Another hit. A boot this time, and Papa goes down to one knee. Someone across the room says something in fast, brutal RussianI can’t fully catch—suka, ublyudok, ty dumayesh my durak—and someone else laughs, and the sound of it turns my stomach completely over.
I am going to scream. I can feel it building in my chest, enormous and out of control, and I press my fist so hard into my mouth that my teeth cut into the inside of my lip and the pain is the only thing that stops it.
Blood on my tongue.
Drive cutting into my palm.
I stand in the dark, shaking and watching through the gap.
He killed their Pakhan.
They think he killed their Pakhan.
That makes no sense.
Papa isn’t—he would never—he’s an accountant, he moves money, he doesn’t kill anyone, what are they talking about, who told them that?—
“Where are the files?” The quiet-voiced man crouches down to Papa’s level. The tone of someone who has done this before and found screaming inefficient. “The files you copied. The accounts. Where are they?”
“I don’t know what files you mean.” My father’s voice is steady, but I hear the wet click of blood in his throat.
A nod to someone out of my sightline.
The next blow sounds like a heavy rug being beaten against a stone floor.
Thud.
A sharp, choked-off gasp.
Then the rhythm begins, the sickening, rhythmic thud of leather meeting ribs, the scrape of furniture being shoved across the floor by the weight of a falling body.
I press my forehead against the slats of the closet door, the wood digging into my skin, and I shake.
I stop counting the hits and start counting my own breaths, gasping them in like a drowning person.
I weep silently, violently.
The tears don’t just fall; they burn, soaking into the collar of my shirt until it is heavy and cold.
The helplessness is a physical poison in my veins.
He put me here so there would be nothing I could do.
He had me promise to stay in this wooden wardrobe to watch him die through a sliver of light, and I hate him for it.
I hate him for the noble cowardice of hiding me. I hate him for the “safety” of this dark box while he is being unmade three feet away.
The quiet voice speaks again, cutting through the wet, ragged breathing on the floor. I catch the end of it through the roar of blood rushing in my ears.
“Make it clean.”
A pause. A metallic slide.
“One shot.”
I stop crying. I stop shaking.
I stop everything all at once, like something in me just cuts out, like a wire in my chest has been snapped with a pair of pliers.
