Chapter Thirty Seven Willow
Chapter Thirty Seven
Willow
“BECAUSE I OWN THE FUCKING CITY WILLOW! Is that what you want to know? What you want me to say? You want the truth.” He laughs sardonically.
“I’m the fucking Pakhan, do you know what that means?” He grits out, poking his own chest brutally
“I’m Bratva, the Russian mob, mafia, whatever you want to call it, I’m a bad man.
I have blood on my hands, a lot of it might I add.
I’ve killed men with my bare hands. I’ve tortured people.
I’ve done things your mind can’t even begin to imagine.
Whatever the worst thing you’re thinking right now that I’ve possibly done…
” His breath shakes, his whole body shakes.
“It’s worse.” He spits out.
My whole body is numb. I stare at this man in front of me and I don’t know who he is. I don’t recognise him. The look on his face, his disheveled hair, the light in his eyes that’s now a creeping darkness suddenly taking over him.
Memories from the past few months flash in my mind and I feel my heart cracking as I relive each one, realising that it was all a lie.
“No…” I don’t recognise my own voice when I speak.
I bring a hand to my mouth as I feel myself start to wretch.
I clutch my stomach and fist the shirt I’m wearing, Dragna’s shirt.
Now all I have are thoughts of if he’s worn this shirt while doing the awful things he said he’s done.
I need out of it. I need out of this house.
My entire body shakes as I drop to my knees and sob. Gasping for breath I grip my own throat.
“Willow! Breathe!” I hear Dragna’s voice echo in my ear but I pay him no attention as I sink lower to the ground, folded over against my thighs and plant my hands in front of me.
I don’t even care how I must look right now or about the slight nipping pain I feel against my palms and my legs. Nothing hurts more than my heart in this moment.
My eyes are open but I can’t see anything past the tears. Everything looks and sounds like I’m underwater and I try to suck in a breath but I feel like my chest doesn’t move, that it can’t move. I feel arms around me, lifting me up and I can’t even find the energy to fight against the hold on me.
“Breathe sestryonka.” A commanding voice tells me and when I look up, it’s Lev’s face staring down at me, not Dragna.
“I’m so sorry.” He speaks again and suddenly a violent sob rips out from inside me, shaking my whole body even further. He holds me tighter as he walks through Dragna’s house with purpose until we get to one of the bathrooms.
“You… You’re all…” I say through harsh breaths and cries. Lev sets me down on the bathroom counter and strides to the medicine cabinet.
“Alina…” I cry even harder.
“Does she—”
“Yes.” He cuts off the rest of my question already knowing what I was going to ask.
One word, just that one word of confirmation from him and I break.
I crack.
I shatter.
He sets whatever he got from the cabinet down beside me and braces himself against the counter.
“That’s why we broke up. She found out, and not in a good way either. There’s also more to that story but I’ll let her tell you herself.”
He doesn’t move and I continue crying as I bring my knees up to chin. I feel a sharp, burning sensation and hiss out in pain.
“Be careful, you’ve got glass stuck everywhere.” He tells me and I look down as he begins walking away out of the bathroom and notice all the blood running down my legs, it flows from my hands, knees and shins and drips slowly from my feet onto the bathroom floor.
I don’t particularly like the sight of blood, but I watch in morbid fascination now wondering about the things Dragna said.
His hands are bloody. He’s killed people, tortured people. How can the hands that held me, caressed me, the hands that made me feel safe be the same hands that caused someone else’s pain. Someone else’s death.
I feel bile rise up in my throat and I turn quickly to vomit into the sink beside me.
Lev rushes back in with a chair that he sets down in front of the counter.
He holds my hair back for me and I feel his hand rub my back.
He doesn’t speak, he just waits until I’ve brought everything up before he turns the tap on and washes the sink.
“I’m so sorry Willow.”
“What for?” I ask breathlessly as I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, still feeling dazed and out of it because of everything that’s happened.
“I lied to you and Alina. Both of you have been hurt by us lying to you and because you both found out the truth in horrible ways. I didn’t want either of you to get hurt.”
He sits on the chair he brought in and grabs some wipes and whatever the bottle is that he lifted from the cabinet.
“It’s not your fault.” It’s the only words I can come up with right now because Lev is not the person who should be apologising to me.
He opens the bottle and tips the liquid onto a wipe.
“It’s partly my fault. This is going to sting by the way.” He doesn’t give me a second to ask what he’s doing before the wipe is pressed to my knee.
“Fuck!!” I jerk my leg back.
“What the hell are you doing?” I grit out.
“It’s antiseptic, I need to clean all of these cuts before I can start taking the glass out.”
