12
VIKTOR
It’s been two months since the incident at the abandoned building. Thankfully, my little outburst seems to have soured Tati on my company. It makes watching over her easier.
She doesn’t really talk to me when we’re together. I take her where she wants to go and bring her back to Nikolai’s. It’s an easy enough job, especially lately. Nikolai hasn’t called me about her in almost a week now. Perhaps the little bird has settled into her gilded cage.
Tonight, I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Somewhere along the line, I started keeping old photos of Nicki and me in a beat-up old shoebox. They’re mostly things from when we first joined the Bratva, but a few of them have some of the Red Devils in them…
I’m sitting on my couch, glass of vodka warming on my coffee table, box of photos on my lap. Most of these pictures are starting to fade after so many years. Twenty or so, I think? It certainly seems like it from the style of clothing and the cut of our hair. Nicki’s hair was wild and curly when he was a teenfollowing me around all the time. I find a photo of him when I was first assigned to be his mentor. He was around fourteen to my early twenties and the two of us are sitting in Nikolai’s living room. I’ve got a drink in my hand and he’s holding an unlit cigar between his teeth as he mugs for the camera.
I used to tease him about that hair, call him a Q-Tip or a drumstick because he started off so skinny. He’d probably have stayed skinny if I hadn’t started whipping him into shape. I pause on a photo of the two of us the summer we went to Muscle Beach in California. He’s standing next to a friend of Teddy’s, I forget his name. But I remember he was three times Nicki’s size. It certainly looks like it in the photo where Nicki stands next to him, snarling as he shows off the tiny muscles in his arms next to the wall of flesh that was Teddy’s buddy.
I flip through a few more photos and stop when I come across the one of both of us, taken during the Leukemia charity drive about a year or so before his death. We’re standing together, two grown men in our expensive suits. The vaguest memory of the curls he had could only be seen in the waviness of his hair on top. He was starting to go gray prematurely, but only in his head. It had almost completely gone white at that point, which he was particularly proud of since mine was only starting to go gray.
He looks fully formed here, finally a man after years of missteps, of trying to prove himself to his father and to the Bratva, no longer unblooded or untested.
I think this is the last photo of him alive that I possess. I wish there were more. I wish I’d thought to take more.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I glance at it and see that Nikolai is calling. It’s late. Well after midnight. Maybe he needs me for some actual work.
“Tatiana’s snuck out. Again,” he says when I pick up. I have to hold in a sigh of exasperation. “I want her found and brought back immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” is all I say and hang up. There goes the peace I’ve been granted over the last few days. I suppose I shouldn’t be terribly surprised. Tati is unpredictable. She’s like a storm that no one ever sees coming. Not even me.
I get up and go to my room to get dressed. Guess I’ll try her friend’s house first.
“Viktor,”Marla says when she opens the door. She runs a hand through her mussed, multicolored hair as she stands there in her robe. “What are you doing here so late? Is something wrong?”
“I’m looking for Tati. Her father says she snuck out again.”
She sighs and rubs her eyes. It’s clear that she was in the throes of sleep when I knocked on her door. “She’s not here. But you’re welcome to come in and check if you want.”
“If you don’t mind.”
She shakes her head and steps aside. I walk into her apartment and immediately, I know she’s not here. I’m not sure how. Perhaps it’s because I don’t smell her perfume, or maybe it’s just her aura that I can’t feel. It always seems like I know she’s entered a room before I see her at all.
I walk into her living room, anyway, casually glancing through the kitchen door and down the hall to the bedrooms. Nickolai’d have my head if I couldn’t at least say that I looked properly.
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Marla shrugs and yawns. “Yesterday or the day before, I think. Nikolai granted me visitation rights.”
I scoff. “How fortunate. Maybe he’s finally starting to lighten up.”
“Maybe,” she says with a weak smile. She steps all the way into the living room and asks, “So, you haven’t seen her since the last time you took her out?”
I shake my head. “No.” Then, “How did she seem when you last saw her?” The question entered my mind as proper. The thing you ask when you’re looking for someone, but as soon as I hear it, I realized how selfish the question really is.
“She’s fine,” she says a little too quickly.
“Fine? Really?”
She sighs and crosses her arms across her chest. “She’s… dealing with some things. Stuff that I really shouldn’t be talking about without her being here.”
I cock my head. “Maybe you should talk about them. Especially if it’ll help me find her.”
“It won’t,” she says. “Trust me on that.” Her eyes drift past me to the coffee table, and she stiffens. She walks over to it and starts gathering up a collection of papers strewn across the glass surface.
