The Pakhan’s Captive (Crowned in Sin #5)

Lena

I stare at my father in confusion. He is standing in front of the linen closet at the back of the apartment with the door open, his hand on the frame and his eyes looking like I have never seen before.

“What?” I look at the closet then back at him. “Papa, what are you—”

“Don’t argue with me.” His voice raises a panicked octave and my heart lodges in my throat. “Get inside. Now.”

What’s going on? My heart beats rapidly now, the sound of it increasing with every beat, because I’ve never seen Papa look this way before.

He is scared and his fear is making me scared too.

What’s happening?

“Tell me what’s happening.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “You’re scaring me. What is going on, why do you look like—”

“I need you to trust me.” He presses a dark blue flash drive into my palm and closes my fingers around it with one firm hold, his hands shaking but firm, like he is handing me something sacred.

“Keep this safe. Do not let it out of your hand no matter what. If something happens, you run. You don’t stop, you don’t look back, you run and you get this out of Moscow. ”

“Papa!” My throat closes around his name. “You’re coming with me. Whatever this is, we go together, we can just leave right now, we don’t have to—”

“Lena.” He calls my name that way he did when I was twelve and won’t stop asking questions about his work. Gentle. Final. A door closing. “Get inside, please.”

My heart sinks in that moment.

I look at him, and he looks back at me. Both palms come up to cup my jaw, and he holds my face for a moment that stretches too long.

There is something in his eyes that looks very much like tears.

Papa is not a man who touches faces. He pats shoulders, squeezes hands, ruffles hair when he is being extra playful. He does not hold faces.

Something is very wrong here.

“Lena.” I see a tick in my father’s jaw as he calls my name, looking directly into my eyes. “I need you to promise me that no matter what you will not leave this closet. No matter what happens, no matter what you see, you will stay hidden. Please Dochka, promise me.”

I don’t know why this is happening, I don’t know what is going on and that is driving me crazy.

But the way Papa is looking at me tugs at my heart so bad, I feel my eyes watering.

My head moves slowly as I try to contain the tears threatening to pour. “Of course, Papa. I promise. I promise.”

I say it twice to assure him.

A tiny very tiny smile graces his tired face and he leans forward and presses his lips to my forehead. “I love you.”

Without thinking, I reply, “I love you too, Papochka.”

The smile on his face grows bigger and I smile sadly.

I always knew Papa loves it when I call him that, but I’ve always teased him about it and never really used it.

And somehow I don’t know why, but I feel so broken.

Papa takes in a deep breath and his expression settles into the careful, composed look I have seen him wear in a hundred hallways outside a hundred rooms I was never allowed to enter—the expression that means his real feelings are somewhere I am not going to reach tonight.

Despite everything in me telling me to protest, to fight, I get inside.

The closet door clicks shut and I stand in the cedar dark with the drive pressing into my palm and my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I am sure someone will hear it, because that was all I could hear.

What is this drive? What is he doing? What is—

An explosion thunders from the other side of the house.

I stop breathing.

The sound of it is enormous—wood shrieking off its hinges, a crack like something breaking that cannot be unbroken—then boots are pouring across the marble foyer in a wave.

Heavy.

Multiple.

Too many, way too many.

Oh Lord. Please what is going on?

I press my eye to the thin gap between the closet door and its frame.

I need to see.

The angle is bad but I can see the mouth of the hallway, the edge of the living room beyond it.

It is enough.

Enough to see the men fanning out through our home in dark clothes, enough to see Papa standing near the fireplace with his hands at his sides and his chin up, and enough to see the man who walks in last and stands in the center of the room and looks at my father the way something looks at a problem it has already solved.

“Pyotr Sokolova.” Not a question.

Papa says nothing.

“You know why we’re here.”

“I know what you’ve been told.” Papa’s voice is even. Impossibly even. “What you’ve been told is a lie.”

The first hit comes so fast I don’t track it.

A fist, the side of his face, and Papa’s head snaps sideways and I shove both hands against my mouth because the sound that tries to come out of me is not a sound I can afford to make.

My back hits the closet wall.

My legs are shaking.

