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I WATCHED NIKITA FROM the other side of the room, wondering what the hell he was going to do next.
From the moment he had walked through the door, from the faux-friendliness of his greeting, I had known that there was something up with him, something serious that my father clearly didn’t want to have to deal with. I could see the panic in his eyes, the fear, even as he tried to keep his gaze on the floor and pretend that he didn’t notice what was going on.
The way he had spoken to Andreas, it had made my stomach turn. He was clearly pissed at him, but I wasn’t sure what Andreas was involved with that seemed to have brought the ire of this man down so hard on his head. I hated it. Whatever it was, I hated that he seemed to be involved in something so dark. Nikita was unafraid of everything Andreas called his own, and that spooked the hell out of me. It wasn’t often I came across someone who clearly underestimated Andreas that much, but perhaps Kozlov had a reason to. Perhaps he knew he would be able to beat him in anything that Andreas threw at him.
Nikita turned back to my father and I, a fake smile plastered on his face, as though we had just run into each other at some family gathering instead of the straight-up nightmare that we were trapped in right now.
“Tell me, Nadia,” he began, voice filling the room, leaving no space for anything else. “Do you speak Serbian?”
I shook my head. I could manage a few words of it, but nothing worth much. And I didn’t want to be shown up by this man, of all people. I got the feeling that he would make a big deal out of it, and I wanted to go as far under his radar as possible.
He tutted, glanced over at my father.
“Dmitri, come on now,” he remarked. “You should want to keep your mother tongue alive. Why wouldn’t you teach her?”
My father didn’t reply. I knew the answer, of course – that hearing it spoken in our home brought far too much of my mother back to him, and that he didn’t want to have to think about her. Sometimes, it felt like he was trying to forget about her, but I knew it wasn’t that – he would never have been able to forget about her, not if he had spent his whole life trying, this was just his way of making sure that he didn’t have to live his entire life under the shadow of her loss.
“Well, I’m sure I could get you some lessons,” Nikita continued. The way he talked, it was clear that he wasn’t leaving it up for debate – if he decided something, then he could get his way. I wasn’t going to argue with him. As much as there was a part of me that wanted to push back against him right now, tell him he had no idea what he was talking about, that he didn’t get a say in my life or my father’s or anything else, I knew better than to come out and say it. He had already decided he was in charge here, and if I did anything to upset the balance, it could end badly for both my father and I.
I was sure that Andreas was working to right it, anyway, even if it was taking him longer than I would have liked. I needed him here, needed his support, anything to get me out of this. I wanted Nikita gone, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. He had decided to come here, he had decided to make this place his, and all we could do was make sure he got out of here sooner rather than later.
“Go to your room,” he told me, waving his hand in my direction. “I need to talk to your father.”
I opened my mouth to protest – who did he think he was, telling me what to do in my own home? But then I saw the look that my father shot me, and I knew that he was begging me to just get out of here. He didn’t want me in the room with this awful man any longer than I had to be, and I figured that the best thing I could do was get out and hope that all of this was over soon.
I retreated to my room, but pressed my ear to the door to make sure that I could hear what was being said in there. I didn’t want to miss a thing. I had to take in as much as I could. I wanted to be as clear on what was happening as everyone else, even if it felt like everyone was shoving me out of the loop as much as they could.
My father and Nikita were talking in Serbian. While I couldn’t speak a whole lot of it, I could understand a decent amount, from growing up around my mother speaking it as a first language. I strained my ears to make out as much as I could.
“You do as you’re told,” Nikita ordered him, in Serbian. “And you get to go back to your life. Your store. All of it. You understand?”
My father didn’t reply for a moment. Whatever it was that he was being told to do, it was clear that he didn’t like it very much. I silently urged him to just say whatever it took to get this man to leave our house. I hated having some invader in our home, some creep who thought that he had a right to stroll in here like he owned the place. I wished I could just push him to the door and tell him never to come back, but he wasn’t going to get out of our lives that easily. He had sunk his claws in, and whatever it took to get rid of him, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Do you understand?” Nikita repeated. He didn’t have to raise his voice to make his point, it was clear he had my father right where he wanted him. I hated knowing that my dad was caught up in something this dark, but it wasn’t like there was anything I could do to break him out of it. I wanted to help, but I was sure that my getting close to Andreas had only made things worse. Was that why they thought of us as traitors? Because I had actually willingly spent time with the other side...?
“Yes,” my father replied, finally. His voice sounded empty, hollow, as though he was doing his best to just get through this conversation and find a way out the other side of it. I knew how he felt. I was begging the universe to get rid of this man, pull him out of here; I hated that he seemed to have such a command of my father, of his life, and wondered just what it was that he had over my dad. Something more than just the store? I would have to wait to find out.
“Good man,” Nikita told him, and with that, I finally heard his footsteps heading to the door. I held my breath until I was sure he was gone, and then I slipped outside my room again to talk to my father.
He was already slumped down in that chair again. His face was pale, as though he’d just heard some seriously bad news, and I chewed my lip. What was I meant to say? Tell him that everything was going to be all right, when I knew that it wouldn’t be, that it couldn’t be? Not after what had just happened, that was for sure. I had no idea what he wanted me to say to him, but I had to come up with something, because the silence in this room was more than I could handle.
“What’s up?” I asked him. It felt like far too tiny a question to really capture the enormity of everything that had just happened, but I had to start somewhere, didn’t I?
He didn’t reply. He rose to his feet, as though the weight of his body was almost more than he could handle, and trudged over to the kitchen. There seemed to be some enormous pressure pushing down on him, something bigger than he could even come close to imagining, and I wished that I could take just a little piece of it for him – something, anything that might make it simpler for him to handle. If there was anything I could do, I would do it, but I had no clue where to even start with it.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” he told me, but there was no way I was going to believe that. He reached for something in the cupboard, and I watched, frowning, as he pulled out a slightly dusty bottle of vodka from its hiding place in the top shelf.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “We have food, I can make us something...”
I’d only ever seen him cook with that booze, so it shocked me to see him pulling it from the cupboard and taking it back to his chair, grabbing a glass on the way. He didn’t drink, not really – it was something that he had tried to avoid after my mother had passed away, because he said it would have been far too easy to get pulled down the rabbit-hole of drinking his pain away. I had always respected that, but seeing him now, with that glass in his hand...
He didn’t say anything to me as he pulled the top of the bottle and poured out a generous measure into the glass. I felt my stomach twist with sickness as I watched him throw back a shot, and then pour himself another. If he was drinking, it was because he was trying to forget – trying to pretend that nothing like this was really happening.
What had Nikita asked him to do that had him reaching for the bottle at once? My father was a strong man, he had been through a whole lot in his life, and he had survived it. But whatever this was, whatever had just been pitched to him now, it was clearly more than he could handle.
I stared at him as he poured another drink, and prayed there was something I could do to help. But how the fuck was I going to be able to do that when nobody seemed to want to tell me what was really going on here? I was stuck in the middle of this mess, trapped in this nightmare that felt like it had no real ending to it, and I wasn’t sure how much more of it I could take.
I couldn’t just stand there and watch him drink himself into a state. I needed to get out. I had no idea how much more of this mess I was going to have to deal with, or if I was going to have to handle that psycho Nikita turning up at our house again, but right now, I needed to rest.
Because I was sure that whatever came next was going to require every little bit of my energy to survive. I just had to hope that Andreas was already starting to get this in hand, because he was the only person I could rely on to really fix this mess right now.
And, though I hated to have to put this on anyone else, I could only pray that he was able to get me and my father out of this hell once and for all.
