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6
Mandy
Ihad heard the gunfire before I’d even made it down the hallway out of the study.
As I approached the open side entrance, I recognized the line of cars and the emblem on their hoods. I could hear the fighting going on across the property and saw the error in my judgment, but that didn’t stop me from pressing forward. My mind was still too consumed with the new information and even seeing my father’s men, here, at Dmitry’s father’s home, did nothing to douse those fires.
“Mandy?” A voice asked in surprise as I stepped out, my hand shooting down to the side of my dress to where I had hidden the gun Dmitry had given me what felt like a lifetime ago. It was now held at my hip using my underwear.
The familiar face of my father’s second cousin, Ira, stared at me in incredulous horror. His gray eyes ran over my frame worriedly, looking behind me as if to see someone pursuing.
I didn’t have to force the tears to fall from my eyes, though they weren’t there for the reason that I was sure he expected them to be. Just like I didn’t have to fake the tremor in my voice. “He’s not here, I saw the cars and . . . I got away,” the words were thick in my throat, like sludge being forced between my teeth. “I want to see my father,” I whispered, my voice breaking suddenly.
Ira nodded, taking my elbow and pulling me with him, away from the gunfire I could hear from several hundred yards off. Without a word he led me to one of the SUVs at the back of the line. He opened the passenger door and helped me inside while he spoke rapid Russian to the driver.
“It’ll be okay, Mandy,” he muttered, reaching across me to buckle me into the seat. “Brian here will take you to your papa, and then we will take care of things here.” He spat, the clear liquid brown from tobacco, before hefting the AK he held in his hands. With a violent smile across his lips, he turned back to the fray.
Shura was going to kill him. I knew it, and I knew that I should feel something other than numbness when I thought about it, but I couldn’t. I watched his figure disappear as the vehicle pulled away, and all that I could think of was the fact that he had slapped his wife once, while at our house for holidays, telling her that her ass was fatter and flatter than a misshapen pancake.
Did that mean he deserved to die?
No, but I wasn’t going to fight to stop it either.
I was too preoccupied with other things. With my father and my mother, with the truth laid bare in those documents, and all the questions that came with knowing it.
I knew the house we pulled up to; I knew the driveway and the front door. I had walked the path I walked now a million times, many coming from the back seat of an SUV driven by one of his goods to fetch me. I knew the whole way to my father’s office, painted in dark colors and perpetually full of the clove cigar smoke he favored.
“Manya! Mandy!” My father corrected himself almost immediately, spinning around from where he had been leaning over his desk with his phone. His face was wreathed in a kind of sadistic jubilance. He wrapped his arms around me and lead me over to the desk. “My cousin has informed me about the things.”
The things. He said that as if it summed up everything that had happened. Like it made any sort of sense at all.
“You made it away from the Koalistia boy, da? That is good. Good. Now we just need find him and tie this whole mess up, da? I’m sure he told you something, where he was going or who he was doing deals with? You understand why you had to go there, da? Your papa had no choice, you know, I made deal to save us, to save you, and now—”
“You married me off to keep suspicion off the family,” I muttered. It wasn’t a question. I’d known it before he confirmed it just then, the moment I’d seen those cars pull up outside the mansion. He was in on it. He was part of the faction that had been spreading the disloyalty and rumors. All under the protection of the marriage. It was the same misdirection he had used with my baba any time he’d needed money from her accounts. Look here, look at the faithful, look at the loving, while I rob you blind beneath your eyes.
“Smart girl. I knew you would understand.” He pulled out a map from beneath his phone and marked things off according to the messages coming through.
“I do. I have no questions about my marriage,” I admitted. Even if I had, they were null and void, for as Dmitry had said: I was his wife, he was my husband. There was no gray area to that.
“Da,” my father mumbled, putting the pen in his mouth and pulling another set of maps out. “Good, good.” He spoke distractedly, mumbling around the obstruction of the pen, and barely looking to me. It was obvious that in his mind this had all been concluded. He only had me here at all in the hopes that I would tell him of Dmitry’s location.
“The only question I have is about Mama,” I continued, taking a half step back and using his distraction to reach under my dress. I gripped the cold metal of the grip of the gun between my numb fingers, pulling it out from under the hem. I didn’t lift it right away, watching him absorb what I said and dismiss it just as quickly.
He hummed noncommittally, retrieving the pen from his mouth.
“My question being why you took a contract out on her life, and paid Yerik Koalistia to kill her.” My words were even, without the fury that I knew was flushing my face. The heaviness of the words sank so slowly into the room and into my father that I could literally track the progress of it with my eyes.
“Pah, is that what that old man told you when—”
“No,” I cut him off forcefully, lifting the gun and aiming it at his throat. He straightened and turned finally to fully face me. “That is what I read in paperwork with your signature and a handwritten letter in your hand asking for it to be done.”
My father eyed me warily, surprise weaving his thick eyebrows together. I could see him weighing my seriousness and comfort-level with the gun, just as he was weighing the situation as a whole. “You do not know what you speak on, here, Mandy,” he cautioned. His tone was still cloying, as if he were trying to get me to see reason. As if he were talking to someone in the grips of hysteria.
“Don’t call me that,” I hissed, my eyes lining with tears. “Mandy is the name I chose to get away from you, to put distance between me and this life. Thislifeyou convinced me had taken my mother. Mandy is the name of my shame, born from you. Manya is my name, the name my mother gave me, the name my husband calls me.” My voice shook, the volatility growing with each quivering word as I watched the fury in my father’s eyes.
“Manya is the name your mother gave you because she couldn’t cut it in America,” my father snarled. “You think she would have called you Mandy? She would have backhanded you and told you your place. She wanted to go back to Russia. She said America was making us soft. She complained of the heat, the sun, the damn neighbors! She had complaints for everything, da? Always. I could not leave my work here. America is where the Bratva sent me, and I have done well here! Making a name for our family, advancing us as I have!”
My eyes widened with his outburst, my stomach tightening in anger. “Then why not let us leave?”
