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“Did you ever run away?”
She chuckles. “Yes, once or twice. I thought about going back to Sweden to live with my parents until I found my footing again, but your father caught me both times. He was furious, and after that was when he started locking me in our bedroom all hours of the day.”
That sounds familiar.
Dread begins to creep up my throat as the similarities begin to unfold in my mind. Izet is already gross and undesirable to me. I can’t imagine what he’ll do to punish me for that. There’s no way I’ll be able to pretend that I love him when he disgusts me to my core. He’ll feel small, and he’ll beat me. I know it.
“Is that when you started using the pills?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest. I’m self-conscious about how invasive the question is, but I feel like this is the kind of conversation I should be able to have with my mom after all these years.
“Yes. Remi decided that the cure to my relentless depression was a cocktail of sedatives that would keep me in bed around the clock. They worked, and for the first time in years, I felt like I wasn’t being crushed by the weight of my mistakes. I was asleep for eighty percent of it, but my waking hours were a little less devastating.”
Now everything is starting to make sense. How could she have survived at allwithoutthose pills?
“At some point, he got angry that I wasn’t able to perform sexually for him due to my condition. He stopped filling my prescriptions, and I began to have convulsions and fits from the withdrawals. I was so desperate for a way out that I attempted to slit my wrists in the bath the night before our anniversary,” she continues, her voice grave and sorrowful.
Hearing about how much my mother suffered at the hands of my father makes me feel as if my heart is going to cave in from grief. The mother I needed wasn’t a selfish bitch who chose her vices over me – she was stolen from me, and pieces of herself were stolen from her as well.
She ashes her cigarette, and I notice the fine lines in her face that have finally begun to show themselves after years of substance abuse. “I didn’t start to see the point of being alive until I had been here for four months without a visit from your father. I was able to justify my existence, to take up space and be a person again. The Bratva had torn me down to the wires for seventeen years, and there were moments when I didn’t even recognize myself.”
She pauses, and we both stare at each other in silence. She’s waiting for me to realize the future I’m walking into, the future I’m allowing if I don’t try to escape somehow.
“Mika, I need you to do whatever you can to stay out of the Bratva. You’re young and so full of life, and your husband will do everything he can to make sure you’re never that person again,” she says as she takes my hands in hers. “Promise me you will find a way to escape. You need to try.”
I don’t know how to promise her, but the last thing I want is to let her down after all she’s been through. She wants me to be happy, and that’s the least I could do for her.
“I’ll do what I can,” I reply, squeezing her hand with a tinge of guilt and regret in my voice.
It feels like such a lame response to the horrors she endured at the hands of my father and the Bratva. She wants so badly for me to escape, to thrive in a life that I’ve chosen for myself with someone who loves me. The least I can do is try, but it still feels like the least in the end.
As I say my goodbyes and leave the ward, Dominik’s face continues to materialize in my head as I consider the life Iwouldwant. He’s such an asshole, and he could have killed Izet for me when we had that meeting. Having him as my handler has been embarrassing and humiliating for me on multiple fronts.
But I still miss him when he isn’t near me.
16
DOMINIK
Remi’s ego took a significant blow when he learned that Mika had gone to see her mother earlier in the week when he was meeting with Amar. As a result, he’s decided to take her out on an excursion day himself to win her affections again.
Based on what little she told me about her mother’s troubled marriage to Remi, I doubt that she’ll ever be able to find any true affection for him again. If I were in her position, I would feel the same way. Even though she’s had a habit of overreacting to conflict in explosive, melodramatic ways, she’s perfectly justified in her anger now.
After Slava confirms that he’s left the car port with Remi and Mika present, I wait thirty minutes before I decide to leave for my own day in the city.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and it’s made me think back on my street fighting days when I was free and able to run wild. The memories are tinted by nostalgia, and it takes a minute for me to remember how dirt poor I was back in those days. When I was twenty-five, I would have literally killed to be in the position I’m in now.
And I have.
Even still, I had a massive amount of personal autonomy when I fought for myself only. I was the only person that I represented, and I didn’t have to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing to an obsessive degree. Remi’s obsession with appearances has highlighted his weakening grip on his men, and he’s starting to allow that stress to eat him alive.
My old neighborhood is deep in the inner city where Russian immigrants have remained and grown their community since the forties. It was a small pocket in a behemoth of a city that had otherwise tried to chew them up and spit them out when the Red Scare happened. I always took pride in my origins, even though the kids I went to school with mocked me for living in poverty.
It’s been years since I visited, but I know that a majority of the people I ran with are still there fighting in those same streets. If they’re still operating where they did before, it won’t be hard to find them.
Driving my own car again feels freeing and renewing after being escorted around in the back of a town car with Mika for the past two months. Having some control of where I’m going and what I’m doing is a luxury I had to give up in order to take this job, but the money was impossible to turn away.
The places I’ve spent my time recently have been uptown boutiques, French restaurants, and shops that sell nothing but smoothies to anorexic blondes. Returning to the part of the city where I grew up and found myself as a person feels like stepping back into my childhood bedroom after being in the hospital. It’s comforting to the point of being painful.
I turn down my old street, looking out for anyone who might have a vendetta against me after I beat them in a fight. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m prepared to handle it, but that’s not what I’m here for.
