Page 75 of Sweet Ruin

Niko grabs his plate and stands. “Well, then I think you go back to Plan A. Wait her out. Three weeks, and you can color in your last precious square.”

Niko takes his plate to the kitchen. I hear the tap run, then the clink of his cutlery in the sink.

I stay where I am with my hands on the edge of the table.

Plan A. Wait her out.

It’d be easy. But I haven’t built a career and an empire on the back of “easy.”

Niko is pushing for the simple route because he doesn’t have the full set of information. He doesn’t know what the corridor is. Money? A few billion dollars? A handshake with some fawning developer, and then we ride off into the sunset, richer than we ever dreamed of being?

Fuck that. I don’t give a damn about money.

Or power, or importance, or any of that shit.

No.

I care because this was her neighborhood.

Before the Bratva world swallowed her up and spat out her bones, this was the place my mother called home. The two-family houses with the aluminum awnings and the plaster saints in the yards. The avenue with the butcher and the bakery and the place that sold live carp out of a tank in the window.

My mother came off a boat and landed there, right fucking there. She never really left. Not in her head, at least. She spent her whole life within about nine square blocks of Fourth Avenue, and she talked about it like it was a world unto itself.

My father called it her Before Times.

He said it like that. Before. As in, That was before, Viktoriya.

He said it when she cooked too much food and he didn’t like the smell.

He said it when she talked too loud on the phone to her cousin.

He said it when she came down the stairs in a dress she’d had since she was twenty-five and he sent her back up to put on something he’d bought her instead.

Before.

As in, We don’t live there anymore, so stop bringing it with you.

He made a lot of money and moved us up and out. And he always despised her for reminding him of where he’d come from.

Eventually, he’d had enough. He wanted to purge himself of the past for good.

I was eleven the night he made it official. January 7th. Orthodox Christmas. With forty people in the house, all seated around the long table, sipping the expensive whiskey from the good glasses. My mother had been toiling in the kitchen since five in the morning.

She never sat down at that table. Not once, not that night. Not ever, as far as I can remember.

She just hovered in the doorway holding a dish and waited to see if anyone wanted more.

That night, once everyone had eaten their fill of my mother’s cooking, Father stood up with his glass and thanked them all for coming. Then he thanked a woman named Ilona, who was a twenty-six-year-old giggling fool of a girl, dressed in revealing clothing, always with a hand on my father’s thigh and a wink in his direction.

He announced her as his new bride.

Right in front of my mother’s face.

In a normal world, a world with some fucking justice in it, the people in that room would have told him he couldn’t do such a thing.

But my father was a violent man. They knew better than to earn his wrath.

So they just toasted and laughed and congratulated the happy new couple.