My lips part as I take a sharp, heavy breath in.
They’re my children.
Chapter2 - Selene
The past two months have been hell. The pastfive yearshave been hell. Far worse than the last two months, actually. But I am so tired today that I can hardly string a thought together. My beautiful babies, Solenne and Arron, have been so amazingly patient during the last two months. At five years old, they are far too young to worry about things, but I know they worry about me. And it’s getting harder to hide my exhaustion and my fear from them.
Fear that follows me everywhere with the need to be vigilant at every corner, every store, in every moment of every day… my father could come from anywhere. And I know he has men tracking us. I haven’t seen them yet, but I can feel them. Their eyes are always on us.
That’s why we have to keep moving. Motel to motel, staying hidden, stayingfree. We have to keep this up long enough for me to find a way out of the country that he can’t trace.
“Mommy, can we have cookies?” Arron asks, drawing my attention as he steals a quick glance over his shoulder at his sister, who has clearly instigated the question. She shoos him forward, encouraging him.
“For breakfast?” he adds, as though it’s important.
“Cookies for breakfast?” I smile, trying to make my voice sound lighthearted and happy. It feels like every smile I have lately is fake. I’m so tired I feel it in my bones.
I look around the motel room, taking it in. Bare, bland, and beige. It’s boring and horrible. The curtains are drawn to keep us hidden, and it’s dark in here despite the beautiful sunny morning outside.
“How about… we go to the park instead?” I ask, thinking that I can’t keep them locked away like this. They need sun, they need a break. They need to have some genuine fun for a moment.
“Really?” Solenne pushes past her brother, grabbing my hand and staring at me with as serious a gaze as she can muster. Her caramel eyes, just like her brothers’, still make my heart stammer sometimes. Sometimes—when they remind me of Simon.All the time. Every day.
“Yes, really. Go get your shoes on. You too, Arron. Maybe we can get cookies on the way home.”
Both of them leap into action, laughing and climbing over the beds in search of their socks and shoes.
It breaks my heart that this is the first time in their lives that they can laugh loudly without me having to hush them for fear of it bothering my father.
For five years, he has ruled our lives, ruled every movement and every choice I made. He controlled me and held me prisoner in a place that was supposed to be a home.
My father is a Bratva man, but many people have no idea. He isn’t the conventional mafia man who makes a splash by being well known and powerful; instead, he prefers to move quietly and under the radar. His entire business was built around providing untraceable services to other Bratva families. Services to make things, people, or problems disappear. And he happens to be very good at it. He can move anything anywhere, and no one will know if he doesn’t want them to. He can make it so that a person is living right under your nose, and you won’t know they exist.
He mademedisappear. He turned me into a ghost. Apt, considering that when people whisper about my father, they don’t talk about Alek Mykros. They talk aboutThe Ghost.
He’s my father, my family, but I hate him.
He was never an easy man to be around, but when my mother died, he seemed to become darker, colder, and less caring than ever before.
Perhaps in a way, she was the thread of good that made him seem softer, but when she was gone, he was broken and free to be himself. I was young when she died, twelve years old.
The entire home changed. My older brothers changed. Vasya, Bogdan, Yaroslav, and Yakov all became his puppets. Pawns to be carved into whatever he wanted them to be. And they didn’t know any better. They obeyed without question because questions earned your punishment. Painful, bruising, bleeding, starving punishment.
As his only daughter, I was not exempt from such punishment and also learned to obey without question.
That was until I met Simon. I was twenty. Young. Naive in some ways, but full of curiosity for a world I felt I didn’t know enough about. I was frustrated with my father, but at that point in my life, he hadn’tbrokenme. I still had dreams and hopes and ideas.
And I had Simon.
I met him by chance at a coffee shop. We connected right away, and for six months, he was my entire world. My everything. He told me his name, and I recognized it right away. Volkov. A prominent mafia family in the city. Powerful, more powerful than my father, and one of our rivals. Instinctively, I gave him my mother’s maiden name instead of the Mykros name. It wasn’t meant as a lie. It was my first step towards leaving my father, leaving the name, the misery… I wanted to be someone else with Simon; finally, I could be.
I would argue with my father at home and then escape to see Simon, and he would make me forget everything bad that had ever happened to me. With him like was perfect. He was my home. My home in a way I had never experienced before.
Simon looked at me as though he truly saw me. We laughed for hours, we talked for hours, and we could be silent for hours, just lying in each other’s arms.
I wanted to give him everything of me, and I wanted him to be my life.
I think he felt the same. But when I think about it now, I might have been naive. Not that it matters anymore, it’s in the past, and I can never have him back. Even though he still owns my heart to this day.
