59. Radimir

59

RADIMIR

Bronwyn stared at me in shock, but I just nodded firmly. Watching her in that car, knowing how close to death she was, knowing that at any second, that could be it... something had cracked inside me, thick layers of ice that had been there for decades. I’d thought that ice was protecting me, and keeping us apart was the price I paid. But almost losing her had switched everything around. I couldn’t let anything come between us ever again. And if the cost was pain, then I’d pay it.

There was a little bottle of bubble bath beside the tub, and I poured the whole thing in. Thick foam started to spread over the surface. By the time the water was deep enough, Bronwyn was naked. I pointed at the bath. “In.”

She climbed in, still looking a little shell-shocked. As soon as her legs hit the water, her expression dissolved into bliss, and she slid down into the tub.

I wanted to tell her, but I needed to make sure she was okay, first. I waited until the heat had soaked into her bones and chased the cold away, and she stopped shivering. Then I scooped up some steaming water and began to rub her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she asked, startled.

“Washing you,” I told her firmly.

I worked my way over her body, soaping her skin and then sluicing the suds away, washing all the stress of the last few hours out of her until I felt her muscles unknot. We didn’t speak a word the entire time. Eventually, her breathing had slowed, and her body was relaxed, and I knelt beside the bath, my big, suited form hulking over her naked one, stroking her back over and over like a cat’s.

God, I loved this woman. Needed her like I’d never needed anyone. I could have gone on stroking her like that forever...but it was time.

I began, keeping one hand on her body to help me get through it. “The Aristovs weren’t always criminals,” I said slowly. “My father was a good man. He worked for the government. My mother was a dance teacher.” I met her eyes for a second. “I was going to be a businessman. Valentin wanted to be an actor. Gennadiy, a doctor. What I turned us into...it wasn’t what I intended. Wasn’t even what I wanted. It was what was... necessary.”

I swallowed. It felt like I was standing at the top of some stairs leading down into a pitch-black basement. I hadn’t ventured down into it for years and I was scared. Not because I didn’t know what was down there but because I did.

But I’d promised.

“One night when I was fifteen, my father came home and told my mother that he’d stumbled on something at work. Corruption, on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions being secretly siphoned off. She begged him not to talk to anyone because she was afraid of what might happen to him. But he couldn’t let them get away with it. He was that sort of man. They argued about it for hours: that’s how my brothers and I found out about it, listening from the next room. A few days later, he reported what he’d found. But he’d underestimated how far the corruption had spread. A man called Olenev, a man my father thought was his friend, came to our house...and stabbed my father to death, right in front of us.”

The pain began, a jagged tear, deep in my chest. “Seconds later, the police burst through the door: Olenev had friends in the force.” I sighed and closed my eyes. “And they arrested us. Valentin, Gennadiy, and me.”

I heard the water slosh as Bronwyn twisted around in the bath. I could imagine her leaning close to me, her eyes wide. “ What?!”

“It wasn’t enough to kill my father. Olenev knew that he’d probably told my mother about the corruption, and maybe us, too. But he couldn’t kill the whole family, that would look too suspicious. So, he invented a story about the three of us killing our father. He said our father had found out we were selling drugs and confronted us, and we’d killed him in a drug-fueled rage. It didn’t matter that we’d never touched drugs. It didn’t matter that Gennadiy was only fourteen and Valentin only twelve. Olenev had sway with the prosecutor and the press. They painted us as feral kids who rebelled against their good, honest father. The three of us were sent to a youth detention center, and not in Moscow, where we lived. A particularly brutal one, for violent youths...in Vladivostok.” Even now, I have trouble saying the name. The pain in my chest grew, the wound ripping wider.

I opened my eyes. “Olenev was clever. We were out of the way, no one would ever believe us, and he could use us as leverage to make sure our mother stayed quiet: he told her that if she went to the press, he’d arrange for us to be killed while we were behind bars.”

Bronwyn was staring at me, her mouth open in a silent O of horror. I focused on the droplets of water on her bare shoulders, on the bubbles that clung to her red hair like snowflakes. I was descending fast, now, into that dark basement and I needed to be able to climb back out.

“We were three pampered city boys from a good family. Every other boy there had been into gangs and drugs for years. We were soft.” I said it without emotion. “Easy pickings. And Olenev, he knew the warden. That’s why he had us sent there. The warden and his guards tried to break us.” It was getting harder, now. I could smell the place, bleach and piss and fear. I could see the cold tiled walls and my blood splattered on them under the flickering fluorescent lights.

“They’d withhold food for days, until we were too weak to fight. Or beat us with rubber hoses. And it went on week after week, month after month.” My voice slowed. I was unleashing memories I’d kept locked down under layers of ice for decades, and it felt like they were going to suffocate me. I remembered seeing Gennadiy being kicked to the ground and then pissed on, while I was held down, unable to help. I remembered seeing Valentin, my baby brother, howling and sobbing, as they burned the soles of his feet with cigarettes. I remembered the pain of being kicked in the ribs when they were already fractured, bruises layered on bruises, cuts reopened before they had a chance to heal. “They had different ways of torturing each of us. With me, their favorite thing was to make me stand outside, naked, in the snow.” I looked down at my shoes, then met Bronwyn’s eyes. “That’s how I lost some of my toes. Frostbite.”

Bronwyn put a wet hand on my cheek, and I closed my eyes again and sank into the softness. It would have been so easy to just nestle there, retreating back to safety. But there was more, and she needed to hear all of it to understand. I just wasn’t sure I could make myself tell her.

