AllFreeNovel
Share Us
8
Dmitry
Icould feel Manya tense on top of me as she buried it further into my shoulder. My father’s words put me on edge as well, though probably for very different reasons. For another handful of moments there was silence on both ends of the phone line.
“Do you know who ordered the hit?” I asked carefully, breaking the silence and fighting the urge to go off.
“Nyet,” my father replied. “Not who, not why. These fucking Italians. . .”
“It’s not just the Italians,” I said, wincing at the explosion of Russian cursing on the other side of the phone. “I followed the car with the two that left your place—”
“Da! I know! Which you do, why? Risking your neck and your pretty, little new wife’s. Doing a byki’s work when you should have gotten out yourself. I told you—” My father cut off his yelling to cough a few times. “I told you—” he tried again, only for the same thing to happen. I waited, listening as he drank something and all but hacked up a lung directly after. “You are my son. A Koalitsia. Not some shestyorka that can be risked.”
My fingers tightened around the phone, the circles I was rubbing into Manya’s back slowing so as not to vent my aggression through that movement as well. Not five minutes prior I had been coming down from an unexpected high, still floating through my post-coital haze. That feeling diminished, I was being lectured like some preteen having been caught using their parent’s car.
“I followed the Italians,” I repeated calmly despite the irritation surging through me, “And they took me to Lebev’s house.”
My sentence was met with the stunned silence I had been expecting, the very same that had seized me when I realized the neighborhood they had lead us to.
“Lebev,” my father repeated slowly before devolving into curses once more. “So now we do not know if your hit is Italian or Russian, we do not know who ordered this hit, we do not know even why this hit is on your head. . .” His curses picked back up, the sound of something shattering in the background so loudly it even drowned out his grumbling.
“Da,” I muttered, moving my hand up to the silver hair hanging down Manya’s back. I ran my fingers carefully through the locks, watching as the light threw rainbow prisms into the strands.
“You have not enough protection as a torpedo,” my father grumbled, his English becoming choppy. “Effective immediately you are once more Two Spy—protected in my name for being so and under my guard until I see fit. Shura will be with you until we can figure this out. And boy, I will have none of your lip on your title. Remember, I am Pakhan first, and father second, and if you think that you will usurp that now, before I am dead. . .”
He trailed off, leaving my teeth grinding hard in the wake of his words.
I fought the urge to try and deny him. Pakhan first, he said, as if we had ever lived any other way.
“Da.” I forced the word through my teeth as if I were having to break them to make room to do so. “If that’s all . . . Pakhan.”
My father’s line was quiet for a long moment, save the rattle of his breath. “Da,” he finally answered, and the line went dead.
I closed the phone definitively and threw it into the front of the car. I went to get up but was stopped by Manya’s thighs tightening over my hips. She lifted her face more slowly this time, her dark eyes slowly moving over my features as if she were either committing them to memory or trying to decipher my expression. Her hands lifted just as slowly, her fingertips skimming my face.
“He didn’t ask about what happened at Lebev’s,” she muttered, the question lifting her voice at the end.
“Da, he didn’t have to. If I called him, I took care of it already. . . . If I didn’t call. . .” I trailed off, one shoulder lifting into a shrug. I watched her flinch slightly, her touch to my face softening even more.
“Is that why you’re angry?” Her question was frank, her gaze so deep it was penetrating, and it caught me off guard.
“Nyet,” I mumbled, watching her expression shift so minimally, trying to decipher each shift in it so as to learn, her too. “He made me Two Spy. . .”
“You’ve been Two Spy before?”
“Yes.”
“But now it bothers you?”
“It bothered me then,” I groused, pushing her hair back from her face. “I like being a torpedo. It suits me. Two Spy . . . it’s a world of politics that I’m not ready for, and I’m not sure that I ever will be.”
“Have you told your father that?” she asked innocently. From anyone else it would have been laughable, but the seriousness in her expression made me pause.
“Da,” I muttered. “I told him. But it does not suit his empire now, just like it didn’t before.”
Her thumbs moved over my eyebrows as if smoothing them down. “I know what it is to have people that do not listen to you. Maybe more so than you do. I don’t have the power and command that you have. I do not have people that jump to follow my orders . . . but I do know what it is to have a father so far into the Bratva that he becomes less a father . . . and more a general.”
Her voice died out, her gaze dropping from mine, and it was my turn to grab her chin, lifting her eyes back to me. I wanted to see the expression there, the emotion. I was struck by the rawness of her words—the similarity in our paths.
