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“My dad wasn’t a good man. Even right from the start when I was first born. In fact, I think it started long before that. He was a monster and he treated everyone and everything as property. I don’t remember mom leaving him, I was too young, but all I know is that Anton took it as the deepest betrayal. Family to him is everything. Family is blood, and blood is power. I never knew this at the time, but Anton had agreed to let mom raise me away from him and in return-”
“She would run the prostitution ring,” Tully finishes for me.
“Yeah. And of course, she agreed.” I look to Tully. “You have to know that if I knew that, that if I knew he had blackmailed her and tried to take me away, I never would have turned her in. I loved her. She was all I had.”
Tully’s hand squeezes in mine. “I know, Rivers. I don’t blame you.”
I watch her for a moment and see the compassion in her eyes and it urges me to finish the story. “On my eighth birthday, I was going to school with you guys, but we hadn’t actually met. There was one day, I had just walked into class when Anton showed up at the door. All the other kids were scared. Even at eight, they knew to fear him even the fucking teacher looked like he was going to be sick.” I shake my head, recalling the memory. “Anton took me out of school that day, telling me it was time to become a man and start training for my future. I remember being excited because my father went to the effort to pick me up from school so we could spend the day together on my birthday. It was a kid’s dream come true.”
Tully starts shaking her head, but I don’t dare stop in fear of not being able to start again. “He took me to a home a few hours from here. There was a family inside and I was confused because they were all tied up, but we weren’t helping. I thought he was taking me to the fucking arcade. But instead, there was a mother and father sitting on the floor back to back and two children. I remember the girl was maybe four or five and she had a younger brother. They were both in binds yet somehow the girl was still able to hold the younger brother. She was protective and did what she could to block his vision.”
“It felt wrong. When you see someone struggling for freedom in binds your natural reaction is to help them and I couldn’t understand why we weren’t doing anything. Anton was talking at the father while the mother screamed for her children. Anton’s men were all around us and things started to blur. I went to the little girl to free her and was hit for moving. That was when I first realized that we were the bad guys and we weren’t there to help.”
“Still to this day I don’t know what their crimes were against Anton. Whether it was the mother or the father who’d wronged him or even both. All I’m able to remember from that day was when Anton told me that to become a man and have power over others, I’d have to have the strength to do God’s work.”
Tully gasps and her eyes go wide. “No, no. Please tell me you didn’t,” she begs. “Please, Rivers. No.”
My eyes close as I remember the moment that’s haunted me since my eighth birthday. “I told him no. I didn’t want to do it, but he gave me a knife anyway. When I cried, I was yelled at. When I begged, I was hit. When I pissed my fucking pants out of pure terror, I was kicked in the back. I was beaten until I had nothing left to give. That was the moment I realized my father would have killed his own son and out of desperation, I stood, bloodied and bruised, before the woman with a knife in my hand and tears streaming down my face.”
Tully squeezes my hand and I fight to keep control. “I was shaking and there was disgust in her eyes and it took me a very long time to realize that disgust was for my father and not for me. She pleaded with me, she would have preferred to see my father beat me to death than to lose her life and not be with her children. But in a situation where Anton is involved, he will always get his way, even if it meant killing his own son.”
“He told me what to do and eventually, I did it. I killed that woman in front of her children. I stood back and watched how the life drained from her body, I watched Anton’s men take the children, I watched the father realize he was never going to see his children again, and then I watched Anton put a bullet between his eyes.”
