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“Here is your glass of wine, madame.” The waiter comes up and places it in front of me. I lift the glass and take a sip, then glance down at my phone. My uncle should have been here twenty minutes ago. I narrow my brows and pick up my phone, tap on his contact information, and press the call button.
The ringing fills my ear, but after a few times, it goes straight to voicemail. Once his greeting plays, I leave him a message. “Hey. Not sure where you are, but I’m at the restaurant waiting on you. If you’re going to be late, let me know, or if work’s held you up, I can bring you back some dinner. Love you.” I end the call and take another sip of wine, but after ten minutes, my uncle still hasn’t shown up or called me back.
The waiter comes over to me and asks if I’ve decided what I want to eat, so I rattle off a random dish and order another glass of wine. I’m now getting worried about my uncle. He has some heart problems that are genetic, so I start thinking the worst has happened. What if his work stressed him out so badly that he had a heart attack? He could be dead on the hotel room floor. My heart beats intensely in my chest, and I do my best to calm myself down, but I can’t help worrying. I suppose it’s only natural.
While I’m waiting, I end up calling the hotel and letting them know my concerns, and they tell me they’ll have someone go check and see if he’s okay. So I try to breathe a little easier, and a few minutes later, my meal is brought out to me. I dig in and now understand the Yelp reviews are not bluffing by any means. The food here is divine, and I scarf my food down, finishing off my wine in the process.
After a few minutes, I start to feel really tired, so I ask for my check and pay. Only, my waiter brings me out a soda, telling me I should sober up a bit before I leave. I’ve only had two glasses of wine, so I’m not drunk. I appreciate he’s brought me a soda, and I do find myself very thirsty, so I drain about half of it before I stand up. But I don’t stay up for long.
I hit the ground like a ton of bricks and realize the massive error I’ve made here tonight.
I ate dinner in a restaurant hidden away in an alley, in a foreign city, by myself… with no other customers in the restaurant.
Two men—one of them is my waiter—come into view and begin speaking back and forth. As they talk, my vision becomes fuzzy until it eventually goes black.
Chapter One
Nazyr
Present Day
The only peace I can find these days is from a bottle. I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s the only thing that calms my mind. It’s why I’m here, at some random bar in the middle of Grozny, sipping on my fourth cedar nut Nastoiki. It’s distilled by the owner of the club, and I was told I should give it a shot, quite literally. That’s how my first one went down, smooth as a shot.
The bartender’s been selling me on trying the other flavors he has one day, but it won’t be tonight. I prefer to stick to the same kind of alcohol when I start drinking at night. If I don’t, I tend to be in the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning, regretting every decision I made from the night prior.
Still, I’ll likely come back to this pub in a few days and try the raspberry, cherry, lemon, or even the horseradish flavor. Why they put something like horseradish in a drink, I have no idea, but it must be damn good if they sell it. Kind of like jalapeño tequila. It doesn’t sound appetizing, but after that first shot, you just want to feel the burn again and again.
At this point, I’ve had the bartender pour me the cedar nut Nastoiki in a glass on the rocks, preferring to slowly enjoy the alcohol versus downing it all at once. Yes, I like to get to the point where I can’t remember how fucked up my life is, but I don’t try to get there in an hour. I usually like to make it a slow, progressive thing.
Fuck, even thinking about it is pulling me back to what my sister, Eset, told me a few days ago. She said I’m using alcohol to numb my pain, to cast away the betrayal I’m feeling from our mother lying to us. I didn’t even argue with my little sister because she wasn’t wrong. If anything, she’s right on the money.
My entire life, I thought I was someone completely different. I thought I was Anzor’s child, who I always believed was my brothers’ stepfather. It turns out that part is true, but I was never Anzor’s son, and Eset was never his daughter. Little did we know the man who raised us—the same man who betrayed who I once believed were my half-brothers—wasn’t related to us at all. Instead, we faced a different sort of truth.
We discovered our mother had fertility problems when she was conceiving my brothers and had gone to a fertility clinic out of the country with her former husband, who was killed many years ago. They must have done a few rounds of IVF and had embryos on ice. My mother became pregnant when she was with Anzor, and he thought he was the father. But he wasn’t. My real father is the man Anzor is responsible for killing. My sister isn’t Anzor’s child either. No, my sister and I share a birth father with Ruslan and Lom.
Anzor wasn’t a good man by any means. He was fueled by his quest for power and greedier than any man I know. He would bite the hand that fed him, so to speak… but he was still the man who raised me. He was still the man who helped me shape who I am today… and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
That’s why I drink every night because I don’t know who I am anymore.
I mean, I do know: I’m Nazyr Umarova.
At first, the changing of my surname was only meant to show unification between my supposed half-brothers, me, and my sister… but now it doesn’t have the same meaning whatsoever. Now it’s real. I am Nazyr Umarova, and facing that reality has been difficult. I feel robbed of the right to even know who my biological father was as a man. At least Ruslan and Lom have some memories of him, but Eset and I were never given the pleasure of meeting him. He was already dead by the time we were born.
There are times when I wonder if my mother would’ve even had Eset or me if he hadn’t died, and as much as I’ve thought about it, I can’t figure it out. Maybe she would’ve. Or maybe we were just more pawns in her constant life game of chess. We know she didn’t have us because she wanted more children. She had us to keep herself relevant and safe.
Anzor might not have known his “children” were of Umarova blood, but our mother sure did, and she had to have done it to keep her own hide safe. She knows how valuable the Umarova family is here in Grozny, and it’s the only reason I can see why she did it. She wanted to keep herself safe for as long as possible. You’d think she’d eventually fear Anzor discovering the truth, but he never did. Even up to the hour of his death, he didn’t have the slightest thought she would’ve done something like this to him.
“Care for another?” the bartender asks me, and I realize I’ve finished my drink.
“Sure, that would be great,” I reply, and he takes my empty glass and then goes over to prepare me a new one.
“Is this seat taken?” a woman with a voice as smooth as butter asks, and I turn to my left. She’s not anything special. She’s your average Chechen woman, but she’ll do. I’m willing to do anything to numb my pain, even if it means burying myself between her thighs later.
“No, it isn’t,” I state, and she smiles brightly while she slides onto the seat.
The bartender comes over, places my drink in front of me, and then looks at the woman. “What can I get you, miss?”
“Raspberry Nastoiki on the rocks, please.” The bartender nods at her, and then she looks over at me. “What’s your poison tonight?”
