“Hello.” I walked slowly toward the dining room, hoping to find somebody there. Squinting into the darkness, I could see the table set up, the dinner untouched, and chairs untucked from the table. Did something happen? “Is anybody home?”
Panic started taking over, and I fumbled with my phone, turning the flashlight on. I almost stumbled on a chair, jumping at the piercing scream coming from the back of our house. It sounded like a man, and before I could recover, another scream pierced through the air. With trembling knees, I exited the dining room, slowly inching toward the back area, where the entrance to the basement was.
The screaming grew louder, and I could hear somebody talking. Was that… Was that my father’s voice?
For years these doors were locked. I never asked why, never even tried to check what was inside. For the first time, they were wide open, the light from below illuminating the hallway above. Should I call the police? What if somebody was trying to rob us? No, no, I needed to see what was going on first.
Turning the flashlight off, I slowly descended step by step. From this point, I could see silhouettes, the light casting a shadow on the floor. Finally reaching the bottom, nothing could have prepared me for the sight in front of me.
My mother stood there, her back turned toward me, holding a glass of amber liquid in her hand. My father, whom I hadn’t seen in months, stood behind a man tied to a chair, with a knife pressed against his throat. There was so much blood on his body, cuts and bruises visible on his face. His clothes were disheveled; his shirt ripped across the chest, caked in blood.
Mom laughed at something, and I couldn’t hear exactly what they were talking about because of the buzzing in my ears. Who were these people? My parents or serial killers?
My father inched lower with his knife, slicing the man’s nipple off. The phone slipped from my hand, and as I reached for my face to cover the gasp threatening to escape from my mouth, I felt wetness on my face. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.
Oh God, I was going to be sick.
Both of them turned at the same time, my mother taking a step toward me.
“Nikolai, look. It’s Ophelia.” I wasn’t sure if she was drunk or high, or maybe even both, but I didn’t recognize the person in front of me. “Did you come to join us, baby?”
She was smiling, while my father carved this man like a pumpkin. Did I somehow step into a parallel dimension? Her eyes were glassy, unfocused, and the fear I had never felt around her started creeping in.
Did I come to join them?
Was she serious? Nikolai, my father, stepped away from the man, taking a cloth from the nearby table, and wiping the knife clean. He didn’t seem fazed by my presence. As a matter of fact, he looked so cold; colder than what he usually was. His blue eyes narrowed at me, the same look on his face whenever he wasn’t pleased with something I did or said.
The one just before the beating.
“Hello, doch’.”
Daughter.
Never Ophelia, never with affection, just the Russian word for daughter. The Aster family used to be Asterov, immigrating from Russia shortly after the Nightingales settled here. Almost three hundred years later, and he still insisted on us knowing the language, as if I was ever going to use it.
“Hi, Papa.” My voice sounded small, timid. I could feel fear coursing through me. How many slaps did I get throughout the years for answering fully in English? Hundreds. So I learned.
I learned Russian better than my brother and sister. I learned because there was no stopping him when he wanted to hurt me, and me knowing his beloved language at least pleased him a little bit. He stepped in front of me, and I flinched involuntarily when he raised his left hand toward my face. The hand that had just held a knife at another man’s throat.
The hand coated in blood.
“I won’t hurt you, dorogoy. You are just in time.” Darling. He never used terms of endearment with me. His hand caressed my cheek, and the metallic smell of the blood traveled up my nose. I gagged, holding the food I had earlier in my stomach. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I vomited all over the floor.
Breathing through my mouth, I met his eyes, the mirror of mine, and asked, “In time for what, Papa?”
“For your initiation to the family, of course,” my mother squealed, the amber liquid sloshing in the glass as she jumped around. “Your brother and sister already went through theirs.”
Theo and Maya knew about this? Why didn’t they tell me?
“I wanted to wait until your eighteenth birthday, but we can do it now.”
What are we going to do? Was this a sick joke? Ha-ha, let’s pull a prank on Ophelia.
“Papa, what are we doing?”
He walked away from me, and only then did I notice an array of instruments on another table, further inside the room. Knives, screwdrivers, clamps, a gun, they all laid there, ready to be used.
“Did you know that our ancestors shared the same bloodline with the Romanov family?” He looked at me. “The last Russian Dynasty?”
“Yes, Papa. You told me this story when I was a child.”
“But I never told you why we ran away. My great-great-grandfather was a leader of one of the largest crime syndicates of that time, and when he found out they were going to attack us, he moved the whole family to the States, starting anew.”
Crime syndicate? I’m sorry, what?
“Everybody feared him, as they should have. His name was Alexei Dimitri Asterov. Now, he didn’t want his family to be weak, and since only boys were part of the syndicate up to that point, he decided to include females as well, bringing them deeper into the family. Guess what?”
“What, Papa?”
“They were better assassins than his sons. We continued his legacy, our empire growing with each year, and now we control most of the States as well as Eastern Europe. Our friends, the Nightingales,” he smiled at me, “they were one of our allies here in the United States.”
The Nightingales were involved in this?
“I thought we owned a real estate business—”
“Oh we do, moy dorogoy. We have several legal businesses around the globe, but that is just a small part of what we are.”
I was going to faint, or puke, or maybe even both. What was going on here? This was madness, all of it. My father was a madman.
I took a deep breath and asked him, “What is the initiation, Papa?”
He looked at me, then at the man who looked almost dead, and smiled. “You get to kill this izmenik. If you succeed where your siblings didn’t,” he held the knife out to me, “everything you have ever wanted to have will be yours.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You can ask Maya. I’m sure she will be more than happy to provide you with details.”
I was seventeen years old, for fuck’s sake. People my age were fighting with their parents about curfew, their grades—mine were asking me to kill somebody. I wasn’t a murderer. I hated violence, but the look in his eyes was serious. He would make my life a living hell, I was sure of that. I gnawed at my bottom lip, contemplating my options—refuse him or do what was asked of me? Could I really do this?
How was it possible that I never saw this level of darkness in him? Had I missed all the signs? Was I that naïve? I had a feeling that my whole life was one gigantic lie. I looked at the dagger in his hand, its blade shining in the light. Glancing at my mother, I noticed her swaying, almost dancing to nonexistent music, and I knew she wasn’t going to help me. I always knew she had a drinking problem, but this… This was so much worse than what I expected.