Page 31 of The Bratva’s Monster

Alex has been more than clear about what he wants to happen with her, and to his credit, he’s being more than a little generous with dealing with her than anyone else in her position. I think if my father were still alive, he’d have already told me to kill her and have done with it.

My brother, though… He knows what Gedeon’s friendship meant to me. And as much as he wants to protect this Bratva, I believe his first loyalty is and always will be to me. Sending me to kill my best friend’s wife is not a directive that he would take lightly.

All that said, I have to follow through. If she is following in the footsteps of her husband, I have to find that out.

I’m making my way up the walk to her door. Their house sits in the middle of a block of buildings with a wrought iron fence around it. The house itself was his grandmother’s until her death, and when they started tearing down shit in this neighborhood to build apartment buildings, she stood her ground… and Gedeon stood with her. As I recall, a lot of bones were broken in the weeks to follow that eviction notice. That is, until the city decided just to let the old lady keep her house.

Memories like that keep popping up in my mind. Memories that conflict with the facts of his being a traitor to us all. It’s hard to believe the same man who had enough love for his family to protect them from progress is the same man who sold out his chosen family for a few dollars.

I knock on the door and deep inside, beyond the wood of the door, I hear her call out. “Just a minute!”

About a minute goes by before the door opens. Liz is standing there in a tank top and flimsy white shorts, her sunshine-shaded hair up in a messy bun. Her eyes widen the moment she sees me, then she offers a closed-mouth smile.

“Rikki,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“Just checking up on you,” I say. “Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days and I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop by.” I pause, waiting for her to stand aside and offer an invitation in. She doesn’t give it.

“May I come in?” I ask her.

“Hmm? Sure, sure.” She steps aside and I walk in. I catch a whiff of her natural odor. Flowery, but sweet like fruit. It reminds me of that night and the way the scent got all over me and surrounded me in the closed quarters of my car on the way back to my apartment.

She clears her throat. “I was just… cleaning Gedeon’s office,” she says. “There’s a lot that needs to be picked up, thrown out, you know…”

“I can imagine,” I say. “Need any help? If there’s furniture you need moved or thrown out, I can help.”

“Um…” She crosses her arms, her eyes drifting to the hallway behind me where the office is. “Honestly, I haven’t given the furniture any thought yet. I’m still going through his paperwork and all that. There’s a lot of it. He kept a lot of notes and letters and all that.”

I nod. She’s doing her best to avoid my gaze. I don’t blame her. I’m doing the same.

“Please, have a seat,” she says, motioning to the living room. “Let me get you something to drink.”

She walks away toward the kitchen before I can accept or reject the suggestion. I wander into the living room. It’s small, but homey. One couch faces a fireplace with a television hung on the wall above it, the mantel with photos in frames along the side. I pause to look at one of them. It’s a picture of the two of us when we were teenagers. I smile as I pick it up and get a good look.

We’re standing arm in arm on the dock of this little park area we used to go to. I don’t remember the name, but as I recall, it’s in upstate New York. We’re in our swimming trunks, our hair soaked to our scalps. I was a stocky boy. No muscles yet, but plenty of girth. My hair was short with shades of red brighter than it is now. Gedeon was as skinny as a rail with a goofy smile, his sandy hair in need of a haircut and stuck to the sides of his face.

“I don’t have anything but water,” she says from the kitchen. “Hope that’s all right.”

“It’s fine,” I say back without looking up. This was the first summer that we spent that didn’t involve ‘training’ from my father. His grandmother took the four of us boys with her when she went to visit her cabin on the lake, where we swam and rode our bikes for that whole weekend…

“How long did you know Gedeon?” she asks me as she walks in, bottles of water in each hand. She hands me one. “I mean, I know you two came up in the ranks of the Bratva together, but… how long were you friends?”

“Since we were boys,” I say as I set the frame back down. “Gedeon’s father was Bratva. He died when he was small and his grandmother took care of him, but…” I shrug. “She was old. And the older he got, the harder he was to handle, so he hung out with us for the most part.” I tap the frame of the photo and say, “He was a good swimmer. Better than I ever was. He once told me that his father took him to the Y all the time when he was a toddler. That’s where he learned to swim.”

She smiles gently. “His father had an irrational fear of him drowning. He put him in classes from when he was three or four years old.”

“Yeah?” I say with some surprise. She nods. “Never knew that about him.”

I set the photo back down on the mantel, but I’m still looking at it. Still remembering. “By the time he was hanging out with my brother and me on a regular basis,” I say, “he could swim like an Olympian. I personally like to think that there’s an alternate timeline where that’s what he became instead of…” I trail off. I don’t really want to go down this road of thinking. What should or shouldn’t have been. He was Bratva. That’s what he was until he betrayed us all.

“Anyway,” I say, turning to her, “I was thinking that if you needed anything, any help around the house, I’d let you know that I was here for you.”

Her ocean blue eyes brighten and a sort of wonder rises up from somewhere inside me. The little ways that joy hits her strike me like a flower when it blooms.

“Thank you,” she says. “I appreciate that, but…” She looks away from me and walks over to the couch and sits. “I think after the other night, it would probably be best if we kept our distance from one another.”

She’s right, of course. What happened at the hotel shouldn’t have happened at all. It wasn’t anything we planned and if the situation were something different, I’d respect her desire for distance.

But distance doesn’t get me answers. “The last words Gedeon said on this earth before he left it were to me,” I tell her in response. “He told me to look after you. I’m honor-bound to do just that. As far as that night in the hotel… We can chalk that up to too much alcohol and leave it there.”