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“Grandpa, focus here,” Nikolai said, his voice calm once again. “I guess you thought this would go away, but it didn’t. They’re telling me that Mom had a cousin who wants me dead so that I can’t pose a threat to his reign. Vladimir. They’re telling me Vladimirkilledmy parents.” There was a long pause. The silence, as they say, was deafening.
“Grandpa? Are you there?”
“I’m here, my boy.”
“Did you know about this?”
I heard Nikolai’s grandfather let out a long sigh.
“I didn’t know about that, Nikolai,” he said. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t suspect it.”
Nikolai said nothing for a few moments, which said more than words ever could. He felt betrayed by his grandfather, his last blood relative who didn’t want to kill him. Of course, he didn’t even know he had another relative, Vladimir, his second cousin, until that day, and Vladimir wasn’t going to be like a rich doting uncle.
“Nikolai, your parents didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t my right to tell you. And like I said, I just wanted this entire mess to go away. You would have been better without having to deal with any of it. You were going to be the first generation to live a clean and respectable life.”
“Are you saying Mom and Dad weren’t respectable?!” Nikolai sounded furious. My heart went out to the boy.
“Oh of course, my boy. Of course your parents were respectable. In those days, us Russians had to do whatever we had to do to get by. But your mother’s side of the family…I guess they just found a different way to get by, and your father got all wrapped up in it…”
“Grandpa, these people are calling themselves ‘my family.’No oneis my family anymore.
Notthem. Notyou.” To feel like you have no family—now that was something I could relate to.
“My family died two years ago in a car crash,” Nikolai said.
He hung up the phone.
“Nikolai? Nikolai, my boy…I didn’t know. I didn’t think they’d still be around…I thought the police had stomped them all out…Nikolai, please…” His grandfather began to sob before hanging up himself. I placed the phone back in the receiver.
Protecting that boy was going to be harder than I thought. Clearly, he wanted nothing to do with any of us.
Chapter 5
Nikolai
I heard a knock on the door after I’d spoken with my grandfather. It was still the early afternoon, but all I wanted to do was lie in bed with my eyes shut, even if I couldn’t sleep.
The door creaked open.
“Nikolai, are you alright?” It was Damien’s voice.
I wanted to tell him I was not alright. But what was the point? What was the point of talking to anyone, of confiding in anyone? Everyone just leaves in the end, one way or another.
Betrayal, a car accident—excuse me, a murder, rather, after choosing a life of crime. That was it, I realized. Above all else, I was mad at my parents for choosing this life. Not only did they abandon me—they abandoned me because they involved themselves in the criminal underworld, thinking they could then shield me from it.
Great. Fucking. Job.
And to think I’d spent the last two years being a stand up citizen—volunteering for the fire department and the local animal hospital, becoming fluent in Russian and Latin, getting an impeccable score on my SATs and running the fastest mile of anyone in the history of Midwood High. Forthem. For theirhonor. What a joke.
All I knew was I’d been right: you shouldn’t get close to anyone.
All it brings is pain.
When I didn’t reply to Damien, he came over and sat on my bed. I was lying on my side, staring out the window and taking in how the ominous gray sky, laden with heavy snowfall, was enveloping the manor’s backyard in an ethereal wintry gloom. He, that gangster who clearly wanted to become close with me—who was treating me like we were long lost members of the same tribe—put his strong hand on my back.
A chill ran up my spine. I winced a bit, but he did not remove his hand.
Didn’t he know I just wanted to be on my own?
