He’s not bragging, just making a simple statement of fact. No one would attack the son of a Bratva on purpose.
He shoves something across the desk toward me. An envelope: heavy, expensive, and slate gray in color.
“What’s that?” I say.
“Open it.”
I crack the wax seal keeping the flap closed. Then I slip out the dual sheets of stationery, skimming down the ornate script.
“I was accepted,” I say.
“Danyl Kuznetsov recommended you.”
“I’ll call to thank him.”
“You’ll do more than that. He expects two years of labor from you after you graduate.”
I nod. It’s a reasonable demand, considering the value of the favor.
Most students accepted to Kingmakers are from legacy families—those where the father, the grandfather, and the great-grandfather all attended the school.
My grandfather was part of a KGB task force, instructed to hunt down Bratva. He only rose through the ranks of the organization once he defected. The Bratva hated and distrusted him at first. He forced his way into their world. He advanced through violence and ruthlessness.
Kingmakers is beyond exclusive. They’re scrupulous about who they allow through their doors. Only those who can be trusted with the secrets of mafia families from around the world are allowed to enter.
I scan the letter once more.
“They accepted me to the Heirs division,” I say.
I wasn’t sure if they would. Moscow is divided into three territories with three separate bosses. Technically, my father isn’t one of them. But in our section of the city, the actual boss has no children, and neither does the next man down.
If I do well at Kingmakers, there’s nothing stopping me from ascending to the position of Pakhan in time.
I look at my father’s face, searching for some hint of emotion: pleasure, anticipation, pride.
I see nothing.
“I’m tired,” I tell him. “I’m going to bed early.”
He nods and turns back to the papers spread across his desk.
I go down the long, gloomy hallway to my bedroom.
I strip off my clothes and stand under the boiling hot shower spray for as long as I can stand. I take my exfoliating sponge and I roughly scrape every millimeter of my skin, cleansing it of the sweat from my fight, the filth from the subway tunnels, and any possible hair or skin cells that might have touched me from those fucking junkies.
I soap myself over and over, rinsing and then starting over once more.
I always make sure that I’m perfectly clean, that I smell of nothing more offensive than soap. I do my own laundry, washing my clothes, my towels, and my sheets every time that I use them.
I can’t stand the thought that I might accidentally smell as musty and unkempt as this house.
The scent clings to everything I own.
I hate that smell.
I hate coming home.
When I’m finally clean, I slip beneath the fresh sheets I put on the bed this morning.
I take a book from my nightstand, the one I’ve been reading the last three nights: Midnight’s Children.
I open it up and begin to read, till the physical exhaustion of the fight finally overtakes the frantic bustle of my brain.
Then I set the book down and let my eyelids drop, trying to remember only the words on the page, and not let my mind wander.
I don’t want to think about anything in my real life.
That’s what books are for.
To take you away . . .
Anna
3 Months Later
It’s my last night sleeping in my own bed at home.
Tomorrow I leave for Kingmakers for the entire school year.
Once we’re at the school, we can’t come home again until the next summer. It’s part of the security measures necessary when you’re bringing in children of rival mafia families from all across the globe.
There’s no cellphones allowed on the island. No laptops or iPads.
You can use landlines to call out or you can write letters.
It’s strange, and it’s old-fashioned—it makes me feel more like I’m going to another world, rather than simply to another country.
I’ve never been away from my family before.
We live in a mansion way out on the edge of the city. This house is already like our own secret world, away from everything else. The walls are so high, and the trees are so thick that you wouldn’t think there was anyone else within a hundred miles.
I love our house intensely. It has everything I need.
I’ve explored every inch of it from the time I was small. It’s so old that it has dozens of tiny rooms and passageways. I used to climb into the dumbwaiter and lower myself down all the way to the kitchen. Or go through the secret hallway that runs from my father’s office out to the astronomy tower. There’s laundry chutes and a hidden staircase from the ballroom to the wine cellar.
And then there’s the attic. It’s stuffed with items left behind from five previous generations of occupants: tarnished silver mirrors, old gowns, record albums, jewelry, photographs, crumbling letters, yellowed lace tablecloths, candles melted away and chewed by mice, ancient cribs, and dusty bottles of perfume that still carry the remnants of fragrance.
I used to spend entire days up there, poking around in the moldy boxes, examining objects and putting them back again.
My younger sister Cara loves it even more than I do. She likes to go up there with a lamp and bag of apples so she can write in her little notebook in the middle of two hundred years of history.
Cara thinks she’s a poet or an author or something. She’s always scribbling away on some new project. She never lets us see it, though.
Her work is probably pretty good, or as good as it can be, coming from a fourteen-year-old. Cara is brilliant, though most people don’t know it since she’s so quiet. She got all of our mother’s sweetness, but not her friendliness.
Whelan is the opposite. He’s loud and outspoken and brash, and sometimes a little asshole. We all adore him regardless, ‘cause he’s the baby. But he can be sneaky and mischievous. His explorations of the house usually end with something broken, or him howling because he got his head stuck between the iron railings over by the old carriage house.
My room looks down over the walled garden. It’s a dark room with high gothic windows, deep crimson walls, a massive fireplace, and ancient velvet canopies around the bed. It was the room my mother slept in when she first came to stay in this house.
My father kidnapped her. Snatched her right off the street. Then locked her up in this house for months.
Slowly, bit by bit, without realizing or wanting it, he fell in love with her, and she fell in love with him. Simultaneous Stockholm Syndrome.
It’s a strange love story, but everything about my family is strange.
When you grow up as a mafia daughter, you learn the history of your people the way the Roman emperors must have done. You learn the triumphs and failures of your ancestors, their bloody struggles and their revenge.
My parents have never shielded me from the truth.
For that reason, I always planned to attend Kingmakers.
My mother told me that when she was kidnapped, she was an innocent. Deliberately sheltered from the reality of the criminal underworld. Her father was the head of the Irish Mafia, but she went to a normal school with normal kids. She was completely unprepared to be abducted, held captive, and offered as bait in a trap intended to murder every last member of her family.