Mama sighs and turns to me, opening her hands. I walk closer and she covers both my hands with her own.
“Malyshka, now, don’t be afraid.”
I roll my eyes. Mama loves to treat me like a child, but I’m twenty-one and we are a Bratva family. She should be able to trust that I can handle the darkness of the world.
Instead, her mission has always been to shelter me from it.
“I won’t be afraid, Mama.”
My father clears his throat nervously, wiping his hands down the front of his tweed suit.
“Your brothers…”
Wenevertalk about what happened.
This is the first time in years my father has mentioned them.
“My brothers?”
My mother tightens her grip on my hands.
“Look what you’ve done, Maksim. You’re upsetting her, and before the important dinner tonight.”
My engagement dinner with the Chicago Romanovs is the last thing on my mind.
Pyotr and Fyodor were my older brothers and I loved them with all my heart. They were twins, ten years older than me. When I was eleven, they died in an accident on the docks. Something went wrong with a ship’s engine while they wereworking. They were so badly burned that the funerals were closed-casket. There was no chance to see them one last time and say goodbye.
I was inconsolable. I’d never known that kind of grief where it squeezes your heart and doesn’t let go, not really, until the moment that I realized they were never coming back.
Every night that first year, I really expected they would burst in with a silly re-enactment of a fairytale that would entertain me past my bedtime until my nanny would drag me away to go to sleep.
With them gone, my life was transformed. Drained of color, with only Papa and Mama and me. I retreated into the paintings, obsessed over them, pushing people away.
It wasn’t just my life that changed, but my value within the Bratva.
With my brothers dead, I am now the heir to the Bryusov name. Whoever marries me will take the Bryusov seat on the Bratva Council and all the power that goes with it. My husband will inherit everything.
Suddenly, I went from being a spoiled child who was irrelevant to Bratva politics, to being the center of the Bratva for every family with aspirations to power.
To my friends, I was no longer Nat who they’d grown up with. I was now Natalia Bryusova, always carrying my family name with me. I hated it. I could no longer look my friends in the face without seeing what I was worth to them.
My father is fidgeting the way he does when he’s nervous, straightening his tie before he speaks.
“Your brothers didn’t die in an accident,malyshka.”
Well, that’s not correct. My father was the one who told me about the accident, who sat me down and explained it to me when I was eleven. I didn’t want to believe it, but now I know that it’s the truth.
“Yes, they did, Papa. The ship’s engine? The explosion? You told me.”
He gives a grimace. “We wanted to protect you. There was an explosion, but it was not an accidental one.”
I glance at my mother for confirmation and she nods, her eyes sparkling with tears.
“Oh, it was terrible. That monster…”
“What monster?”
“Aleksandr Zhukov.”
