Page 169 of Vicious Games

My forehead creases. There’s that word again. Always that word.

“So I’ve been told,” I mutter. “Though I’m still unsure howwe’refamily.”

“It’s like I’m looking at you, Katya,” Misha murmurs under his breath, more to himself than to me. The way he says that name makes something in my chest ache.

Then he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together. “Maybe I should start from the beginning. How does that sound?”

“Okay,” I whisper.

“Your mother, Katya… she was my sister.”

The world shifts beneath me at how he didn’t even try to ease me into it.

“Yoursister?” I repeat, blinking rapidly.

“Yes. Our eldest. Six years older than me.”

“And a mother to us all,” Aleksandr adds quietly, his voice thick with emotion. His blue eyes, so much like Misha’s, suddenly darken with what can only be grief.

Was.

I hang on that one word.

They’re speaking about her in the past tense.

Which means…

“What…” I try to swallow. “What happened to her?”

“Evil, Kira. Evil caught up with our Katya,” Aleksandr answers with a snarl.

“Sasha,” Misha warns with a poignant look, and instantly Aleksandr goes silent, his lips pressed into a fine line.

“As I was saying,” Misha continues, clearing his throat, “Katya stepped up and raised us after our parents passed. I won’t go into the details of how it all happened, but what matters is this—she took care of us. All of us. Five younger siblings, a blind grandmother, and a house barely holding itself together. We were just kids… and she became everything we needed. She was barely more than a child herself, but she mothered us the best she could—especially Kostya. He was still just a baby when our mother died.” He pauses, the weight of the memory pulling his shoulders down. “It wasn’t always easy. There were nights we had no food. No electricity. No heat. And sometimes even running water was a luxury. Since our grandmother couldn’t work, Katya was also the breadwinner of our home. Sasha and I tried to help, but we were younger than you are now. Still, we made do… until we didn’t.” His voice falters. “Katya, unwillingly, became involved with the worst kind of man—Vasily Fedorov.” He spits the name like poison. “Vasily wasPakhanat the time. Saying no to him was a death sentence—for her, and for us. So, she endured his advances, sacrificing her body, even her soul, just to ensure our safety as well as keeping food on the table. And for a time, our small family had more than most. Until she got pregnant.”

The room stills so silently that my heartbeat feels like thunder in my ears.

“Katya couldn’t risk Vasily discovering your possible existence. If you were a boy, he’d make sure to have raised you as a soldier to join the Bratva. But if you were born a girl… he’d have discarded you—or worse. Sell you to the highest bidder. Katya couldn’t let that happen. No mother would.”

He touches the stack of letters gently.

“So, ever the clever one, my sister, your mother, faked her death. And with our help and a few close friends, she fled to America. Vasily believed she died by suicide, throwing herself off the Moskva River. Of course, we mourned her publicly… but secretly, we kept her alive in our hearts.”

He looks down at the stack of letters again, sorrow etched into every line of his face.

“Though I made her promise never to reach out to us, Katya yearned for her family. So…she wrote us letters. Always letters. About Chicago, and about you. Every last letter… was about you, Kira.”

A lump forms in my throat as I now start to understand why everyone in this house has called me by that name.

“Little did we know that her letters to share in her joy with us, would bring us so much pain. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Vasily must have found one of those letters and tracked her down. But before he could reach you… she hid you somewhere he’d never think to look.”

“A Catholic church,” Lucky says beside me.

“Yes. To be fair, Vasily wasn’t the only one who couldn’t find you. I never thought she’d leave you with strangers either. I always assumed she had made friendships in America and handed you off to them. I searched and searched… but I never found you. Not until now. Not until your boyfriend walked into my club and showed Kirill a picture of that bracelet.”

I turn to Lucky. His head is bowed, his jaw tense.

“That bracelet,” Misha continues, “is the only family heirloom we ever kept. Even when we had nothing to eat, we never sold it. It was passed down through generations, going back as far as the ear of Catherine the Great herself. Our grandmother made Katya take it to America, saying that one day she, her baby, and the bracelet would come back, to their rightful home.”

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