“I don’t think so Lev! Take me to the hospital if it’s that bad! What do you know about doing any of this?”
He looks at me and raises his eyebrow and gives me a pointed look as he sits back in the chair.
“You’re asking me, the second in command to Dragna, now knowing what you do about us on what I know about taking care of injuries?”
My mind reels again thinking of everything they’ve possibly seen, all the things they’ve probably done and I feel like I'm going to throw up again.
Tears brim my eyes and start to spill down my cheeks as Lev stands and wraps me in a hug.
I cling to him automatically, my brain just looking for any kind of anchor to keep me grounded right now.
“I wish this all could have been different. I wish you and Alina didn’t go through this hurt and pain because of us. I swear to you if I could take it all away, I would.”
He strokes my hair and I start to laugh a little.
“Are you laughing?” He asks and his hand stops. He sounds so confused and it makes me laugh even more.
“Willow. If you’re having some kind of breakdown I might need to call for backup.”
He pulls away from me to look at my face and he looks so concerned as he searches my eyes for any sign that I’m about to go crazy.
“I’m laughing in shock. None of this is funny, it just doesn’t feel real because I don’t understand any of this.” I say as I wipe my tears away.
“How can you and Dragna, two terrifying looking men, two men involved in crime, both be so gentle to me? To Alina? It doesn’t make any sense and I feel like I have whiplash, or maybe I am just having a breakdown.”
Lev breaths out a sigh as he sits down again, repeating the process of the adding antiseptic to another wipe.
“If you let me clean your wounds and look after you, I’ll tell you how.”
I blink at him, he really isn’t going to let me get out of him helping me.
“Okay.” I sigh.
“When Dragna and I were younger.” He says, clearing his throat as he brings the wipe up to my knee, pressing it down and holding the back of my leg gently so I can’t pull away as I hiss again at the pain.
“I had to go live with him, Aunt Milena and our grandfather because something happened to my mother. I had two sisters as well. They were twins, only a couple years younger than me.” He gives me a weak smile and all I can focus on are the words ‘had’.
“It’s not only my story to give you all the details.
But what I can tell you is some bad things happened within our family and my mother and sisters were taken.
I was staying with Dragna at our grandfathers house the night it happened so I wasn’t there at home to be taken with them. ” He shakes his head before continuing.
“The guilt… it fucking eats me alive. Dimitri, our grandfather, and his men did everything they could to find them, to bring them home…” His voice cracks and I reach out to put my hand on top of his for support.
“But they couldn’t. It was as if they had vanished. A few months went by before one night the entire estate erupted into chaos. I was only six, but I remember it so vividly. Everyone was rushing around, men were piling into cars, guns strapped to them, people on phones, shouting, screaming…
Amongst all the chaos though, I’ll never forget the only thing I could focus on.
Like everything around me went black and all I could see was Dimitri and Milena outside wailing.
The front doors were open, flood lights on illuminating them like a spotlight.
Milena was holding something in her arms and I didn’t know at the time what it was, but you can imagine.
” He shakes his head and I feel something wet drip onto my foot.
I look down thinking it’s the blood he’s cleaning off me, but it’s tears. His tears.
“Lev. I’m so sorry.” I say as a sob rips out of me.
“It was seeing my grandfather though, that’s when I knew straight away what had happened. I’d never seen him cry, but there he was… Our Pakhan, our leader, my big strong grandfather who we all looked up to, pulling my mothers lifeless body to his own, shouting for her to wake up through his tears.”
He leans his head forward to rest against my leg as his armour cracks and he cries harder.
He cries and he cries and I can’t do anything but hold onto him and cry with him.
“That’s why this is hitting Dragna so hard.
It’s why it’s hitting me so hard and all we want to do is protect both you and Alina.
I know Dragna is going insane because he can’t find out who’s stalking you and in his mind, he’s thinking history is going to repeat itself.
I also didn’t just call you my sister joking around.
I do genuinely see you that way Willow, and I couldn’t protect my baby sisters then, but I can protect you now.
I’ll protect both my girls, we all will if you let us. ”
I just stare at him in disbelief that this is their life, that that’s what happened to him as a child. I couldn’t imagine ever going through something like that and it makes me think about how Dragna must of felt that night too.
He would of been sixteen, just after his father passed away or just before… all that loss at such a young age.
But he lied to me, he’s been lying to me this whole time. Everything he’s bought me, every dinner, every gift, every book all paid for with money that probably had blood on it.
I look back at Lev who is just watching me with sorrow filled eyes.
“I want to go home Lev.” I tell him through my tears and he gives me a weak smile while nodding before he wipes his own tears away again.