Page 68 of Ruinous Need
“You do. Give me all of it.”
Something breaks loose in me as he looks down at me with those infuriatingly unreadable onyx eyes. The knife that stabbed through my heart when he told me he was just using me. The confusion when we had to leave. Every part of himself he’s hiding from me. It feeds into my pain, ripping through me.
I grip his hand so hard, digging my fingernails in, that maybe he really does get a slice of what it’s like. How it makes me hate my own body for putting me through this.
As the blood wells from the half-moons I’ve left on his hand, he doesn’t try to move away. He lets me grip him tighter and tighter, until the pain eases enough for me to lie back and sleep.
Even then, when I wake up, my hand still covers his. I didn’t want to let him go. In case, when I woke up he was gone again.
I look at him in the soft morning light. His face pale, his new sharp haircut making him more powerful, less chaotic. Like he’s corralling that unhinged energy into something precise and focused.
I trace the bloody marks I’ve left on the back of his hand and I start to believe that maybe he is doing all this for me. My heart starts pounding as I realize that for the first time since I was eighteen, I have something to hope for.
CHAPTER 27
VIKTOR
THE MOUNTAIN HOUSE is one of the few places that I have joyful childhood memories.
They’re hazy and they were when I was very young, before my father became the Pakhan.
I remember laughter, wide hallways to run down and being able to play with anyone in the house. I would race around the property, in the snow and the sun, and if I fell there was always a comforting hug at the other end. No one told me to stop crying in those days.
This is where I met Lev.
His parents owned the holiday home across the road from ours, which is now overgrown and abandoned. In those early days, our parents were great friends and would invite his family over for dinner.
We’d play spies together for hours, hiding in strange places around the house until the staff found us and told us to get out of the way, when we’d declare, “Mission compromised,” and sprint off to find a new hiding place.
I tell Lisette about these memories as we walk through the snow. She was feeling better today and craving some fresh airafter her endometriosis left her near-immobile for days. She immediately detects the sadness in my eyes when I talk about him.
“What happened?”
I’ve never told anyone. Not the whole story.
But it comes tumbling out with Lisette here, holding my hand as we walk across the slopes where Lev and I would have raced each other on sleds. Now that she knows about my father, it feels only right to tell her the full story.
After my father became Pakhan, he became paranoid and convinced that his friends and allies would betray him. That was all he thought about, his thinking becoming increasingly conspiratorial the longer he was the Pakhan.
Alliances, betrayals, punishments and reprisals. Who would betray him, how and when. Sometimes he was right; most of the time he was wrong.
The job consumed him. He wasn’t the same man I remembered from childhood.
I don’t know where it came from, this need to increase his power, but it spread like bitter poison through our whole lives. He started to beat my mother and me. We were just another element of his need for control over everything. Image became an obsession.
I was a possession to be moulded into the right shape so that I could fulfill the role he set up for me. Not a person, but an extension of my father.
I had been training with weapons every day since I was thirteen, under his warped instruction. He would place photos of my friends on the boxing gloves and dummies we used to practice.
“Imagine if Andrei betrayed you. He would deserve to die, wouldn’t he?“
The taunting set me on edge, pushing me away from my friends, until I lashed out at them too.
I knew the plots and betrayals he made up weren’t real, but my father planted these ideas in my head and brought them to life. Until my head was so twisted that I could taste what it would feel like to have my friends betray me.
I dreaded the day I would have to kill, but I knew it was coming. He made it seem inevitable.
The trainings got more violent. Any weakness I showed was punished with increasingly harsh torture. A week locked in the basement. A minute of holding my arm over the gas element in the kitchen. Beating my mother in front of me and continuing for as long as I cried.
