Now, the darker side of my world has come slamming back to hit me full force. If my worst fears are correct, it’s about to touch my son.
I stare at the TV screen in shock. I’m watching the Russian news channel, and there are reports of a shooting in Moscow. In my building. The place where Yulia is right now, with her partner, Melissa.
Heart pounding, I grab my phone.
“Da,” Vasily answers on the first ring.
“Turn on the news,” I grind out.
He does, and his sharp intake of breath tells me he’s seeing what I am.
“I need you to get over there and check on Yulia and Melissa right now. I can’t have Michael waking up and hearing about this before I know they are okay and can reassure him.”
I hear Vasily moving around. “On my way over there right now, boss.”
“Call me as soon as you know anything.”
I try to calm down by telling myself the news didn’t mention it being the penthouse apartment where the shooting occurred. Yulia still lives there. I took the apartment next door for my infrequent visits, which isn’t quite as grand, but what do I care? I’m hardly there.
The last two years have seen business, both legit and non-legit, explode. The legit side has given me wealth and status; the non-legit side has given me power and even more wealth.
On the legit side I buy and sell firms and make a fortune. On the non-legit side I deal in armaments and make a fortune. I used to deal in cigarettes, weed, and other drugs, but that shit is small time and messy. I play with the big boys now. Hell, I am the big boys… The biggest.
I bite my cheek as I watch the rolling ticker tape of headlines, trying to gain more information.
Since we’ve moved up from smuggling cigarettes and weed, Vasily and I haven’t had to shake anyone down. We don’t go after the small fry hoodlums dealing on the corners, so we have few enemies within Moscow. The only people we had to remove from the situation were cartel members from South America who had the fucking temerity to try to take over our operation in America. I dealt with them ruthlessly, so there isn’t any of them left to come after us.
It won’t be Yulia, I tell myself. It won’t be. I can’t have failed someone else in my life. It’s like losing my sister all over again if I lose Yulia.
Thirty minutes later my phone goes, and I answer it, heart hammering so hard I can barely breathe.
“Boss,” it’s all Vasily says. It’s all he has to say.
“Fucking no.” I throw the phone against the wall.
Shit, Michael. How can I tell him? How? I know this pain. Know what it does to a person. How it eats them up inside, destroying the good until only bad remains. It’s insidious, like poison.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I need to control myself, to calm down. He needs me. I can’t lose it now.
I go to my phone and curse when I see it’s unusable. I grab the landline and dial Vasily’s number, grateful I know it by heart.
“How? How did they die?” I ask.
“Konstantin…”
Oh shit. It must be bad if he doesn’t want to tell me.
“Tell me now.”
“They were raped, both of them, and then executed.”
Oh shit, no. Not that. No, no, no.
Something is on my cheek irritating me, and I wipe it away to find my skin wet. I’m crying, and I hadn’t even realized. I never cry.
“Is it the Mexicans?” I ask.
“No, boss. I … you’re not going to… I don’t know how to say this.”
What the fuck?
“Spit it out,” I growl.
“The police have two men in custody. One is a young vagrant, high on meth.”
So this was random? Jesus fucking Christ. “The odds of this being random are…”
“Yeah, I’m not finished, Konstantin. The other man … is your father.”
And just like that any remaining good in me dies. Extinguished by the man who helped give me life. That very same man has snuffed out anything left over of the old Konstantin, the boy who still saw the good in some people, who married his childhood friend to help her out. He’s gone, consumed by the vicious, violent man I’ve been becoming for many years.
I drop the phone and bend over.
Fuck, I can’t breathe.
I struggle to get air into my lungs and as soon as I manage it, I regret it because it seems to trigger the contents of my stomach to force their way back up my throat.
I throw up all over my extortionate carpet, unable to stop it.
My father? My fucking father? That piece of shit, good for nothing bastard did this? How? Why?
I can hear Vasily shouting at me to pick up the phone, so on autopilot I do.
My hands are shaking like crazy as I hold it to my ear.
“How?” I grind out. “How the fuck did my father manage to pull off something like this?”
“I don’t know,” Vasily says. “He had to have help, though, Kon, and I think it’s got to have come from within.”
He’s right. No way would my useless father and some drug-addled street kid have the knowledge or skills to break into the penthouse. It was highly guarded by a state-of-the-art security system and cameras, so they had to have help.
“Find out, Vasily. You find out, and I don’t fucking care what you have to do in order to get them to talk.”
“Of course.”
“Go to Ilya.” I tell him. Ilya is a friend, and he’s like me—partially legit, a whole lot not.
“Ask Ilya for some men. Other than you, no one else from within our organization can know any of this. Not even Denis or Bohdan; not for now.”
“Done. And, Konstantin.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to go; I need to wake Michael and tell him his mother is dead.”
I hang up the phone, and walk in a daze to the kitchen. Grabbing the bottle of Scotch from the side, I drink straight out of the bottle until I’m able to think clearly.
Okay, firstly, I need to clear up the mess down here. The sick, the smashed shit. Then, I need to get ahold of my contacts in the Moscow police force. I don’t want any of the details of Yulia’s death releasing to anyone. If the media get a whiff of this, they’ll splash it everywhere, and I can’t have Michael finding out about what truly happened to his mother. Not ever.
I go through everything, numb and locked down. By the time I’m ready to talk to Michael, I’m feeling like shit. I’m frozen cold, and it’s nothing to do with the temperature.
My father, my own blood deserted me and his family, and if that wasn’t enough, he then came to me sniffing after my money. When I refused him, he did this … this abomination against a woman under my protection. My fucking wife.
It doesn’t matter that our marriage wasn’t the real thing. I respected and loved her like a member of my family. He defiled her, and now I will make him suffer.
Why now? Did he wait for so long after I sent Vasily to give him a beat down for a reason? They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I’m going to get mine hot. So hot. He’s going to pay in the most painful and depraved manner.
I want him dead, but slowly. I want him tortured, his fucking fingernails torn out, and his tongue cut out, or maybe… I’ll make him eat his own dick. I want him to know untold pain before he dies.