“At first, we got visitors. Our mother came each month, to catch us up on news and tell us to be strong. But then the warden found out and….” My hands curled into fists. “He strip-searched her. And then...he raped her. In front of the other guards. After that, we told everyone not to visit, and we were completely on our own.” I inhaled, but the air came in shakily. I hadn’t realized how hard this would be, but I had to get through it.

“About a year into our eight-year sentence, our mother got cancer. The warden wouldn’t let us visit. Not when she was in the hospital, not when she was in a hospice...” My voice went tight. That had been one of the worst parts. I remember sitting on my scratchy wool blanket, tears rolling down my cheeks, knowing she was in agony, alone, and not being able to reach her...it felt like it happened yesterday. I inhaled the sweet, damp air of the bathroom, trying to remind myself I was here , with her . But the pain was so bad now, it was hard to breathe. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to go on. “The warden wouldn’t even let us go to the funeral.” My voice was ragged. “We’d lost both our parents, and we didn’t get to say goodbye to either of them. That nearly destroyed us.”

Bronwyn threw her arms around me and pulled me against the bath, her wet arms and breasts soaking my shirt, her breathing ragged in my ear. “This is what you have nightmares about,” she whispered.

I nodded. Then I closed my eyes and just held her close, and the warmth of her and the scent of her made the pain retreat a little. I took three long breaths, then pulled gently back so I could look her in the eye.

“It’s okay,” she said softly. “You don’t have to tell me any more.”

But I shook my head. “Yes I do.” She needed to hear the best part. Which was also the worst part. I stared at her and let the sight of her give me the strength to continue.

“You see...they’d made a mistake, with the three of us.” My voice turned bitter and savage. “They thought that they could break us, grind us down. But there was something inside us. When they had me outside, naked, and the wind was so cold it felt like it was tearing the flesh right off me, the only way I could survive was to stop feeling. To get through the pain and humiliation, we became like ice. The beatings they gave us...they forced us to build our bodies and become stronger. And the way they isolated the three of us made us stick together, until we were so close nothing could break us apart. The warden thought he was breaking us, Bronwyn. But he was creating monsters.” I felt the grim satisfaction I’d felt back then: knowing that we were changing, that we’d have our revenge someday. And I felt the sickness, too, at what we were becoming.

I rested my forearms on the edge of the tub, wetness soaking through my shirt. “We’d seen for ourselves that the official system—government, police, courts—was corrupt. So we decided to build our own system. We were surrounded by criminals: everyone there had been in a gang. We learned everything we could: how to steal, how to smuggle, how to kill.” I rolled up my shirt sleeve and showed her a tattoo on my right bicep, rough and blurry. “We got our first tattoos in that place, done with soot and a needle made from the straightened-out spring from a pen. For three years, we grew, we hardened...and we planned.”

“There was a small metalworking shop, and we made a key to our cells. When it was dark, we slipped out and crept to the warden’s office, where I strangled the bastard with a phone cable. Then we ran into the night: no money, no food, nothing but the clothes on our backs. It took us months just to get back to Moscow, stealing so we could eat. From there, we bought passage on a cargo ship going to the US. But not before I’d visited Olenev, the man who killed our father, and cut his throat.” I paused for a second to let that sink in. I needed her to know the worst of it, the worst of me: I’d said no secrets. “ We went to New York, worked our way up through the street gangs and after a few years, we went to work for a Bratva boss called Luka Malakov. There was a guy there about the same age as me, who’d done some time in the army: Alexei. He taught me how to be a hitman and we became friends. We all worked together, gradually gaining status and respect. And eventually, after years, my brothers and I moved to Chicago to start up on our own. Mikhail joined us soon after: he has...his own story.”

I looked down at myself. There was almost nothing left of the innocent boy who’d gone to Vladivostok.. My shirt was soaked through, almost transparent, and we could see the muscle I’d built through years of fighting, the scars I’d gotten and every dark line of my tattoos. “That’s what happened in Vladivostok, Bronwyn. We went through hell, and we became what we needed to, to survive. But what we became were monsters.”

I let out a long, shaky breath. I’d never thought I’d tell another living soul. Reliving it had left me worn out and broken, but...now that it was out, there was a clean edge to the pain, like when a bullet is pulled out of you. Maybe now, it could start to heal. At the same time, another emotion rose, filling me like ice water.

I’d thought it was just the pain that had kept me from telling her. But I was afraid. Afraid to meet her eyes because what if that fear was back, the fear I’d seen the night I killed Spartak’s brother? What if she told me to stay away from me! I was afraid of losing her.

I slowly lifted my eyes to look at her.

Her eyes were swimming with tears, but it wasn’t fear and disgust in her face...it was love and acceptance.

And some part of me that I didn’t think could ever feel complete again was suddenly whole.

We both dived forward and slammed together, water flying from her soaking body, arms locking around each other’s backs. “I love you,” I told her. “I love you, I love you.”

“I love you too,” she told me firmly. “And I’m proud to be your wife.”

We crushed together even more tightly, but the wall of the tub was still between our lower bodies, and I needed to feel her against me completely, now . So, I pulled her right out of the bath, naked and slippery as a mermaid, and fell back full-length on the floor with her on top of me.

I ran my hands up and down her warm, wet back. Her damp hair fell around my face, and I inhaled her scent. Then I put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her lips down to mine.