Page 22

22

ANASTASIA

F ather’s office is off-limits.

It has been ever since he died, unless we need something really important regarding past businesses that weren’t grabbed when his office was quickly scrubbed after his death at my request.

Becoming the Godmother was one thing, but I couldn’t inherit his office like he did from his father.

He died in there, and the thought of spending my working hours in the same place he was killed turned my stomach.

So, I had the place cleared out of the majority of files and made it a no-go zone.

I heard the whispers that people thought it was because I wasn’t strong enough to handle my grief or that there was some weird superstition involved.

That’s never been it.

The handle is cold to the touch, and despite my need to step inside the one place I never wanted to visit again, something holds me back.

The memory of him in that chair with his arms limp, his head back and his throat slit wide open like a letterbox, is hard to ignore.

It rests constantly on the edge of my mind, haunting every step I take toward my future.

I hold the handle until the metal grows warm under my touch.

Outside, wind and rain howl together like a dangerous symphony.

The lights flicker, and a pinch of nervousness trickles down my spine like the scrape of a long fingernail.

I just need one file.

An old file, if it even exists.

In and out.

It’s not like his ghost is going to be waiting for me.

Swallowing hard, I turn the handle.

The office door opens with a familiar creak, followed by the familiar snap of the stiff upper hinge snapping free from its resting place.

His door has always been like that, and as a child, the sound of his door opening was always as scary as a gunshot.

It was the sign that I was to be on my best behavior since my father was no longer confined to his office and nine times out of ten, he was in a bad mood.

Pushing the door open, the scents of leather, old books, and faint alcohol sting my nose just underneath the sickeningly sharp chemical smell from when we cleaned up his body and all of the blood.

I blink as the lights flicker once more.

My father’s body appears in the chair for a split second.

His skin is pale, his eyes wide open and his mouth parted in a scream that escaped through the large slit in his throat.

Blood sprays up the window behind his chair, across the surface of his wooden desk, staining all the important papers he was working on, and down onto the floor in an arc.

I blink and the memory is gone, leaving my heart to skip nervously in my chest.

“Come on, Anastasia,” I murmur softly to myself, closing the door.

“Don’t jump at ghosts.”

I need information on the Yegorovs, if there is any that even exists.

I don’t recall my father ever joining with another family, for business or otherwise, which is why it’s alarming to me that he had some kind of business partner for the sickening advancement of his precious business.

The fact that Tatiana has come to make a deal fills me with a quiet concern I can’t share with anyone.

Is she here because she really wants us to work together on the condos like she said, or is it for another reason?

Does she want to be close to me in any capacity because she or her husband are that partner my father was working with, and she wants whatever he left behind?

I need to check before my suspicious mind ruins what could be a crazy good deal for me.

My father’s filing cabinets line the right-hand wall behind his desk.

As I make my way toward them, it’s difficult not to notice all the little things about the office that made it one of the worst places from my childhood.

Countless hours sitting on that hard leather sofa waiting eagerly to show my father something cool I did with my tutors, only to be met with anger that I was even in there.

Even more hours were spent waiting outside, hoping for a glimpse of my father beyond the silence at dinner if he ever turned up.

Outside, the rain lashes against the window with enough force to make the glass panes shake.

The wind howls down the chimney, escaping through the fireplace with a loud whistle as if trying to blow out the nonexistent flame.

I pause and skim my hand along the wooden mantelpiece to a small chip in the edge of the wood from where my forehead bounced off it as a child.

My father had slapped me so hard in anger that I lost my balance and almost fell into the fire.

In a bid to stop myself, I had tried to fall away from the fireplace and ended up cracking my forehead against the wood, chipping the antique, much to my father’s further anger.

The chip has smoothed with age, but the memory still stings.

Turning, I step around the small leather seat next to the drinks table and walk over a rather ugly olive-green rug.

Just glancing at it makes my gut clench and my hands throb in memory.

I’d tried to act like a grown-up and had been so excited about how fancy and elegant I felt holding a wine glass.

Until I got too excited and spilled the wine all over the wooden floor.

My father had been furious and made me scrub for days to clean up the stain with unknown chemicals that merely burned my hands and stripped the wood of all color.

The chemical burns on my skin took weeks to recover, and even now, extreme temperatures make them ache and throb.

My father took some twisted glee in watching me suffer while berating me the entire time about the destruction I'd caused.

