Page 29 of Stay Toxic

When Alexi and Kira had gotten together, I hadn’t been surprised.

What I had been surprised about was how she’d changed after I’d given them my blessing.

It was only years later that we would find out exactly why Kira had changed so completely.

She hadn’t wanted Alexi at all. She’d wanted me. And she’d started dating Alexi to make me jealous.

The only problem was, I hadn’t been jealous. I’d never seen Kira that way, and never would. She’d only ever been Alexi’s in my eyes.

One would think that Kira’s behavior in the end would’ve affected Alexi and my relationship with each other, but it hadn’t. It’d only made us stronger.

When Alexi finally pulled his head out of his ass when it came to Kira and scraped her off, we’d grown even more solid.

Then my dad had died and left me as the Pakhan of the US arm of the Russian Bratva at the age of twenty-six, and I’d been faced with the reality of being the youngest Pakhan in history.

Truthfully, there were days when I asked myself why I did what I did.

Then I have a good laugh and remind myself that I never had a choice.

My father hadn’t given me one.

On the surface, my dad was a good dad. He was doting. Went to soccer games. Football practices. Violin recitals.

He spent the majority of my life being the perfect attentive parent. I also remember my dad having two faces.

The one that he put on in public—the one my sisters saw—and the one that he put on in private. Which just so happened to be the face that Dima and I saw, along with the rest of the criminal underworld.

My dad was devoted to my mother.

He was, in all reality, the best man that she could ever ask for.

He played the part really well.

Truthfully, when he died, I wasn’t sure how to feel.

There were two sides to every coin, and I unfortunately got to see both sides of that coin.

My dad was a hard man.

A killer.

An abuser.

But he was also fair and just. He expected perfection, but didn’t punish us if we didn’t give him that perfectness. But the silent warfare he would aim at you if you did wrong…

If I was being honest, my father had always struck me as having an undiagnosed mental illness.

The complete and utter disregard for life should’ve been my first clue.

My dad would kill anyone anywhere for any reason and expect everyone else to clean up his mess—i.e., me when I was old enough to do that and get away with it.

When my little sister, Maven, had gone missing while we were on a family vacation—we weren’t on a vacation, Dad had a business meeting that he disguised as a family vacation—he’d turned into this raging psychopath that couldn’t focus on anything but fixing a mistake that he’d inadvertently made.

Sure, my mom had been distraught and begged him to find her—we’d all been distraught—but Dad’s motivations were again two-sided.

Someone had pulled one over on the Pakhan of the Russian Bratva. That was a slight that he couldn’t allow to ever pass.

He’d spent the next twenty-five years of his life ‘searching.’

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