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My forehead hurt from the intensity of my glowering. Dick. His comment reminded me there had been one question nagging at me since our conversation at the warehouse.
“Why me, Mikhail? Why did you want me in Moscow? Why did you want me to take over as Pakhan?”
He stared at me for a moment, and I could feel how the words were stuck in his throat. Whatever his reason, it clearly wasn’t something he enjoyed discussing.
“Come, Ivan,” he said, his voice sounding like gravel as he gestured me away from Emmy and Drago. I instinctively pulled her tighter, then realized I needed to get my shit together.
“I’ll take her to her mother and Anya,” Drago offered.
I nodded and turned to Emmy, holding her close. “Be good, malyshka.”
She gave me a tired smile. “I’m too exhausted to be anything else.”
I gave her a hard kiss and watched her walk away with Drago.
“You should see your face.”
My head swung around to look at Mikhail. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve changed a lot from the boy I met so long ago.” He was referring to when I was on the run from Yuri and found myself in Russia. I was twenty at the time, so referring to me as a boy was not entirely inaccurate, but it was far from flattering.
“Yeah, I mean, of course.”
He shook his head and pulled out a cigarette. He rarely smoked, which made me even more curious about what he had to tell me. “No, you were broken when I first met you, Ivan. Closed, damaged, angry. When you look at that girl…” he trailed off and lit his cigarette. “You want to know about why I wanted you in Russia?”
“Yes.”
“It’s about Svetlana.”
My heart stopped. “My mother? What about her?”
“I knew her when she was in Russia. I loved her once.”
I stood completely still, stunned at what he was saying. “You were with my mom?”
“For nearly a year, yes. I was young, coming up in the organization. I didn’t know how to be a real man. I was an asshole, fucked around, blew her off, but I loved her. She got sick of my shit and left me, as she should have because she deserved better. Instead of fighting for her, I acted like a proud, dumb as fuck kid, and I let her go.”
“Are you…?”
“Your father? No, but I could have been. Should have been. She wanted my time, my attention and my fidelity and I refused to give it to her because my focus was on the Bratva. I thought giving in to her demands made me weak.” He took a heavy drag on his cigarette, as if the nicotine might ease his rioting emotions. “Svetlana ended things after countless disappointments, but I was still angry that she left me. So, I moved on and she met your piece of shit father.” His features tightened in remembered pain. “He praised her, gave her gifts, took her out—basically gave her everything I’d denied her. Your mother…she didn’t have much, she grew up in poverty, like most of us. He gave what she thought she wanted. Stability, money, attention. When he proposed, she said yes, and he moved her to Chicago.”
“Did you know Yuri killed her?”
“No. They told me something completely different, that she and Yuri’s wife had been targeted by Serbians. I killed a lot of fucking Serbians that year,” he said, wiping a hand down his sad face.
He continued. “When I saw you in Russia—Christ, you looked just like her. Her hair, her eyes. You even had her northern Russian accent.” He had a soft smile on his face, clearly lost in thoughts of my mother. “It cut me when I saw you. I knew she’d still be alive, would still be with me if I had gotten my shit together. Having you in Russia was like…” Again, he trailed off, taking a big drag off his cigarette.
“Like having her there?”
He nodded. “Yes, to an extent, but it was more than that. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife, but I’d failed Svetlana. I didn't protect her. I knew Sergei was a fuckhead, that she was too good for him, but I was too proud to intervene. Then she was dead. If I couldn’t save her, I would save her son.”
“Is that why you sent Pavel back here?”
He gave a brief nod. “He’ll find her. He knows the consequences if he doesn’t. It’s the only reason he’s still alive.”
I was reeling from this information, but it explained a lot. His latitude with my behavior and general surliness, his fixation on me being in Russia, his desire to have me follow in his footsteps. It also explained why he never cheated on his wife, why he valued the relationship. He’d learned the consequences of taking a woman for granted.
“I’ll make sure to come back and visit once a year, at least. I’ll have to bring Emmy, so I can’t do anything too dangerous. Not like the shit I used to do.”