Page 9 of Killer Love

“A man came to the city, dressed in black. He killed a woman. Young, beautiful, but full of secrets. I remember hearing my father speak of it. The man shot her through both eyes, just like the politicians tonight.”

My mother flinches, but she keeps her head down, focusing on me. It’s very unlike Nina Lutrova to be squeamish, so I study the look on her face and the expression in my father’s eyes as he regards her for a pause.

“Who was she?” Yuri asks, unable to read a room like I can.

“It’s not important,” my father says with a wave of his hand.

“Katerina Starkova.”

The three of us react to her voice, and the familiar name crawls down my spine.

My father inhales sharply. “Nina…” It’s not a word of warning but one full of love and sympathy.

“It’s all right, Niko.” She grabs a cleaner cloth. “It’s time they knew.”

“Starkova?” Yuri leans forward in his chair. “That’s…”

She nods. “My mother.”

Yuri looks at me as if to silently ask if I knew. I shake my head once. Our mother was orphaned as a small child, that much we knew. The circumstances surrounding that have been, as previously mentioned, not important. Until now, I suppose.

My father clears his throat. “They caught the man before he could leave Moscow, but several of our men died in the process. The man was too well-trained. He tried to swallow cyanide, but they stopped him and brought him back alive to be questioned.”

My mother reaches for her sewing kit. I quickly slide it away. “No, Ma.”

“Luka…”

“I don’t need stitches.”

She throws up her hands. “Fine. I hope you bleed to death.” She stands up and plants a kiss on my cheek before she walks away to throw out the bloody cloths.

I snatch a bandage from the kit, along with some tape to attach it. “What did they get out of him?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I was only a young boy when they brought him in. It was the middle of the night, but I heard them dragging him downstairs. I followed the sounds of him screaming to the cellar and when I looked inside… that’s when I saw the kobra.”

I glance at Yuri. He seems just as lost as I am. “The kobra?”

“A tattoo,” our father says. “From here to there.” He lays his hand on his chest and slides down to his navel. “I ran back to my room and never told anybody what I saw, but the next morning my father pulled me aside and he said to me… ‘Nikolai, never let a snake loose in Moscow.’”

I press the bandage in place to make it stick. “We couldn’t see a tattoo,” I say. “But he did hiss.”

“Hiss?”

Yuri parts his lips and lets out the sharp sound. “Right before his men showed up,” he says.

Our father nods, once again losing himself in memory. “My father spent years trying to figure out what the kobra was and what it meant. Finally, it caught up to him, and my mother found him in a pool of blood with two bullets through his eyes. Just like Katerina.”

I look up into my mother’s silent face. Unfortunately, these stories are not uncommon for families in our line of work, but to hear the specifics now after what happened tonight is more than a little chilling. The same demons that haunted my family a generation ago are still alive and well… in my fucking city.

Our father looks between me and Yuri as he taps a hard finger against the table to make sure we’re listening. “You two…” he says, “let this go.”

I blink. “But, Pops—”

“No buts.” He points at me. “They come and they go. That’s the way it is.”

“This is our city,” I argue. “It’s like Grandfather said. We can’t just let them run loose.”

“I have before, and I will now. Doing so has allowed me to live long enough to watch my children grow up, unlike my father and your mother’s mother. Do not get involved, Luka.”

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