My whole body is shaking.

Papa!

No! I’ve got to stop them…help him.

I reach for the doorknob, but my legs have given up under me. Fear grips me hard.

I clamp my hands harder against my mouth and beg in my head.

Shut up. Please.

“You killed him.” The man standing over Papa says it like a statement of fact. “You had the Pakhan killed.”

“That’s not true.” Papa spits blood onto the floor, turns his head back, and meets the man’s eyes. “I have served this organization for twenty years. I would never—”

Another hit. A boot this time, and Papa goes down to one knee. Someone across the room says something in fast, brutal Russian I can’t fully catch—suka, ublyudok, ty dumayesh my durak—and someone else laughs, and the sound of it turns my stomach completely over.

I am going to scream. I can feel it building in my chest, enormous and out of control, and I press my fist so hard into my mouth that my teeth cut into the inside of my lip and the pain is the only thing that stops it.

Blood on my tongue.

Drive cutting into my palm.

I stand in the dark, shaking and watching through the gap.

He killed their Pakhan.

They think he killed their Pakhan.

That makes no sense.

Papa isn’t—he would never—he’s an accountant, he moves money, he doesn’t kill anyone, what are they talking about, who told them that—

“Where are the files?” The quiet-voiced man crouches down to Papa’s level. The tone of someone who has done this before and found screaming inefficient. “The files you copied. The accounts. Where are they?”

“I don’t know what files you mean.” My father’s voice is steady, but I hear the wet click of blood in his throat.

A nod to someone out of my sightline.

The next blow sounds like a heavy rug being beaten against a stone floor.

Thud.

A sharp, choked-off gasp.

Then the rhythm begins, the sickening, rhythmic thud of leather meeting ribs, the scrape of furniture being shoved across the floor by the weight of a falling body.

I press my forehead against the slats of the closet door, the wood digging into my skin, and I shake.

I stop counting the hits and start counting my own breaths, gasping them in like a drowning person.

I weep silently, violently.

The tears don’t just fall; they burn, soaking into the collar of my shirt until it is heavy and cold.

The helplessness is a physical poison in my veins.

He put me here so there would be nothing I could do.

He had me promise to stay in this wooden wardrobe to watch him die through a sliver of light, and I hate him for it.

I hate him for the noble cowardice of hiding me. I hate him for the “safety” of this dark box while he is being unmade three feet away.

The quiet voice speaks again, cutting through the wet, ragged breathing on the floor. I catch the end of it through the roar of blood rushing in my ears.

“Make it clean.”

A pause. A metallic slide.

“One shot.”

I stop crying. I stop shaking.

I stop everything all at once, like something in me just cuts out, like a wire in my chest has been snapped with a pair of pliers.

The apartment goes so quiet I can hear the friction of my own pulse against my eardrums.

Crack.

The sound isn’t as loud as I expected. It was small.

Then footsteps.

Movement.

The sounds of drawers opening, shelves being cleared, rooms being systematically taken apart.

I stand in the closet and I wait and I count seconds until the sound is thin.

Until footsteps cross the foyer.

Until the ruined front door scrapes against the frame.

Silence.

I count to a hundred. Then another hundred. Then I tell myself they are gone and I open the closet door and step into the hallway.

The living room is on my left. I already know. I already know and I turn toward it anyway because I have to, because he is my father, and I cross the wrecked room in ten steps and drop to my knees on the rug beside him.

“Papa.”

I press my fingers to his neck. I press so hard I feel the bone, desperate for a quiver, a spark, a lie.

“Papa, please. Please, come on, come on—” My hands are shaking too hard to feel anything and I press harder, shifting my fingers, trying again. “No. No, no, no, Papa, look at me, please look at me—”

Nothing.

The light in the room is the same as it had been half an hour ago.

The sun is still hitting the dust motes in the air.

But his eyes are fixed on a point behind me, and they are empty.

There is no one left to hate.

There is only the quiet.

A sound comes out of me.

Something without words, something that has no shape, and I put my forehead down against his chest and sob so hard my whole body convulses with it, these horrible, gasping, ugly sobs that I couldn’t stop if I tried.

