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Tears well in my eyes. “I appreciate that, Kay. I love you, and I always want you to be okay. But I’d also trust you if you told me to back off.”
There’s a pause. “Are you telling me to back off?”
“In the kindest way possible… yeah. I love that you care about me, but I really am fine.”
She sighs. “I want to believe you, but I don’t even recognize the number you’re calling from. Did you get a new number?”
“It’s just temporary. It’s a burner phone.”
“Yakov gave you a phone?”
I chew on my lower lip. “I… got the phone from him.”
There is still so much about Yakov’s day-to-day life that I know nothing about. Kayla just aired out his dirty laundry. Yakov is a criminal. A criminal criminal.
And yet…
“Yakov is protecting me,” I tell her. “I really believe that. I trust him.”
Kayla sighs. “I really fucking hope you’re right, girl.”
That makes two of us.
33
YAKOV
“Mariya should stay with you. She needs her mother.”
My mother scoffs on her end of the call. “She doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think she needs anyone. If Mariya had her way, she’d walk out that door and never come back. Some days, I’m tempted to let her.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You know that letting her run off wouldn’t be safe for her.”
“I know it just fine! Now, I need Mariya to know it. But she is stubborn. As stubborn as your father was. Maybe worse.” She sighs. “She’s just like him, anyway. He was her favorite. Out of the two of us, he was the one who could talk sense into her.”
“Mariya loves you, but she’s a teenager. She’s going to act out. It’s normal.”
“This isn’t normal, Yakov,” she insists. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this before. Three kids and I am out of my depth. You were never like this.”
That’s not true. I was just better at hiding it. The things I did that my mother knew nothing about could fill books and those books could fill libraries.
“I was raised knowing what I would inherit. It was different for me.”
“Your brother was never like this, either. Nik was such a good boy,” she says fondly. “He never gave me any trouble.”
That’s because she left the country when Nikandr was sixteen. He didn’t have time to give her trouble.
In a matter of two months, our father was shot in front of us, our mother took Mariya with her across the globe, and I became Nik’s only family member and his pakhan.
I could point all of this out, but it would just send her into a grief spiral I don’t have time to pull her out of. I didn’t even want to take this call. The plan was to ignore it and wait for her to text the way she always does. After a few hours had passed and whatever fight she and Mariya had gotten into had cooled off, then I’d text back.
But she called and called and called.
By the time I finally picked up, my mother was crying. “You know what it does to me when you don’t answer the phone right away. It takes me right back.”
The day my father was killed, I rode with him in the ambulance. His phone kept ringing in his pocket. The EMT handed it to me and said I could answer it if I wanted to. It was my mother.
I let it ring.