If I could, I’d burn this entire fucking office to the ground.

I make it to his desk and hesitate.

The filing cabinets are a few feet away, but I’m suddenly rooted to the spot. I close my eyes, and I’m right back in that moment with his dead body slumped back in his chair and the scent of death in the air.

The very last conversation I had with my father wasn’t one of love.

It was an argument.

He called me in here, and like every other time he did, I stupidly got my hopes up thinking that finally, this was the time when I would get to do something useful. That he would finally see my potential and realize the terrible, abusive way he'd treated me all these years was just part of some twisted training to harden me into someone who can survive in this world.

I was wrong.

He made me stand in front of his desk while he drank and gleefully told me that I was to be sold off.

Not engaged.

Not married.

Sold.

I was a money sink, in his words.

I had no worth.

No use.

No family was worth marrying into because no family would want someone like me.

I was a bad deal waiting to happen and he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He didn’t have time to worry about what I was up to when he had more important things to focus on, and he wanted nothing more to do with me.

So he was selling me.

He held his drink up and laughed that he would probably need to be the one spending money and paying someone to take me off his hands.

I thought he was drunk and joking, but when he listed all my failed engagements to much smaller families, something clicked in my mind.

He had only ever tried to wed me to smaller, insignificant families because he didn’t want a union with a family that could become a threat.

In some ways, he saw me as a threat.

His own daughter.

The one he beat and berated, blamed for the death of my mother while she was in childbirth, the one who only ever just wanted to be seen.

Something snapped in me that night and I argued back.

I told him I knew all about his plans to traffic children and that I was going to stop him.

I was going to go public and present the foul change to the other families so that he would finally know what it felt like to feel like the whole world was against him.

Looking back, I ran my mouth without much thought as to how I was going to do that, but it felt good at the time.

In fact, it felt amazing.

I’d watched his face relax in shock and the realization that I finally had some kind of power over him.

I knew his secret.

His filthy secret that would mean his end.

Staring at his desk, a tremble shoots down my arms and legs.

I close my eyes, and the last conversation I had with my father floods my mind.

He threw his drink at me and it smashed against the fireplace.

He cursed my existence and everything about me, told me how often he’d thought about smothering me in my crib as revenge for what I did to my own mother.

He told me he was going to sell me for a penny to the highest bidder and no one would ever hear from me again.

When I laughed in his face, he lunged at me with such fury that for a few seconds, I was certain I was going to die.

The rest is a blur.

I think the letter opener ended up in my hand through pure desperation and when he flew at me, I just reacted.

I had no idea a letter opener could do so much damage to someone.

It slit his throat like a hot wire through ice.

We stared at each other for what felt like an eternity, then he stumbled back into his chair and blood spurted from his throat like a fountain.

It all happened so fast that it still doesn’t feel real.

But I did it.

I killed my father.

I murdered him to save myself, and then I tried to make it look like a break-in and assassination to save myself further.

I ran outside, broke the window, and even scuffed up the back gate to make it look like someone had snuck past security.

I wiped security cameras in the house and looped them to compensate for the lost footage.

Thankfully, my father didn’t have a camera in his office because he was too paranoid.

But I did it.

I killed him.

And the entire family has been scouring the city for months in search of his killer.

Coldness envelops me as the storm rages outside, and my father’s chair sits empty, still stained with blood that couldn’t be scrubbed out.

Nausea warms my gut, sending hot tingles all over my skin, followed by a flush of goosebumps.

I swallow hard and step past his desk to the filing cabinets where the remainder of the files are kept, and as I open them and search for anything regarding the Yegorovs, it dawns on me how limited my time may be.

Every step I take to move the family forward and advance my own business involves risk, but if my father did have dealings with the Yegorovs, then I’ll need a good excuse to decline their offer.

I can’t take the risk that they are my father’s mysterious, unknown business partner.

But declining has its own risks.

Viktor is watching me like a hawk, and the last thing I need is to give him another excuse to probe deeper.

Without a scapegoat, I’m on borrowed time.

The laws of our family, and every other Bratva family in New York, are absolute.

Murdering the Pakhan , the leader of the Russian Mafia, is a death sentence.

Even for his daughter.

Some rules are absolute.

In a perfect world, I would have gathered evidence and presented it to the heads of the other most powerful Russian families in the city, and they would have dealt with him.

Instead, I murdered him.

And if anyone ever finds out, it will be my neck in the guillotine.