So I practice the line. I adjust it for maximum shock. I get good. This is about escaping, about getting back to who I really am and away from Aleksio’s orbit. He’s like a dangerous black hole—he’ll pull you in if you’re not careful. I can feel his pull working on me with every hour we spend together.
The world I escaped to is a place where laws trump blood vendettas. Where people work together to protect the weak. Where even one death through gun violence means everybody failed. Where kids can still be saved. That’s the world I need to get back to.
It’s true what I said to Aleksio—I miss Chicago. But I can’t be who I am here.
Suddenly the phones are going off. The guns are taken from me. The joke of me being Sergei Kazan is over.
“What’s going on?”
The guys are shrugging on their jackets. They’re acting like men going to their battle stations. A hit back? Lazarus?
“Are they okay?”
Yuri bursts out onto the porch. He looks intense. He points at the picnic table that’s out there. “Sit.”
I sit.
Viktor comes out with a bottle of vodka and sets it down on the table, and then he sets down a glass. “This is for you. It’s nice. You should drink it.”
“Where’s Aleksio?”
“Aleksio is not coming.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s okay, yes.” Viktor pours the vodka into the glass.
“It’s not even dinnertime.”
Viktor sets the glass in front of me. “Was not a request.”
“What’s going on?”
Viktor pushes it toward me.
Yuri watches Viktor darkly.
“Did something happen to my father?”
“I’ll tell you if you drink it.”
I take it with shaking hands. “Is he okay?”
Viktor nods at the glass.
I down it and slam it onto the table.
“Your father is not dead.” He pours another.
“What, then? Where’s Aleksio?”
Again Viktor nods at the glass.
“I don’t want another.”
“Yet you will have another, sistra.”
“And then you’ll tell me the rest?”
“I will.”
I take the glass and drain it, then slam it on the table, feeling a weird sense of vertigo.
“Your father is awake. We will kill him, of course, but for now he lives.”
“You fucker.” I go at him but Yuri grabs me and turns me and pushes back down on the rough wooden bench, forces me to sit, using his weight to hold me still, and there’s nothing nice about it.
“Another,” Viktor says.
“What’s going on?”
“Your father needs to tell us more. He needs to get more invested in our cause.” He pours another.
“What are you going to do?”
“You know what I am going to do, I think,” Viktor says. “Now that we have no movie to show him. It was stupid what you did.”
A wave of wooziness washes over me. “No.”
“You are right-handed,” Yuri says, holding my hands and inspecting the pinky with the birthmark. I try to pull my hands to my belly, but he won’t let them go.
Tears come to my eyes. “Get Aleksio.”
“Aleksio will not come.”
I try to get up from the table, but Yuri won’t let me. He seems to know everything I’m about to do before I do it. “You can’t. My father can’t handle it. His heart can’t handle it. You need him alive, don’t you?”
“His heart.” Viktor sneers. “He does not deserve your care. He does not deserve shit.”
“You have all this wrong. He and your father were friends and partners! They were like brothers!”
He brings the glass to my lips, but I shake my head violently and it spills all over us.
“You will want that in you, I think.” Viktor fills it again.
“Why are you doing this? Think! If he really did send you away, it was to save you.”
“You are so stupid.” He sounds disgusted. “Aleksio did not want to tell you—out of kindness he did not want to tell you. ‘We are taking enough from poor Mira,’ he said.”
A horrible chill spreads through my chest.
He pours another and pushes the glass toward me. “I told him it was obvious. ‘She will work it out,’ I said to him, but he did not think that you would work it out.” Viktor shrugs. “He was right.”
“You don’t know shit,” I say.
Viktor’s eyes go dead. “Drink.”
“Fuck you.”
“We will make you drink, then.” Viktor nods at Yuri. Yuri grabs my hands and holds them behind my back while Viktor brings the glass to my lips. Again I make him spill it.
Viktor fills it again.
“Get Aleksio!”
“This I do for Aleksio. Drink.”
I sit there with my lips zipped tight, like if I don’t open my mouth I might not be able to drink, and therefore the finger chopping won’t go ahead.
“Most do not get to drink vodka,” Yuri says, pronouncing it “wodka.” “It just happens. Fwap.”
“God, you’re fucking barbarians.”
“Somebody is coming out here with a paper cutter in a few minutes,” Viktor says. “You will be drunk or sober.”
“A paper cutter?” I try wildly to jerk away, writhing in his arms. I knock him in the head and balls, and he has to put down the glass and help Yuri hold me still.
“It will happen, zolotse,” he says softly into my hair. “Is sharp. Will be fast.” He lets one of my hands free, and that’s my chance—I take the bottle by the neck, thinking to hit him, but he’s too fast. He snatches it back. I moved too slowly.
“Fuck.” I look down at my pinky, a little bent on the tip, with the freckle birthmark. This is going to happen, I think, fighting back the tears. The worst thing is thinking of my father seeing it. He’ll recognize it. He’ll know it’s mine. The blood will be too much for him.
“Shhh,” Yuri says. “You’ll get through.”
“Fuck you.” I sniffle. I should tell them about his blood thing. Or will they just use it against him? My mind feels hazy.
Viktor pours me another. This time I drink it. “I can’t do this.”
“It’s the adrenaline,” Viktor says. “Is still worse if you are sober.”
“Aleksio’s going to kill you.”
“He can kill me after we find Kiro.”
I take a drink and look at my pinky against the rough, dark wood of the picnic table, resisting the impulse to sob. Sobbing won’t solve anything; it could even make things worse. A door slams from somewhere inside the house. I perk up, hoping it’s Aleksio. But no, it’s one of the Russians coming out with a bag…from an office supply store.
My blood races as the man who was joking with me not fifteen minutes ago pulls out a box. He rips it open and pulls a big heavy paper cutter from its Styrofoam bed. I twist and turn and scream for Aleksio.
Viktor says, “The fact that you are calling for Aleksio is exactly why I made sure he cannot be here. He will not come.”
“Fuck,” I say, hyperventilating. It’s from the shock of what’s happening to me. I feel like throwing up. “Oh my God.”