Konstantin did something I’d never seen him do before. He closed his eyes and bent forward, as if in respect or prayer. The wind started to howl, scouring our exposed skin as it blasted across the water, but he didn’t seem to notice. When he spoke, he didn’t open his eyes.
“There was a new gang in St Petersburg. Small, but brutal. They didn’t pay any attention to the rules of the Bratva, the brotherhood. They had no honor. They…”
He paused for a moment, his jaw set hard. I reached out and touched his shoulder, my chest going tight with tension.
“My brothers and I had just arrived home from school,” he said in a rush. His accent was getting stronger, the edges of the words rough. “My mother was in the dining room, planning the formal ball we held each year. And suddenly there was a crash as the front door was kicked open. Eight men, and their leader had brought his teenage son along, a kid no more than eighteen. They started killing. The guards first, but then the rest of the staff... the cooks, the maids…. The whole house was running in blood.”
“I was fifteen. My brothers were eleven and eight. They took us upstairs and locked us in a room that had no windows. My mother, they took to the bedroom next door.”
I slid my hand across Konstantin’s back, trying to comfort him, but his body was like cold rock. There was no comforting him from this.
“My brothers were crying. I... was crying. I kept telling them that soon, it would be okay because my father would get home and then he’d unleash unholy hell on them. I told them, these fucking idiots don’t know what they’ve done. I told them, we’ll watch as father executes every last one of them.” He paused. “I didn’t realize that they wanted my father to get home. That’s what they were waiting for.”
His eyes opened and he stared out across the water towards the Statue of Liberty, but I knew he wasn’t seeing it. He was in a mansion four thousand miles and twenty years away. The Russian in his voice was even stronger, now. “When my father got home, they took him upstairs. We heard him pass our door and we banged on it, telling him we were there, and he shouted for us to be brave. Then they took him into the bedroom with my mother and…” He swallowed. “And then a few minutes later, we heard her start screaming.”
“Oh God.” I wanted to be sick. “Konstantin—”
“You see, my father offered them money. Told them where the jewelry was hidden, opened the safe for them, told them they could take all the cars. But that isn’t what they wanted. They wanted to take over. They wanted to take control of everything, all of the family’s businesses, legal and illegal. And of course he refused. So they started to rape my mother, right in front of him.”
I couldn’t speak. I just gripped his arm and hung on in a death grip.
“He loved her. He loved her, and us, more than anything else in the world. And when they said they’d torture us, too, cut our fingers off one by one... he broke. He gave them everything. It took all night and into the next morning: they had him calling banks in Switzerland, approving transfers, signing over his companies. They’d bribed lawyers and blackmailed people at his businesses so that everything could be witnessed and signed. We’d never be able to undo it. In one night, we lost everything... and they went from a small-time gang to running half of St. Petersburg.”
“When it was all done, they told us they were releasing us. They let us out of the room and we ran to our parents. My mother was crying but trying to be strong. She tried to pretend she was okay, but we knew she’d been…. And her face was covered in bruises. Some bastard had beaten her while he—” Konstantin squeezed his eyes shut in disgust.
“They drove us out of town and up to a bridge over a river. It was January, thick with snow and far below zero. The sun was just coming up and the river was white with floating hunks of ice. We got out of the car and….” He closed his eyes again. “Nataliya was there. And Mikhail. And Evelina and Feodor.” He had to stop for a moment and take a breath before he could explain and when he spoke again, his voice was raw with pain. “My cousins, Christina. Every one of my cousins. And their parents. People who had nothing to do with crime, the only thing they’d done wrong was to be related to us.”
“It wasn’t enough that they’d ruined us, they had to destroy us. They had to end the Gulyev line so that no one could come back and take revenge on them.”