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Twenty-four hours ago, I would have said that big man-monsters with six arms or lion-goat men with wings were impossible. But what do I know?
No, nothing that happened today feels real. After I go to the bathroom and wash my hands, instead of getting dressed right away, I find myself staring at my two knives.
Dad gave me the first one, a Bowie knife made with high carbon steel and a fine bone handle, on my tenth birthday.
Yeah, yeah, most people might think it’s weird to give your kid a wickedly sharp, deadly weapon, but neither of us ever pretended to be normal. I mean, maybe we were for a little while when I was small, but that was back when we had Mom.
If there’s a single truth about my father, it’s this: he loved Katia Volkov with every fiber of his being. And when a rival bratva brutally killed her when they broke into our home looking for my father. . . Well, he never got over it.
He went apeshit and murdered the head of the bratva who’d ordered the assassination in one of the most brutal attacks the Russian public had ever seen. He used an axe and killed not only the Pakhan but all his sons who worked for him, sparing only a recently married man’s young wife. He considered her an innocent, but she witnessed the attack and immediately went to the authorities.
My father had connections with the police like most Pakhans, but not even they could protect him when the press made news of the brutality of the attack public. My father has been in hiding ever since, running things from behind the scenes with his brother as a front man and, as I came of age, me as a go-between.
Since I was a child, my father had been preparing me to take over for my uncle. Other daughters were Daddy’s little princess. I was Daddy’s little assassin.
I was my father’s princess in some ways. He prepared me ruthlessly to take over his own crown one day. But ever since what happened to my mother, he was determined that neither of us would be caught unawares again.
So he homeschooled me. I preferred this because the one year he’d tried enrolling me in public school when we were in Bulgaria, I only ended up regularly getting in fights with the boys and being sent home when I gave them all bloody noses.
After morning lessons with him at home, doing boring things like reading and math, I began what I considered real school.
Weapons training. Knives. Guns. How to kill with objects found in an office. A kitchen. Hand-to-hand combat. Along with studying strategy.
My father never lamented the men he’d killed, only how sloppy he’d been about getting caught.
And still, I think my father only thought all was mostly self-defense training. My. . . other job didn’t come about until later when another of our enemies found my father when I was visiting him in Kazakhstan for my twenty-first birthday.
They attacked us in the middle of the night.
I froze for fifteen seconds when I heard the noise of glass shattering. Fifteen seconds that might have cost my father his life.
My training kicked in, and without hesitation, I grabbed the knives I kept sheathed under my pillow, opting for them instead of the gun in my nightstand.
I didn’t know how many of them there would be, but if I could dispatch as many as possible as quietly as possible, we’d be better off. My father yelled at me later for not grabbing the gun.
I considered it more important that he was alive to yell at me after I’d slit the necks of all four assassins before they could get to his bedroom. And when we needed money to make an important investment a couple years later, I decided to diversify our portfolio by offering additional services. I let it be known among the right people that my father had access to an assassin we would hire out should the parameters be right—no women, no kids, half up front, half on delivery.
For the last five years, that’s what I’ve been doing. I wouldn’t say full-time. Maybe four to six jobs a year. Dad wasn’t exactly happy about it, but it increased his brand profile and, on several occasions, gave him the kind of favor and pull with the right people. So when he said he had a chance to come out of exile, I was stupid enough to believe him. I thought, wow, maybe I’ve helped him in a crazy, roundabout way.
Little did I know it would all go sideways when we were betrayed by the one person he completely trusted besides me—
My eyes squeeze shut as fury washes through me.
For so much of my life, I could never understand what my father felt when he killed that Pakhan and his sons in such a rage. Yes, I’d lost my mother in a violent way. In many ways, I thought I had even more rights to rage about it than my father, for. . . reasons. But the effects of his rash actions screwed up so much of the rest of his life. I never said it to his face, but I was mad at him for lashing out in the thoughtless way he had.
