There’s no version of this where I get to keep him.
12
JOHNNY
I’m crouchedbehind the scrub brush on the side of the house when the rental car pulls into the drive.
I should be long gone by now. Natalia told me to disappear before her brother showed up, and she wasn’t subtle about it. But I want a look at the guy who makes her voice go tight and her body curl in on itself.
Just one look. Then I’m out.
The guy who climbs out is built like a bouncer. Broad through the chest, thick neck, the kind of big that’s meant to intimidate.
He moves from the car to the front door like he owns the property and everyone on it. This is a man who expects the world to get out of his way. He doesn’t knock. Just pounds with the flat of his hand and waits.
Then he turns his head, scanning the yard, and I see his face full-on?—
The ground drops out from under me.
Images slam through me so fast I can’t sort them, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but grab fistfuls of sand.
A desk. Dark wood, cluttered with printouts. Grainy security stills spread across the surface. And across from me, the man from my last flashback. The man I’ve been drawing.
Broad shoulders, silver threading through dark hair, authority radiating off him like heat from asphalt.
Only now I know who he is.
My father.
Lorenzo.
His voice hits me next, fragments crashing in without order or mercy.
“Nikolai. Next in line. History of domestic violence. Extreme force against enemies.”
The face in the photograph is the guy on Natalia’s front porch. Same hard features. Same dead, flat eyes.
More fragments. A car speeding past, muzzle flashes from the windows, someone shouting that Dario’s been hit. My father’s face white with rage. “They nearly took my fucking wife.” His fist on the desk. The word he kept using, over and over, until it stopped sounding like language and started sounding like a verdict.
Enemy.
My jaw locks so tight my teeth ache.
“Anton Kozlov. The Pakhan.” My father’s voice drops lower, the way it does when he’s not angry anymore, when he’s past angry, when he’s already decided. “He is our enemy.”
Then one more image. One more photograph on that cluttered desk.
A woman’s face. Young. Brown hair. Blue eyes that I’d know anywhere now, the kind that shift between pale and steel depending on the light.
“Kozlov’s daughter. Natalia.”My father shrugs, barely glancing at it.“She’s a nobody. But just as corrupt and evil as her rotten family, I assume.”
The memory releases me like a fist unclenching, and I’m back in the sand, bent over my knees, fighting not to retch.
Natalia. My father said her name like it meant nothing. Like she was a footnote in someone else’s file.
Fuck that.
The woman who cleaned my blood off her bathroom floor and checked my pupils every two hours isn’t a footnote, and she sure as hell isn’t a nobody.
