Page 29 of Ruinous Need

VIKTOR

THE MOUNTAIN HOUSE is one of the few places that I have joyful childhood memories.

They’re hazy and they were when I was very young, before my father became the Pakhan.

I remember laughter, wide hallways to run down and being able to play with anyone in the house. I would race around the property, in the snow and the sun, and if I fell there was always a comforting hug at the other end. No one told me to stop crying in those days.

This is where I met Lev.

His parents owned the holiday home across the road from ours, which is now overgrown and abandoned. In those early days, our parents were great friends and would invite his family over for dinner.

We’d play spies together for hours, hiding in strange places around the house until the staff found us and told us to get out of the way, when we’d declare, “Mission compromised,” and sprint off to find a new hiding place.

I tell Lisette about these memories as we walk through the snow. She was feeling better today and craving some fresh air after her endometriosis left her near-immobile for days. She immediately detects the sadness in my eyes when I talk about him.

“What happened?”

I’ve never told anyone. Not the whole story.

But it comes tumbling out with Lisette here, holding my hand as we walk across the slopes where Lev and I would have raced each other on sleds. Now that she knows about my father, it feels only right to tell her the full story.

After my father became Pakhan, he became paranoid and convinced that his friends and allies would betray him. That was all he thought about, his thinking becoming increasingly conspiratorial the longer he was the Pakhan.

Alliances, betrayals, punishments and reprisals. Who would betray him, how and when. Sometimes he was right; most of the time he was wrong.

The job consumed him. He wasn’t the same man I remembered from childhood.

I don’t know where it came from, this need to increase his power, but it spread like bitter poison through our whole lives. He started to beat my mother and me. We were just another element of his need for control over everything. Image became an obsession.

I was a possession to be moulded into the right shape so that I could fulfill the role he set up for me. Not a person, but an extension of my father.

I had been training with weapons every day since I was thirteen, under his warped instruction. He would place photos of my friends on the boxing gloves and dummies we used to practice.

“Imagine if Andrei betrayed you. He would deserve to die, wouldn’t he?“

The taunting set me on edge, pushing me away from my friends, until I lashed out at them too.

I knew the plots and betrayals he made up weren’t real, but my father planted these ideas in my head and brought them to life. Until my head was so twisted that I could taste what it would feel like to have my friends betray me.

I dreaded the day I would have to kill, but I knew it was coming. He made it seem inevitable.

The trainings got more violent. Any weakness I showed was punished with increasingly harsh torture. A week locked in the basement. A minute of holding my arm over the gas element in the kitchen. Beating my mother in front of me and continuing for as long as I cried.

I learned how to stop my tears quickly.

Father didn’t reserve his torture for his enemies and traitors. He used it on his family too.

Then, when I turned fifteen, the day I dreaded arrived.

He decided I needed to prove myself as a worthy heir. It was an embarrassment, he said, to have a weak son with no reputation to speak of.

He placed a gun in my hand and gave me an assignment. I would help him hunt traitors, he said.

There was nothing my father loved more than hunting traitors.

I remember the house.

I walked through it with wonder. It felt like a home in a way my own house never really had. Papers and toys covered every surface. There was a full bowl of fruit in the kitchen. Stuck to the fridge was a drawing of the family as stick figures.

A family lived here. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t expected that the traitors would be a family.

That confused me. I barely knew what my father did. How could children be traitors?

It was nighttime, and they were asleep. My job was to kill all of them in their beds.

My father had called me before his council to give me the assignment. His allies on the Council leered at me as though I was a piece of livestock on display all sitting around their dark table.

“They don’t think you’ve got it in you, boy.” My father’s voice boomed with authority.

“I don’t have what in me?” I remember feeling embarrassed that my voice squeaked at the end. It had only just broken.

“The power to lead,” my father said. “They want you to prove yourself.” There was a dark gleam in his eye.

I puffed my chest out. That was something I could do. I was acing my weapons training.

“I’ll do it whatever you tell me.” I made the promise and wished I could take it back the second I saw the way my father‘s lips curled into a cruel, satisfied smile. He’d wanted me to make a promise.

He indicated the seat beside him. I had never sat at the Council table before.

The council told me what I would have to do.

“Do you swear?” they asked me. “Do you swear that you will complete the task?”

I felt sick to my stomach, but I agreed.

As I stole through that house, my first thought was: this will be easy. I felt relieved.

A house full of sleeping people. All I needed to do was move fast enough from room to room.

If we don’t kill the traitors, they’ll kill us. My father‘s voice echoed through my head. The fear pulsed in my veins that any second they could wake up and know who I was. If they were traitors, that meant they wanted me dead.

That was what my father said.

And, at fifteen, I still trusted him. His conspiracies weren’t crazy talk to me. They were real risks facing us.

Memory is merciful sometimes. I don’t remember anything until it was over, and I was leaving bloody footprints along the hallway. It was like I was in a trance. I was proud of myself for being so efficient. I couldn’t wait for my father to finally accept me.

Then something drew me out of the trance. A photo.

I stopped there for what felt like an hour.

Lev. He smiled back at me from the photos, his arms slung around his mother’s neck. His younger sister sat between her father and mother. They were all laughing, carefree.

Bile rose in my throat.

I sprinted back along the hallway, into the first room I saw, and there he was.

Lev.

My best friend, covered in blood but still breathing in shallow gasps. He looked at me and I’ll never forget the way he tried to scramble away from me, but he was too weak to move.

His mouth opened, but all that came out was a bubble of blood.

I threw myself on him, trying to staunch the bleeding with my bare hands, but it was much, much too late.

As he died, he looked at me like I was a monster.I couldn’t even cry as the horror spread through my veins.

Someone dragged me up by my shoulders and a numb feeling spread inside me. I recognized the heavy scent of him like cigars and incense.

“You did well. A worthy heir and soldier.”

No apology.

No explanation.

He held a ceremonial dinner in my honor and announced that I would succeed him as Pakhan. And I vowed that day that I never would. Instead, I made it my mission to destroy his legacy.

The scene became something of a myth among the Bratva. People were split between whether I was a figure of terror or the perfect heir.

I knew exactly what I was: a monster.

The image of my father.

“Hey,” Lisette’s musical voice brings me back to the present. “I don’t even know what to say except I’m so, so sorry Viktor. Your father sounds like he was hideous.”

Her fingers trail lightly down the side of my face, over my jaw and down my neck. Running over the shape of my tattoos. Soothing me. Anchoring me to reality instead of the past. She buries her face against my chest and inhales deep.

I expected Lisette to run once I’ve finished my story. Once she saw me for what I was.

“Worse than hideous.”

Her face is hidden but she clings to me tighter than ever.

When she looks up at me, resting her chin against my chest, her sea-green eyes are sparkling with tears.

“That’s a monstrous story, Viktor. But it doesn’t make you a monster.”

I tighten my jaw. “There are some things we can never be forgiven for.” I’m back in the past right now, running through the memories like it’s an old photo album.

Lisette brings me back to the present, running her mouth over my jaw.

“No. This is who you are. Not whatever twisted mission your father gave you when you were a teenager.”