“Then you will leave my house. You will stop bleeding me dry and live on the streets for all I care.”
“You’d kick me out? With nothing? No money, no?—”
“Yes!” He slams his hand on the counter and I jump. “I’ve been putting up with you for far too long. Since the day you killed your mother, I’ve sat here and tried to behave like I’m supposed to care for a creature like you.”
He’s leaning into me, spitting in my face as his eyes dig icepicks into me. In Russian, he growls, “You have been a bane on my existence since the day you were born. I would kill you if I could.”
He stops himself, his jaw clenched. I slowly stand up, eyes burning with tears I don’t want him to see. “You don’t mean that,” I say, my voice getting thick with an incoming sob. “No matter what our differences are, I’m still your daughter. I’m your blood. You don’t mean that.”
He turns from me with an angry grunt. “I wanted a son,” he says. “Your mother promised me a son. And what I got instead was you at the price of losing her. My bloodline is dead thanks to you.”
Again, he cuts into me with the circumstances of my birth. As if I could have controlled something like beingborn?Through my hurt, a ball of anger shoots up through me. “And if I were your son, do you think I’d ever want to be one of your beloved brigadiers?” I say to him. “Some days, I don’t even know whoyou treat worse, me or them. At least they get to make their own money and live in their own homes. If I were your son, you’d probably just treat me the way you treat them because you don’t know how to relate to anyone else in any other way. I don’t even understand how Mother could have loved a man like?—”
He’s up. He grabs the mug and throws it against the wall right by my head. It shatters and pieces fly everywhere, sticking me as I flinch away from him. He grabs me by my robe and pushes me. I stumble back, catching the wall to keep myself from falling over. He takes another step toward me and I scramble back, reaching for the bat sitting at the entrance to the hall leading to my bedroom.
He stops, glaring at me as I raise the bat. Everything is shaking. My knees, my hands. I clench my jaw in an effort to look fierce, but I’m terrified. I don’t want to hit him and I don’t want him to hit me.
With one meaty hand, he points a finger at me and says, “You will leave here,” he says. “One way or another.” He straightens his suit jacket and takes a step back. “Be thankful you are not my son, Natalya. If you were any of the brotherhood, you would already be dead. No one speaks to me the way you have.”
My hands feel slippery on the bat. I still hold on as tightly as I can, ready for him to attack again if he dares try it. He doesn’t. He looks at the bat, then at me, then he says, “Midnight of the last day of this week, if you are not out of this pool house, I will have you removed myself. And you will need more than that bat to protect you.”
And with that, he walks out. I stand there, staring at the open sliding door and the quiet blue water of the pool just beyond it. The eerie silence after the hurricane.
What the hell am I going to do?
Fear keeps my feet rooted to the spot and I have to force myself to move just so I can close and lock the sliding door.
As soon as I do, the tears come. I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have any money, and the few skills that I picked up in college won’t net me enough money to live on. Christ, what a mess this is.
I go to clean up the broken mug he knocked over when he came for me, weeping as I pick up the ceramic shards from the warm brown liquid it was once holding. None of this is fair and I don’t know how to make it right.
The mug is cleaned up and my first thought is to call Ilya. I don’t know if she can help. Maybe I can stay with her for a little while. I don’t know.
I go to my bedroom to get my phone and call her. The phone rings a few times before she answers groggily. “Hello?”
“Lee…” It’s all I get out before I start sobbing. All the pain just comes flowing out of me like a river.
“Hey, hey,” she says. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“No,” I sob, wiping my face with my sleeve. “My father is kicking me out.”
“You’re kidding me.” She pauses, then, “Oh, my God. That’s great.”
I scowl at my phone. “What?”
“Nat, he’s giving you the keys to your freedom. Real freedom. Finally.”
“Ugh. You don’t understand. This isn’t like he’s setting me up in an apartment or giving me a job at one of his buildings. He’s kicking me out. On the street. With nothing but the clothes on my back if he can help it.”
“Okay, well, first of all, I’m not going to let that happen. You can stay with me until you get on your feet, okay?”
I sniffle. The sobs are dying down. “Thank you.”
She listens to my shuddery breaths, then she says, “He’s really just kicking you out on the street, huh? Guess he heard about you flirting with Anton Romanov.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she says. “I think he’s just tired of having to look at my face all the time. I don’t know.”
“That’s kind of harsh.”
