I need to be careful. If Jasper thinks there’s feelings between myself and Dasha, I have no doubt he’ll get rid of me, and that just won’t do.
I might not know if I love her or hate her. I might not understand what I’m doing here, or what I want from her. Hell, I don’t know what I want from myself half the time. One thing I do understand, however, is that she is on some fundamental level mine. My bright jewel. And no one gets to do the things this fucker is doing to Dasha to something that is mine.
I turn to Jasper and smile at him. I try to infuse it with some warmth, but all I am thinking about is the ways I’m going to make him bleed.
“With all due respect, unless it’s relevant to me protecting her, the less I know about your wife the better. We are trained never to get close, not emotionally. Never get attached. It can affect your judgment, you see.”
“Of course. I don’t see how you’d get attached to her, though.” He points to Dasha on the stage. “She’s nothing but a blank slate. What she can do up there is magic, but I believe the only reason she can pull such magic is because fundamentally, deep down, there’s something essential missing within her. Something that fills most of us with warmth, life, desires, needs, and wants. Dasha doesn’t have that. She only wants to dance. Have you ever seen the film The Red Shoes?”
I shake my head.
“You ought to watch it.” He purses his lips and puts the pipe between them as if it’s lit.
God, he’s such a pretentious fool.
“I do believe that story could have been written about Dasha. Of course, the film isn’t quite as dark as the fairy tale it is based on. There, the ballerina loses her feet.”
I immediately flash to the memory of him threatening Dasha with taking a hammer to her feet, and I clench my fists at my sides.
“Of course,” he continues, oblivious to my blinding rage. “Swan Lake is an apt role for her. Dasha is like the lead; light on the outside, but so very dark on the inside. Duplicitous, a liar, a betrayer.”
He looks at me, and I can’t breathe. Does he know? He can’t surely. Damen covered my tracks so well.
“Then again, aren’t most women?” he sneers. “They flatter and flirt and preen, but they’re all moral voids. The reason the greatest art, discoveries, and wonders of humanity are all created by men are because women, at their very core, are empty.”
He stands then, folds his paper, slots it under his arm, and walks slowly out of the theater.
If he’d stayed, I could have reeled off a whole host of women who have made amazing contributions to society, to art, to technology, and medicine. Jasper, it seems, is nothing but an old-fashioned misogynist with some very dubious ideas, with a deep streak of sadism at his core.
Soon, he’s going to find out what it’s like when the shoe is on the other foot.
Soon, he’s going to find out what it’s like when you’re the one in pain.
I’m going to make him suffer so beautifully.
Chapter Nine
Bohdan
Aged thirteen.
“You little fuck,” my father yells, white spittle coating his thin lips.
He hates me. I think he hates me because I’m not his.
I can’t be. No one in his family looks any different to him. Beady eyes, thin lips, a weak jaw, and all of them under five-feet-eight.
I’m already five-feet-eight, and twice as clever as him, and I’m just a kid. I’ve got blond hair, after a summer in the sun, blue eyes, and my teacher told me yesterday I had a face Michelangelo would like to sculpt. I looked him up, and he’s pretty cool.
My mom is a beauty, but she’s dark haired with deep brown eyes. She wanted to be someone. This is something my mother tells me often. She laments how she could have been famous, or at least wealthy, if her parents hadn’t made her marry my father when she was only eighteen. It was arranged. A bargain between two old families in this poverty riddled, endless suburb we live in.
I hate it here.
Living here is like something out of a zombie film some days. I love zombie films, but sometimes my friends and I joke that we watch them for light relief. We watch them to see how the better half lives, jokes Abram when we watch the zombies eating the poor unsuspecting victims.
My father shouts some more, and I try to tune him out. I wish I were bigger, heavier. I might have grown in height, but I’m still skinny, and my father is a squat, solid man. It means he can still beat me. One day, though, one day I will be bigger and stronger than him, and then I’ll make him bleed.
He runs out of steam and shakes his head at me in disgust before heading into our tiny kitchen area, probably to get some vodka.
I walk to the window and stare out. The winter trees, stripped of their leaves, rise like toothpicks amongst the giant concrete teeth of the housing blocks. Nothing but concrete as far as the eye can see.
Still, it’s better up here than it is down there.
Down there is dangerous. Wild.
People half out of their minds on drugs or drink, or both, stagger around like lost souls.
What must it be like to be one of the moneyed set who live in the middle of the beautiful parts of the old city? To go to fancy restaurants and have a beautiful woman on your arm. I wish I had money and power. Maybe this work I’m doing for Roman, my uncle, will give me enough cash to get out of here.
We’re so poor that we’ve never been into the city proper to see the beautiful buildings. That’s how little money we have. It’s probably only forty minutes away, and I’ve never seen it.
Instead, this is my grand view. The endless, snow swept, concrete jungle stretching for miles.
“You better not be making a mess,” my father shouts mystifyingly.
I’m looking out the fucking window, the idiot.
Then he bellows some more, and I shake my head. “You’re angry at me because your wife cuckolded you,” I mutter. I learned that word yesterday in literature studies.
The truly sad thing about my dad is that he actually loves my mother, and she loathes him in return. He daren’t beat her, so he beats me. He only does it when she’s out, and he always denies it, or makes up an excuse how it’s not as bad as it looks.
One of these days, I’ll pulverize him. I loathe him too. The same way Mother does. I’m not too keen on her either. I’m never having kids. I don’t want to fuck them up the way my parents have me. I’d never do that to an innocent life. Some days, a lot of days, I’d rather have not been born than put up with their endless shit.
The door to our flat opens, and a flurry of male voices fill the dank space of our kitchen. Shit. This means only one thing. My mom is out for the night, at her friends, and Dad is having a poker game.
I hate them. I hate what happens during them.
I slam my door shut, put the dresser against it, and curl up on the bed.
For three hours, I lie there listening to the men’s voices get more raucous as they drink, and gamble and fall out. Then I hear it.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The tread is heavy and slow. That means it’s him.
The door to my room opens a touch but stops when the dresser gets in its way.
“Ah, don’t be like this, Bohdan. Your dad said you might need some help with your homework.”