“Hey.”

My head snaps up.

Four men.

Still in the room.

The one near the window is already turning toward me—tall, dark-jacketed, hood still drawn up and casting shadow across the top half of his face. He’s completely still as he watches me.

The whole room is.

There’s that suspended, airless second where everyone is recalibrating.

His arm shifts. Just slightly. The sleeve of his jacket rides up at the wrist.

Black ink. Heavy lines. Two serpent heads on one coiled body, facing outward in opposite directions.

What is that—

Three words to the room. Low and unhurried.

Kill the girl.

I run.

I am crying and running at the same time, not clean running, not adrenaline-sharp the way it is in films, just hysterical and stumbling and sobbing so hard I can barely see the kitchen doorway in front of me.

A lamp crashes behind me.

Someone shouts.

I hit the kitchen wall with my shoulder and bounce off it and find the service door by memory alone because my vision is completely gone—tears and dark and panic.

The bolt.

The bolt that always sticks.

“No, no no no—” I wrench it with both hands, sobbing hard when it doesn’t move.

I wrench again and it gives so suddenly I nearly fall through the door into the stairwell.

Cold air.

Concrete.

Down.

I scream on the second floor landing.

Just once, just a broken, involuntary thing that tears itself out of me when I hear the door slam open above and boots hit the top stair, and then I swallow it and keep going—out into the alley.

January’s air hits me like a wall.

I run anyway.

No coat.

No shoes, just soaked socks slapping against wet concrete, still crying, still making these sounds I can’t control, wailing and running through the narrow alley behind the building with the cold tearing into my lungs and my legs burning and the drive locked so tight in my fist that the casing cracks slightly at the corner.

Behind me, shouts. Footsteps.

Closer than I need them to be.

I cut left off the alley, then right into the smaller streets, the ones that knot up through the old district.

Papa walks me through these streets on Sunday mornings.

Look where you’re going, Lenochka. Not at your feet. Always at where you’re going.

I look where I am going.

I run, weeping because that’s all I could do, and somewhere in the third block the footsteps behind me fall away and I don’t let myself slow down until I hit the underpass beneath the rail bridge and throw myself behind the first concrete column and fold completely in half.

My knees hit the ground.

I put my face in my hands and just fall to pieces.

Shaking, gasping, ugly and total, the kind of crying that doesn’t have any dignity to it at all.

Papa on the floor.

The sound his body makes.

One shot.

The way the room goes quiet after.

When I finally lift my head, my eyes are swollen and nearly shut.

I open my fist.

The drive sits in my palm. A crack runs along the bottom left corner where I’ve held it too tight.

My father died for whatever is on this. The man with the serpent on his wrist killed him for it.

I close my fingers around it again and push myself up off the ground, legs barely holding, and start moving north.

Three blocks later a woman outside a pharmacy takes one look at me and stops walking.

“Do you need help?”

“A phone,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. “Please. Just a phone.”

Just then, it dawns on me that I had my phone in my pocket all the time.

She stretchs out her phone to me and I try to smile and I’m sure I looked like a dying puppy. “Thank you, don’t worry about it.”

I walk ahead quickly, happy to feel the weight of my phone in my pocket.

Without another word, I bring out my phone and I dial Nadia’s number, standing on the frozen pavement, waiting.

Second ring.

“Lena? It’s late, what—”

“N-Nadia.” The word cracks down the middle. “I need you. I need you to come get me, I need—” Everything collapses at once, the closet and the shot and his face and the serpent and the running and all of it, crushing inward. “He’s gone. He’s gone, Nadia, they killed him, they—”

“Where are you?” Her voice sharpens immediately, all sleep gone. “Lena. Where are you right now?”

I look up at the street sign. I tell her.

I stand there on the pavement with the cracked drive in one hand and my phone pressed to my cheek, and the serpent tattoo burns behind my eyes every time I blink, and Nadia is apologizing, she’s not in town, but she’ll find someone to get me, and I am not okay, I am not going to be okay for a very long time.

But I am alive.

And I have the drive.

And I have the tattoo burned so deep it will never leave me.