3
Dmitry
It was dark by the time we pulled up in front of the familiar stucco walls. The security lights were on, bathing the path to the front door in bright, white light. Manya had stopped asking questions somewhere between pulling away from the curb at the office and driving through the different neighborhoods for the following three hours to ensure we weren’t tailed.
I knew she was irritated.
I knew she was worried.
I even knew that my silence made me the ass in this situation. But my mind was a labyrinth of steel traps and dangerous levers that I was attempting to navigate without setting anything off. The blood staining my knuckles and fingers was now smeared against the steering wheel cover, brown where it had dried. I’d known, bringing those two men in, that I would be receiving information I wouldn’t want to hear.
I just hadn’t anticipated that it would be as bad as what they had finally revealed. It was not just a handful of people within the factions that were unhappy, irritated enough to try and advance their own stations. It was a network, where the offending parties were willing to pay out of their ass to ensure that they had the support they needed. The support they couldn’t garner on their own.
Italians. The bastards had brought the Italians into it, and the fact that they had was second only to them threatening my wife now.
I threw the Jaguar into park, ramming the driver’s door open and exiting the car before the engine had even fully shut off. I dropped the keys. They got lost somewhere between the seat and the door, falling into the crack only to be ignored as I crossed around the hood of the car to the passenger side. Manya opened the door before I got to her, swinging her legs out of the vehicle and taking my hand as she stood.
She didn’t question the location again, nor did she even pause to look around her. If anything, she seemed to drop her gaze, mute and subservient in a way that in another setting might have thrilled me. . . . But here, as things were, it only reminded me of the chasm that existed between us.
We made it through the front door. A set of keys had been left on the entryway table, the tell-tale sign of Shura having been there. No doubt he would be somewhere else on the property, holed up somewhere unseen, watching all the exits and entrances. It was what I could count on him for.
It was only as I readjusted, pulling her towards the curved staircase that I felt the first hint of resistance in her body.
“Is this because I didn’t save your father?”
Her words were loud in the ensuing silence. The words were so contrary to what I had been expecting that I almost stopped walking entirely. My eyes darted to her as I forced myself to keep ascending the stairs.
“Or is it because I didn’t cry hard enough? You know he killed my mother! You know how I feel about that, you knew at our wedding, so if you expect me to just—”
“Shut up,” I instructed, my tone more bland than should have been possible.
A little gasp trailed her words as she cut them off as told. She had started to yell, her voice raising with each new word she spat out, and it was almost more than I could handle in that moment.
I didn’t want to be fighting with her. I didn’t want to listen to the list of things that were bothering her, not when she’d been acting distant since before any of this had even happened. She had started pulling away before my father had died, before even we had been stuck with him that last handful of days before his death. She had been distant since Russia.
The hurt in her body language was evident, and it was all that I could do not to snap at her for that as well. It wasn’t her fault, but my body was still on high attention from earlier that evening.
“It isn’t you,” I managed to eek out, speaking through clenched teeth with difficulty. “An entire medical team couldn’t have salvaged the old man, much less a fucking social worker. As for your mother, as you said, you knew that when we were married. We have moved past it.”
I stopped in front of the carved door to my father’s study, flipping aside the paneling to reveal the keypad beneath. I punched in the code and watched with a kind of impersonal interest as the keys lit green, allowing me to open the door and get the two of us through it.
“Youmoved past it,” Manya argued. She waited for the study door to shut behind us before jerking her wrist from my grip with an irritated huff. “I didn’t know it was your father who carried the contract out! I didn’t know that until Russia!”
The confession hung between us like a foul stench. Impenetrable, immovable, filling the space as quickly as the words came and leaving me staring at her in surprise.I had just assumed. . . . But it made sense. The way she had retreated before we had even crossed the tarmac to the plane, the tension between her and my father, her reaction to him dying in front of her . . .
Was she harboring guilt over not saving him? As if somehow she could have?
Tears glittered in her eyes, and I could see the frustration in the growing color of the apple of her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she blustered, shaking her head and tearing her gaze from mine. “I didn’t mean to bring that up now, it’s a bad time, and—”
“When would be the right time, Manya?” I asked, unable to hold the question behind my teeth. My voice was pitched low, dangerous in its lack of any real emotion. I could see her flinch from how she took me to mean it.
“I know you’re still grieving, and I know—” she started, only to stop suddenly as I took a step towards her.
“You know what it is like to grieve for a parent, da? Da.” I answered for her, my eyes glittering as she took a step back from me, as if to escape. I followed, my steps even despite the emotion brewing in the bottom of my gut. “But my father? My father is not my focus right now, Tigrenok. You, you are my focus. You and this hit on your head, how to keep you safe, how to keep you whole. Do you know what I did to those men in that room when they told me there was a contract out with your life as the price?”
Her eyes widened with each step I took closer and she slammed her hand on the top f my father’s large desk. “You killed them,” she whispered, the words thready and almost more air than word.