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5
Manya
Fucking bullets.
Before marrying Dmitry, I’d never been in the vicinity of a gunfight, much less right in the middle of one. In a matter of less than a week I had come to find my husband with a knife wound so deep that even days later it still pulled open, narrowly escaped a gunfight in a Bratva mansion, and been involved in a car chase down what was apparently Bratva territory lines. Blyat was the right word indeed.
“Manya, it is a marriage. You do not have to like him. You do not have to tolerate him even.”
My grandmother’s words chased me through my marriage, echoing in my head at the most inopportune times. I didn’t have to like him, she’d said, and I’d held to that belief like a nun to her rosary. I had wanted to hate him, to continue to despise him until he fell dead of the life he had held us to. But like those territories we’d just crossed, Dmitry and I had long since blurred the lines between us. Three days of blurring—in every available surface of his house.
I was no longer sure that I hated him. I wasn’t even sure I disliked him at all.
My grandmother had said to tolerate him, with her fingers like claws on my cheeks, holding me in place and forcing me to hear the wisdom in her words, but I wondered if they hadn’t been part warning as well.What if she had meant that I was only supposed to tolerate him? To find a balance there and not allow for anymore?
My grandmother had been my safe haven when I was in high school. It was her who had shown up to the jail with my bail money when I had been arrested, her who had plaited my hair for my day in court, and her who had held that same braid back later that night as I heaved up all the heavy Russian food she had fed me. She was strict and serious, lacking the warm, round frame of so many grandmother’s I had seen in America—but she was my baba still.
She had raised me on Russian lore at her knee as she brushed my hair, a hundred strokes for each side, and promised me a life in her whispers that I had yearned so desperately for.
Magic, she had said once when I was little, will eat you away if it can. It festers in the heart and grows until you have no more use of the real world and all of its hidden traps.
Dmitry, to me, felt a lot like what I had imagined magic to be back then.
My grandmother, back in her day, had been married to a Pakhan. She had born sons and daughters for the man and arranged the marriages of all of her children . . . including my father. She had lived through this life that I was now learning to field . . . and I had never wanted more than to sit at her feet and ask her for her advice again. But she wasn’t here.
My fingers trailed over the seam of the back seat of the car, my stomach in knots as I stared hard at the green door that Dmitry had disappeared behind. After he had entered the house, I’d climbed over the console to the back seat. I wanted to get a better view.
This was my life. The bullets and the fear. I had accepted that the day that I’d said “I do,” even if I had at first refused to acknowledge it.So why was I cowering in the back of some old Lincoln like some helpless damsel who had nothing but a smile and kiss to offer her husband when he came home wounded from war?
Going in after Dmitry was stupid, fine. I had no gun; I had no knowledge really of how to work one either. Going in after him would only distract him from whatever work he must be doing in there. I flinched at even thinking of what that would mean. In my mind’s eye I could see the bodies spread over his father’s halls, their necks turned at unnatural angles and their eyes staring wide and blank at me. . .
I couldn’t go in after Dmitry, but that didn’t mean I had to just sit here in the backseat waiting.
What if he needed to leave quickly? What if he didn’t come out and I needed to get back to Shura in order to save him?
I scrambled back over the console, pushing myself into the driver’s seat. With a grunt, I pulled the panel beneath the steering wheel clean off. I had quit boosting cars for my mother. But that had been reckless, and this was . . . something else.
Reckless still, maybe, but not for the same reasons. I knew that my mother would understand. It was too easy, too, for my fingers to find those familiar wires, thanking God himself that the vehicle was so old. I wasn’t as familiar with boosting those new cars, the ones with the computerized systems…
I bit the edge of my tongue, tasting the brief flash of copper that came as the tip of my tooth dug into the muscle, and I rearranged my hands slightly to gain a better view.
When the stripped wires brushed against one another, the engine turned, the starter engaging a half second behind. Again, I readjusted the way that I was brushing those charges against one another. “C’mon,” I pleaded, “You’ve got this. . .” I didn’t know if I was talking to the engine or myself at that point, but when the engine finally turned over and the motor purred, I couldn’t help but grin.
I almost cheered, only biting it back as the gravity of the situation settled back over me.
How long had it taken for me to start the engine?
How long had it been since Dmitry had gone inside anyways?
Fuck. How was I supposed to know when I had waited too long to get help—or when would be leaving too soon? For all I knew, Dmitry could have already met a fate he couldn’t come back from. The imagery of him in place of those bodies in his father’s house flashed across my mind’s eye and I felt my stomach tense even further. Maybe that was why the heroine always stayed home in movies. . .
My gaze jerked up though as I heard what sounded like gunshots from within the house, loud enough to echo through the street outside and into the car where I sat. The car in front of me shuddered from it, the alarm triggering loudly, breaking the silence of the street. Without a thought I pushed the gearshift down, pulling out from where Dmitry had parked and wheeling the vehicle around to stop in front of the house with the green door.
I’d only just gotten the vehicle level with the door when it burst open, Dmitry running out of it with eyes wildly scanning the outside. With my breath trapped in my chest I leaned over the console and flung the passenger door open. He ran towards the vehicle followed by a spray of bullets.
I could hear each one of them ping into the metal body of the Lincoln, sharp little noises that only spurred my heart rate further.
Dmitry dove into the seat next to me, his body only half in as I shoved my foot as far down into the gas pedal as it would go, the back tires squealing as we peeled off. The bullets were still hitting the car, one shattering the back window and sending glass shards flying all around us. Dmitry slammed the door shut.
