Page 5 of Tormented Heir

She nods.

“Okay, call them, and I’ll take you home.” I don’t have the time to drive her to her sisters, but I can take her across the city. I tip her chin up and give her my undivided attention. “You can never tell anyone I killed him. That’s the price you pay for living. For the second chance I am giving you.”

“I won’t,” she insists. “I hate him.”

My men can talk because that’s just gossip amongst the streets, and the cops won’t listen. A widow saying I killed her husband, though, is the kind of thing even the cops in our pocket would struggle to ignore.

“I swear,” she whispers.

I don’t expect to see her again, but she turns up at my club three nights later, and she’s no longer shaking, or in shock. She’s had her hair done, and she’s wearing new clothes. She tells me she owes me something, and this time, she’s the one who gets on her knees for me.

We enjoy a few weeks of intense fucking. When she leaves, she tells me if I’m ever stuck, I can go hide out in Alabama. I don’t tell her I’d rather gouge my eyes out than hide out in rural bumfuck nowhere with her. She is fun, but nothing more.

I don’t do love and hearts and flowers and commitment. It’s a promise I made to myself when I found out about my biological father’s weakness and the sickness living in him.

It’s a promise I renewed once I followed Jacob into the Bratva and became his de-facto next in line. I might be the prince to the Bratva throne but I don’t want a future queen by my side. Any woman would simply be a target and I’ve never met any woman I wanted enough to risk that.

I saw firsthand how his own daughter was used against him, and I won’t put a wife or child in that position. If being the heir to the Bratva king means being alone and apart, it’s a price I will pay gladly because I’m too fucked up to be the marrying kind anyway.

My cursed blood is one thing, but my early years are another damn good reason I shouldn’t marry. They weren’t exactly healthy, and I am sure my early upbringing would help ensure I’d be a shitty husband and father. My first stepfather was a cruel man, and he really did a number on my mother and me.

I pour a massive whiskey and sit in my club, looking out over the city.

My mind drifts back. To Lombardy. The beauty of the place, the quiet of the house … the hatefulness of my stepfather, and the fear he inspired in a little boy.

2

DIMITRI

8-YEARS-OLD

Lombardy

I race around the corner and come to a screeching stop. Italian Nonna is in the kitchen. She’s perched on a chair like a giant old crow, her fingers drumming on the wood as she reads a recipe.

She scares me.

Italian Nonna always wears black, and she has an angry face. She looks like one of the ghosts from the Christmas stories my aunty likes to read around the fire at this time of year.

Here, in the foothills of the Italian mountains, snow is softly falling. It’s magical the way it covers everything and makes all the outside noises quiet and muffled. The noises in the house are still loud. Pappa shouts at the servants, Italian Nonna screeches orders, and pots and pans clatter.

Scary Nonna pushes her chair back and limps to the stove where she sticks a spoon in a pot and slurps from it, then she shouts at Margherita. “More salt, child. What is the point of us having staff if we must do it all ourselves?”

I sneak away, not wanting to be dragged into helping. I hate helping in the kitchen. When I reach the special front room, the grown-ups room, I hear voices and creep nearer.

It’s Mamma, and she’s talking to my other nonna. The Russian one. She’s not my mamma’s mother; she died and went to heaven five years ago. This lady is my real papa’s mother.

My papa is in heaven too. I never met him, but he is a hero. Russian Nonna told me so, and I have his picture. He was a handsome man. He looked like the knights in the books I like to read.

Russian Nonna is talking softly to Mamma in the old language as Mamma calls it. I understand it. Not all of it, and I can’t read it, but I understand a lot of the words and sentences. Papa hates me speaking Russian and says he doesn’t understand how I can still remember it.

“The child grew up hearing it for the first few years of his life, Anton; it’s only natural,” Mamma will say.

She’s always being nice to him, trying to make him smile, but he’s as miserable as Italian Nonna. When he’s not miserable, he’s angry, and sometimes when he’s angry he takes me outside and hits me until my bones ache. Always on my legs and upper arms. He says if I tell Mamma we will be homeless. He says if I tell Mamma we will starve. So I don’t say anything, but I try my best not to get the beatings.

I slip quietly into the grown-ups room, and Russian Nonna sees me. Her red-cheeked face looks like an apple as she grins wide.

“You are so grown,” she says in Russian. “Come here, child.”

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