Page 33 of Fixation
“Mom?” I walked up to the front door of our old home when I heard a noise coming from there.
Hope, the filthy monster, surged through my body, curling hot and sharp beneath my ribs like a knife waiting to twist.
My mother had left two days before Dad was lowered into the ground. She’d said she needed a moment to herself.
She hadn’t been back since.
I was eighteen, so technically, I didn’t need her.
But fuck if I didn’t wish she’d come home. That she hadn’t left me too.
“No,” a man barked, his accent heavy. “Not your mother.”
I stopped at the kitchen, my nose scrunching. I didn’t recognize his voice.
My family had lived in the suburbs of New York. I knew each and every one of my neighbors.
None of them sounded like that.
Without thinking, I snatched a knife from the counter. I’d never killed a man.
I’d never wanted to die young, either.
Dad had to have thought the same thing when the semitrailer crashed into his car and stole him from us.
“Who the fuck are you?” I growled at the muscular man who took up the entire space in our foyer.
We were about the same height, around six feet five inches, but back then, I was innocent.
Naïve.
Nothing about this man, in his black suit and the Cyrillic letters tattooed all over his hands and bulging neck, suggested naïveté.
The aura surrounding him was dark and ominous.
I held the knife to him, anyway.
It was all I could do.
“Your father had a contract he failed to fulfill.” His brown eyes glimmered. His light blond hair, which he had cut short, appeared almost white in the late afternoon sun. “You’re his only remaining family. I’m here to collect.”
“There isn’t much left, and my mother needs that money.” I wielded the knife, moving closer to the man. “I’m not giving it to you. Get out. Leave.”
His lips twisted in a disgusted snarl. “I don’t need your money. I need your skills. Your father, he bragged about you. Said you’d be a better chemist than he ever was, if you put your mind to it.”
What could this man want with me? What skills?
I didn’t ask. Couldn’t.
“And while I’d rather keep you alive and taking care of business for me, trust that there’ll be consequences if you refuse to do as I say. I won’t hesitate to kill you, then rape and chop your absent mother to pieces.”
Fear had my stomach churning.
“What did he say I could do?” With Mom’s life at stake, I forced myself to ask, “What do you want from me?”
“I want sixteen years of your life.” The man straightened his back. Rolled his shoulders. “Sixteen years were left in Sean’s contract with me, the future head of the Bratva. The Russian mafia. That’s what I want.”
The Russian mafia.
