Page 77 of Devil's Vows
Now she’s adding her other hand, playing more keys, and the haunting composition wants to suck out my soul, saying everything we can’t find words for.
“If you know this instrument as I do…just listen. I’ve composed a requiem.”
Great. A tune to accompany the souls of the dead. The mere word sends a shiver down my back because this room is where it all ended, leaving this house riddled with bullet holes and me stumbling over the bodies of my men.
Her gaze meets mine. She doesn’t know what happened in here.
She lifts her hands off the keys, presses down on one, and points to its neighbor. “I investigated and found this. Is it his, Ivan? Tell me, because if it’s Dimitri’s, I can never play this piano again.”
I lean in and clench my jaw. Dark, dried blood has stained the wood, visible only when you play the adjacent keys and look for it. We cleaned, I fucking scrubbed, but it was all surface level. There was just too fucking much of it.
How appropriate that she’s composing a requiem for him, on the piano still stained with his blood.
“Is he really dead? And if he is…how did you do it? Howcouldyou do it?” she whispers. “You were like brothers? Dimitri a son to our Pakhan.”
“And a traitor, as you know. He had half this household flipped to his side. Why do you think I sent you away?” My jaw clenches, as do my fists. Surely, she can’t be this clueless, this naive. “Why the fuck do you think I have that evil woman locked up in a fucking junkie’s health spa for as long as it takes for her to die? Do you think it was easy? Knowing he was coming for the Pakhan and then for me? Fuck, Milana, I sent the girls away just in time?—”
“It would have been a blessing for the Pakhan?—”
“To hand over everything we have, everything we control, to a fucking psycho like Chertnikov? Dimitri was just his tool, Milana. We would’ve been next. Me. You. The girls.”
“Chertnikov? You’re sure?”
“Yes! Sergei confessed.”
Her hands fall away from the keys and the room turns menacingly quiet as I wait for her to digest this information.
“There’re no bullets in this room,” she says eventually. “No holes like the rest of the house, which looks like a fucking Swiss cheese. I ask again,howdid he die?”
She has a right to know. Didn’t I force her to leave, to go hide out in Russia when I sensed something was very off? As for Dimitri, I always had the weight and height advantage. I keep fit for my girls, to stay alive for my family, something Dimitri didn’t have to fight for, couldn’t possibly understand as he never had children of his own. He let his exercise regime slack over time, too focused on arranging the perfect coup for the Fourth of July, where gunshots wouldn’t be heard over the ruckus of millions of dollars’ worth of fireworks on the only day of the year when you can get a permit in this area.
No. She isn’t clueless or naive. This is the fucking world welive in, as she well knows. Her heart still aches, just like mine still does, with the loss of a man who was like a brother to us.
“I sliced his throat. Right here.” The fountain of blood was horrifying, a flooding river gushing with adrenaline. He didn’t have a chance. He never had a chance. “Hand to hand combat. After he shot me twice and Yuri managed to kick the fucking gun out of his hand. It was noble, if you’d like to phrase it like that. He fought with everything he had. In the end, it was quick.”
And part of me died that day. The last bit of innocence scraped from my eyes. My best friend actually did what he’d been planning to do for six long years. That day, the world lost color, and ever since, all I can see is black and white. Good and evil. Life and death. Six fucking years. Time during which he sat at my table, served as my best man at my wedding. Was one of the first to see my girls after they left the neonatal unit. He held my tiny first-born in his hands as water was poured over her head, his prerogative as godfather at her baptism.
Milana stands and runs her trembling fingers over the ivory keys. “I loved this piano. It was my life, myraison d’être. Now I’ll never touch it again.”
She closes the keyboard cover over the keys, reminding me of a coffin. A fitting end with a requiem’s notes the last to be played on it.
“I’ll get you a new piano.” Burn this one, erase the evidence, slowly over time, in the wood fireplace in one of the lounges.
“Don’t bother. But do you understand why I can’t breathe in this house? Death is everywhere. People I knew just gone.”
I nod. Breathing is hard here if you only look backwards, to what has been and how it ended. The past suffocates you. The only way to breathe is to look forward, to the future I need to secure for her and for my family. And for that, I’ll have to do whatever I have to do.
“I can’t promise you anything, Milana. I won’t.”
“This place is haunted, Ivan. I don’t even want to know what you did with the bodies.”
But I bet she’s figured it out already. All sixteen men torched to obscure their faces, to burn off their fingerprints, teeth pulled, bodies frozen in the freezer in the basement’s industrial kitchen until we were ready, and then buried under the new swimming pool. Yes, I want to see the Feds figuring that one out. Before the Pakhan’s first stroke, we got wind of a coup, so we put our own plans in place, for all to see. Paperwork, permits, zoning approvals, and inspections already in place, everything was above board.
The hole dug by local contractors who do this all over the city, extra deep for a diving board and a slide for the girls. Extra-long so I can swim lengths in the summer. Going a bit deeper by ourselves one night, dragging bodies out one by one and covering them again, compacting the whole lot in a mass grave. The concrete was poured by another contractor who had taken on too many jobs this summer—of course he had; we saw to it—and only did a surface-level inspection before he poured. The rest is history.
“It’s been dealt with.”
“I bet it has. I’m never setting foot in the basement again.”
