Page 11 of Volatile Waters

“Why?”

“Because I want to kill her.”

Uffe had been murdered six months earlier. My uncle refused to go to the funeral. I always wondered if that meant we were responsible for the death.

Intrigued, I smirked. “Do tell.”

“The bitch threatened me, claiming she has copies of a false birth certificate for a Russian infant.” He lifted a brow, asking if I was following. I wasn’t. He rolled his eyes and said, “So, I need you to go to the U.S.”

I snarled. “What the fuck for?”

“My curse.”

My stomach soured. Seafoam’s child. “She’s still alive?”

“The American says no, but he also says Marina is dead.”

“And?”

“He didn’t sound sad.” Now, this conversation was making more sense. He was beyond infatuated with her. “Not to mention, she is the mother of his only living child. It does not feel right. If that child is alive, we are to be profiting off of her. Same goes for Marina. Money or their deaths. Take Kirill in case you need someone to disappear permanently.”

My jaw locked. “I am capable of murder.”

He waved his hand through the air. “That wasn’t murder. That was a misfortune of events.”

“But she is dead, no?”

Father rolled his eyes. “Yury, you were too inexperienced to know she was choking on vomit behind her gag.” He laughed. He actually laughed. “You thought she was jerking because you were fucking her so hard.”

I was only sixteen when I accidentally killed a slave, permanently shutting the pearly gates of heaven to my impending entry. As callus as I had already become, it was still a devastating injury to my dark soul. But I was given no time to mourn or comprehend the depth of the crime. I was in the live feed room being filmed, watched, paid, and judged for my performance. For the sake of money, Uncle had her body removed from the hanging chains and replaced with another crying young woman who I was to ‘train.’ Tears dripped from under my black hood as I fucked the next slave.

Father tossed a passport onto his dark wooden desk. “Adrian is to go, too.”

I chuckled when studying the inside. “I am no longer Yury?”

He stared at me for a lingering moment then finally answered, “You never were.”

My smile faded, and my ears began to ring. “What was that?”

As if trying to ignore the bomb he’d just set off inside my head, Father acted nonchalantly. “None of the names used in this house are real ones. It is safest this way.”

Painfully, as I sat there, the illusion in which I had been raised started melting away. Dumbfounded, I asked, “But, how is this possible? I am a man who doesn’t know his real name?”

He pointed to the passport in my pulsating hand. “You do now. But you are to always go by Yury. Always. I only told you your true identity because I do not wish for the U.S. to search for your true identity and find out our family business if you are to be questioned.”

“Questioned?” I exhaled. “Don’t you mean apprehended?”

“And you are not to mention our line of business.”

My chest constricted as I imagined being imprisoned for illegally entering a foreign country. “Would you come for me, Father?”

He stared at me with his calculatingly shady eyes, then replied, “No.”

Father not only asked me to sneak into a country where I had never been, and obtain unlawful documents, but to also make a delivery.

On a private jet, Kirill, Adrian, two other cousins, and I smuggled in three slaves. Two of them, I had personally trained. In actuality, the slaves’ presence was how it was so easy to enter America unnoticed. Rich men, hungry for their purchases, paid off the late-night private airport employees, keeping our arrival undocumented.

Three very young women, wearing robes over their gold chain delivery attire, were heavily drugged and sleeping. It was best for travel. Their imagination with where they were being sent always made them far too nervous and hard to bear. Drugged, they were less annoying.