was hurt and I wanted to check.” "And? Did you see anything?”
"I saw her. The girl that’s down there. It was just for a second, before Belova started screaming at me to get away from the door."
"Who did you see?"
"The girl. You know, the one they say is in the basement. She’s young, looked younger than us and she’s black."
Her voice went even lower. I had to strain to hear her.
"She was thin and looked terrified. She froze when she saw me.”
"Are you sure? Did you get a good look?”
"Barely. It was quick. Belova went insane and started threatening me. Said if I ever mention it again—if I even think about going down there again, I’ll have to deal with Grigori Ivanov.”
"But he would—”
"You think I don’t know?”
Belova’s scared too. I heard her mumbling as I walked away. She kept saying Ivanov would kill her. That nobody can go down there. She kept mumbling over and over like she’d lost her mind.”
The hallway went quiet.
I was still standing there, wondering what the hell I’d just heard, when the other girl whispered, so low I barely heard.
“The Pakhan's witch.”
"What?”
"I heard about her before. I didn’t think it was true. I heard some girls talking about it a couple of years ago. They thought nobody was listening.”
The girl hesitated.
“That’s what they call her. They say the Pakhan keeps her down there. That’s why we can’t work Tuesday evenings. She tells him things he shouldn't know."
"That’s just gossip. It can’t be real.”
"Maybe. But she wasn’t supposed to be real either. And you saw her.”
I kept walking, not giving any sign I’d heard a word. But the conversation stayed in my mind. It stuck. For days after, it was all I could hear.
The Pakhan's witch.
A girl locked in a basement under a whorehouse, who tells him things. A girl he visits every Tuesday evening. I found that hard to believe. My father doesn't believe in superstition, he believes in information, leverage and violence.
And yet…
He wears the same watch he had on when he survived a shooting twenty-three years ago. He has specific ways things have to be done, or he cancels an event entirely. Hell, there’s an entire district in Moscow he pretends doesn’t exist because his father died there.
Superstitious or not, for the past six, maybe seven years, the Pakhan has been unnaturally good at eliminating threats before they surface.
Traitors get exposed before they can make a move and enemies disappear before they can act.
It's almost as if he knows what’s coming.
Which he might, if this girl’s been feeding him information all these years.
I pull up to a furniture store I use as a front for more lucrative business. There’s legitimate sales being made, but I don’t care. It’s what goes on in the back that’s my concern. It’s where some of my men are loading trucks. They nod as I pass.
I have a small office here. There’s a desk with a computer and a filing cabinet next to it. Apart from a chair, there’s nothing else. I sit and take out my phone, opening the file I’ve been keeping on the girl. Or rather, all the evidence I’ve been gathering to decide if she might be legit.
The funny thing is, I remember what it was like some years ago before my father had this kind of insight.
This man hadn’t even seen it coming when some idiot wanting to make a name for himself, tried to take a shot at him. Interestingly enough, it was soon after that he started rooting out threats with almost a hundred percent accuracy.
I couldn’t let this go. If someone, if this girl was really giving him information and she could see things, then where the fuck did she come from?
I didn’t need to question why she was being kept locked away in a basement.
That sounded on par for my father. Why give her the chance to escape and deny him the use of her ability? Made sense.
I started with missing persons cases in Moscow. That went nowhere, considering the small amount of black people here. Not a single one reported missing.
I widened my search to all of Europe. There were definitely more cases, but no lead. Next, I went wider, going international to cover my base. I filtered for kids who vanished abroad six to eight years ago. I narrowed it down even more.
Young. Black. Female. Disappeared without a trace.
One case grabbed my attention and made me stop scrolling.
Nala Spencer. An eleven-year-old girl from New York.
America. She disappeared from a London street while on a trip abroad with her private school.
That was seven years ago. I pulled the security footage from the Metropolitan Police.
It showed a young girl in broad daylight being snatched and shoved into a car. That was the last anyone saw her.
Two days later, her family in New York was murdered. The police called it a home invasion gone wrong. Apparently, the only survivor was her nine-year-old sister.
Nala was never found. No body. No car. Not a single trace of whoever took her. It was like she disappeared off the earth. The case went cold within months, just another unsolved missing child case.
The timing lines up perfectly with my father’s timeline of accuracy. The girl’s age fit what the whores had said that she looked younger than them.
Everyone knows London is a trafficking hub. With the right connections, it would’ve been easy to move the girl from there to Moscow without any problems. Still, it wasn’t proof enough. It could have been a coincidence, nothing at all.
On a whim I added "psychic" to my search. I didn’t expect anything to turn up. I figured I’d curse myself for being an idiot and move on. That is, until I found something, a bunch of social media posts from kids at her school. Old accounts mostly abandoned now but still there.
One girl, Stella Richardson, posted two weeks after Nala’s disappearance. It was a long emotional post about how much she missed hanging out with her and coming up with dances to their favorite songs. How she'd never forget Nala and wished she could’ve helped her.
The comments on that post were… interesting.
One kid wrote: “Didn’t ya’ll used to say Nala was psychic or some shit like that, well how come she didn’t see that coming? Psychic my ass.”
The responses were split. Some told this boy to shut up. Others, that his comment was uncalled for and hurtful. And of course, there were those that gave examples of Nala’s ability.
The Stella girl wrote back: No one ever said she was psychic. Nala was just really good at seeing some things. Stuff she wouldn’t know unless you told her. I don’t know how she did it, but just so you know she told me my sister planned to run away even though she never met my sister.
Another girl, Erica wrote: Did she run away?
Stella: Yeah, my parents found out she was planning on meeting some guy on Long Island. The guy was a convicted pedo. Nala saved her.
There were dozens more comments from other kids who knew Nala.
They called this ability her "gift." Some thought it was cool, others said it gave them the creeps. I figured that meant they didn’t like what she did.
Still, they all agreed on one thing, Nala knew things she shouldn't know and had no way of knowing.
I've read those posts dozens of times over the past two months. Memorized and taken them apart.
I’m not naive. I know those kids could be exaggerating. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were remembering the times she was right and forgetting the times she was wrong. Could also be their way of coping, making their friend into something special because they miss her.
Or it could be real.
My father rarely left Russia. Which means whoever found out about the girl’s ability must have sold her to the highest bidder. Knowing my father, he probably paid for the girl then had the traffickers killed. Can’t have anyone running around knowing his secret.
There it is, the Pakhan’s perfect intelligence source. I almost laugh. No wonder he's been untouchable for years. I open the picture again. It’s Nala. Eleven-years-old and smiling in her school uniform. They’d said it was her most recent picture.
Pity.
She looks normal. Happy. No idea my father was about to fuck over her entire life.
My phone vibrates. It’s business. I ignore it anyway. Right now, I can’t stop staring at that picture of the little black girl. I need to be sure it’s her in that basement. I can’t make a move until I’m certain it’s her. Most important, I need to do it without my father knowing I was ever there.
The brothel is his territory. Belova answers directly to him.
I can't walk in and start asking questions. Sending Lev or anyone else is too risky and word would travel too fast. I also know without a doubt, if my father finds out I was anywhere near his little secret, I’m a dead man.
He'll put a bullet in my head himself. I have to be smart about this. If this girl is real and locked inside that basement, I’m taking her.
I don’t give a fuck how risky it is. Her days of being my father’s canary are over.
She’s mine.
I try to picture her now. Older. I have one message for her: I’m coming for you, Nala Spencer. And when I do, you’re going to help me destroy the Pakhan.