Chapter Two: Annika
“Do you have something picked out for tonight?”
“What’s tonight?” I asked, glancing over at my friend scrolling across her smartphone screen, barely looking up at me every few seconds.
“We’re getting wasted, remember? Your father is out of town, and for the first time in a while, you don’t have to be parading around your own home entertaining his guests. I don’t know how you and your mother deal with the constant influx of businessmen strolling through here,” she said, her fingernails clacking away at her screen.
“It isn’t as bad as you think, Nat. I know that I keep dragging you to these things and that this is our first night where we get to forget about my familial obligations, but I have no problem being there for my father. He’s a good man, despite what your father has said about him,” I said, reminding her that the way she feels about my father is only because hers was in a bidding war with him over some ridiculous art piece.
“The two of them are always in each other’s way, but yours always seems to come out on top. It doesn’t matter, but what does is that we have the house to ourselves for a change, and you can finally throw that party you’ve been itching to throw since you were a teenager,” said Natalia, and I thought about it for a moment, but it had bad idea written all over it.
“I’m starting to think that maybe we should just go out.”
“No way. I already invited this guy that I’ve been seeing, and you promised,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me like we were indeed back in our younger years.
“Fine, but we’re having a few people over, and nothing is going to get out of hand, okay? No one is going to get too drunk and give my father another reason for lecturing me about how I’m letting my life pass me by,” I said, solemnly, remembering the conversation we had a few nights ago about how he wanted me to get more serious about the family business.
It was strange to even be discussing such things with Natalia, but she and I both knew the kind of work our fathers did when no one was looking. They passed it off as harmless business deals, but we heard enough from their questionable phone calls to know that they were dealing with very dangerous people.
I’ve heard stories about the kind of dangerous behavior our fathers engaged in when they were our age, and how they were both able to build successful empires off of being thoroughbred criminals. I was at that point in my life where both of my parents were expecting me to fall in line, to assume my role as part of our family by making sure my father’s deals went down without a hitch. My father promised that we’d never be in harm’s way under his watch, and I believed him. We hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary when he had his guests over, but we also didn’t know what the conversations were like behind closed doors after the majority of people had already cleared out.
My heart was taken up elsewhere because if there was one thing my father and I certainly had in common it was our shared love of art. I always dreamed of opening up my own art gallery, and I found a small, quaint little place that seemed to be just perfect for what I had envisioned. Though, people like Natalia thought that it was a complete waste of my time, telling me that there was no reason I had to try to make a living when I came from a bloodline of one of the richest families in the country.
If I ask her to come with me now to view the place, all she’s going to do is talk about the party tonight. I probably should just go alone.
Natalia had been a friend of mine from when we were fifteen, and as much as our friendship had been a rocky one, I never wanted to lose her. When our fathers had such a reputation in society, it was hard to make genuine friends anymore, so I tried to stick it out even though she infuriated me at times.
I did promise her that tonight was going to be all about letting loose and enjoying our twenties just like we should, but seeing as I’m a year shy of thirty, it’s all a little late..
“Your life is perfect, Annika. You have everything you could ever want, and your father is only hard on you because he sees how much potential you have. My father tells me the same thing, but we’re old enough to make our own decisions,” she said.
“The stakes are higher when we’re born into families like ours, Natalia and you know that.”
“That may be true, but we’re not getting any younger here. We deserve to be a little reckless sometimes, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so. Well, I have to run a few errands before tonight. Please, keep the guest list to a minimum, I can’t have word getting back to my father,” I said.
“Of course,” she said, and I was glad to be out of there for a little while.
It didn’t matter that she was holed up in my room waiting for nightfall to approach so she could woo some guy she’d just met. From what she had told me, he seemed to be exactly the kind of guy our parents have begged us not to get involved with, but there was no one that could ever tell Natalia what to do. She prided herself on being free of any constraints brought about by her birthright, and the line of criminals she descended from. I was trying to do the same thing in a much different way. I didn’t know enough about any of it to understand whether I wanted out or not, but I knew that my dreams were simple. The riches didn’t interest me, but when they were attached to art, it’s like it all suddenly started to make sense.
My family and I had been on so many trips touring many parts of Europe securing pieces that have been in my family's collection for years, and I’d always been so fascinated by how much history could be in a single painting. I studied it long enough to know that’s where my heart was, and it was why I started seeking out a place to open a gallery in the first place.
My father had graciously helped out in the process, but he always told me that he’d be needing my eye for incredible work soon enough. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he gave me the final push and recommendation I needed to get the place I desperately wanted. It was like things were finally falling into place for me, and the only time my father took it upon himself not to criticize me, it was when we were discussing art.
I always had a rather sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I thought about why he’d been so considerate in making the process of guaranteeing the property so much easier like he was holding out to collect on his favor at a later date.
The most he’d ever asked me for in the past had been to be nice to his dinner guests, and pretend that I didn’t know about his extracurricular activities. I’d seen him come home with his dress shirt soaked in blood, appearing like he was wounded from battle. I started putting the pieces together when I heard my parents fighting about it when I was a little girl, and ever since then I had a feeling that the time would come for me to step up to the plate, assuming my position to uphold the Novikov name.
It was at times like that that I wanted to get away from it all, the thought of the terrible things my father must’ve done to get where he is today, and how much of it my mother must’ve seen when they first started seeing each other. I never thought I’d ever be able to handle something like that, even if it was what was expected of me. Sometimes, I felt like my father was right and I had let too much of my life slip through my fingers, spending all of my time studying to get my Master’s degree.
He was the kind of man that believed practical knowledge always outweighed anything I could learn from a book, but that was only because he grew up gunning people down to take away their hard-earned money to later fund his now thriving business. I didn’t want to be that kind of person, and I tried to distance myself from it until I knew enough to make a firm decision about how I wanted the rest of my life to play out.
My father had always warned my mother and I that with a business like that, there could always be consequences that we may not be ready to face. I was well aware that my father had enemies, but I still didn’t know anything about them, or what they could possibly do if they ever wanted to take action against him. Those were the kinds of things I never liked to think about because it made my life seem much more complicated than it already was.
You’ve gone twenty-nine years of your life without so much as a break-in. There’s nothing you need to be worried about now. You have to trust them when they tell you that you’re going to be safe.
The walkto the empty rental space had been calming, but the air still felt heavy after last night’s storm. The skies were still rather gloomy, thick with grey clouds, and I could’ve sworn I felt a raindrop fall onto my cheek just as I opened the door to the little old building. It smelled of fresh paint and cleaning solution when I walked in and I was greeted by the realtor who was carrying a file in her hand, trying to quit the urge to bite down on her pen while I thought over securing the place one last time.
