Page 35 of The Mafia King's Baby

“You said you were fifteen the first time?”

I stop digging and look up at her. The flashlight illuminates her face from below, throwing strange shadows that make her look older, more serious. Her eyes are focused on me with an intensity that suggests this isn’t casual curiosity.

“Yes.”

“Fifteen.” She repeats the number like she’s testing how it sounds. “That’s young.”

“Not where I come from.”

I return to digging, but she doesn’t let the subject drop.

“What happened?”

The shovel hits something hard—a root or a rock—and I have to work around it, using the blade to cut through whatever’s blocking my progress. The brief delay gives me time to consider how much to tell her, and how much truth she can handle right now. “Someone came to our house. Someone who wanted to hurt my family.”

“And you killed him?”

“My brother did.” I set aside the shovel and kneel to pull the severed root from the hole. “I just helped clean up afterward.”

Celia adjusts her grip on the flashlight, and the beam steadies. “How did you know what to do?”

“We didn’t. We figured it out as we went.” I pick up the shovel again, attacking the earth with renewed force. “Made mistakes. Got lucky they didn’t matter.”

“What kind of mistakes?”

I grit my teeth while I dig. I don’t want to relive that night, don’t want to remember how terrified Dmitri and I were, how we nearly got caught because we didn’t know about tire tracks and blood spatter and all the other details that matter when you’re trying to make someone disappear.

“The kind that could have gotten us killed or arrested in St. Petersburg, which would be much worse than here.” I pause to check the depth of the hole, measuring it against the length of the shovel handle. “We learned fast.”

“Because you had to.”

“Because the alternative was worse.”

The grave is almost deep enough now. I’ve been digging for forty minutes, working steadily while Celia holds the light and asks questions I don’t want to answer, but there’s something about the darkness and the isolation that makes honesty easier, like confessing to a priest in a booth where faces can’t be seen clearly. “The man who came to our house had already killed my parents by the time Dmitri got to a gun.” The words come out before I can stop them, emerging from some buried part of my memory that the physical act of digging seems to have unlocked.

Celia doesn’t respond immediately, but I can feel her attention sharpening, focusing on what I’m telling her.

I drive the shovel into the bottom of the grave with more force than necessary. “Dmitri shot him before he could shoot us too.”

“I’m sorry.”

The simple condolence catches me by surprise. Not pity or horror or judgment, just genuine sympathy for a loss that happened more than twenty years ago. I haven’t talked about that night in years and have rarely allowed myself to remember the smell of blood in our small apartment or the way my mother’s hand was still warm when I checked for a pulse that wasn’t there.

“We didn’t know what to do with the body. We couldn’t call the police because they were as corrupt as everyone else in our neighborhood. We couldn’t leave him there because more would come looking.” I measure the depth of the hole again—deep enough now. “So, we wrapped him in a tarp and carried him to the river.”

“Did you cry?”

The question surprises me with its directness. I pause, the shovel suspended halfway to another scoop of dirt and look up at her. “Yes.”

“Because of your parents?”

I nod. “Yes, but not just them. Because of everything. The blood, the fear, and what we had to do afterward.” I climb out of the grave and set aside the shovel. “Because I was fifteen, and I’d never seen a dead body before, let alone helped dispose of one. I didn’t know how to comfort my brother, who’d never killed anyone before either.”

She nods slowly, and something in her expression shifts. Not sympathy exactly but understanding. Maybe recognition that we’ve both crossed lines we never wanted to cross and been forced into roles we never chose.

“How long did it take? To stop being scared?”

“I’m still scared.” The admission comes out easier than expected. “Just scared of different things now.”

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