Page 1 of The Bratva's Sextuplets
1
Zita
Iwas eight years old when I first watched my neighborhood die.
The memory comes back to me now as I sit in my father’s study, staring at the television screen where the breaking news ticker scrolls across the bottom. The words blur together, but I catch the important ones:Nicky Belsky dead,Russian crime boss,suspected heart attack. The anchor’s voice drones on about investigations and power struggles, but all I can think about is Mrs. Petrucci’s bakery, which shared a retail space with Rossi’s Hardware, and the day everything changed.
“Zita,bambina, you want the kind with extra chocolate chips today?” Mrs. Petrucci’s voice floats back to me across fourteen years, warm and rich with her Sicilian accent. She stood behind the glass counter in her flour-dusted apron, weathered hands already reaching for the cookie jar shaped like a fat ceramic cat.
“Yes, please.” I pressed my face against the cool glass, leaving small fingerprint smudges while Papa talked business with Mr. Rossi near the hardware section in the back.
“Of course, my little star.” She winked and pulled out a cookie. “Don’t tell your papa I spoil you, eh? He thinks you eat too many sweets already.”
I giggled and promised to keep our secret, the same way I promised every Tuesday when Papa brought me downtown for his meetings. The bakery smelled like yeast and vanilla and something indefinably warm that made me want to stay forever. Mrs. Petrucci would tell me stories while she worked, sometimes about her husband, who had died a few years before, or about her grandfather, who brought the family recipes from Sicily, and occasionally, about the neighborhood when she was young and all the families knew each other.
“This place used to be different,” she’d say while wrapping up my weekly treat. “Everyone looked out for each other. The children played in the streets until dark, and mothers didn’t worry. That was before the Russians came.”
I didn’t understand what she meant then. Eight-year-old me only cared about warm cookies and the way Mrs. Petrucci’s face lit up when she talked about the old days. Yet even I could sense something shifting in the neighborhood, like a storm approaching from a distance too far to see clearly.
Four years later, the free cookies stopped.
“I’m sorry,piccola, but business is business now.” Mrs. Petrucci’s voice had lost its warmth, and her hands shook slightly as she wrapped two plain sugar cookies in wax paper. “Fifty cents, please.”
I handed over the coins, confused by the change in routine. The bakery looked the same, but it felt different. Her son Tony lurked behind the counter now, his nervous energy making the whole space feel smaller and darker. Men in expensive suits visited more frequently, speaking in low voices while Tony nodded and handed over thick envelopes.
“Mama, you talk too much,” Tony said that day, shooting me a warning look. “The little Lo Duca girl doesn’t need to hear family business.”
Mrs. Petrucci’s face flushed red. “She’s been coming here since she was tiny. Her family?—”
“Her family makes deals with people who don’t like questions.” Tony’s voice carried an edge I’d never heard before. “Smart girls know when to mind their own business.”
I left without finishing my cookies, the sweetness settling too heavily in my stomach and making me queasy. That was when I started paying attention to the changes around me, started listening to the whispered conversations, and watched the way familiar faces disappeared from the neighborhood.
By my fifteenth birthday, Mrs. Petrucci was dead.
“Stroke,” Papa told me when I asked why the bakery was closed. “Very sad. She was a good woman who got caught up in circumstances beyond her control.”
“What kind of circumstances?” I’d asked, but Papa’s expression warned me not to push further.
Tony sold the building three months later to pay debts he never explained. The new owners gutted the interior and turned it into a front for money laundering operations that lasted exactlysix months before the FBI raided it. Now, it’s just an empty storefront with newspaper covering the windows, like a bandage over a wound that won’t heal.
The same pattern repeated throughout the neighborhood. Rossi’s Hardware became a shell company for drug money. Benedetto’s Grocery fell behind on protection payments and burned down in a mysterious fire. Maggio’s Restaurant changed hands four times before finally closing permanently when the last owner disappeared one night and never came back.
I learned the name responsible for all of it when I was sixteen and started paying attention to Papa’s late-night phone calls.
Nicky Belsky.
The man whose death is now being announced on every news channel in Chicago had been Papa’s business partner for over a decade. They signed their first deal when I was twelve years old, the same year Mrs. Petrucci’s cookies stopped being free. Papa called it an opportunity for growth and expansion. What he really meant was that he’d made a deal with the devil to protect what we had, and the devil had decided to take everything anyway.
I reach for the remote and turn up the volume as they show a photograph of Nicky. He looks exactly like I remember from the few times I saw him at our house, with pale skin, cold gray eyes, and a smile that never reached past his lips. He was the kind of man who could watch a neighborhood die and feel nothing but satisfaction at his own influence.
“The Belsky organization has controlled significant portions of Chicago’s shipping and construction industries for over two decades,” the anchor continues. “Sources close to theinvestigation suggest Belsky’s death may trigger a power struggle within the Russian organized crime community.”
Power struggle. They make it sound so civilized, like a corporate merger instead of what it really is. Blood and fear and innocent people caught in the crossfire while men like Nicky Belsky’s son fight over who gets to destroy lives more efficiently.
I think about Tigran Belsky, Nicky’s heir, and wonder if he’s anything like his father. I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard Papa mention his name in those late-night phone calls he thinks I don’t listen to. Papa always sounds nervous when he talks about Tigran, like he’s discussing a dangerous animal that might turn on him without warning.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway makes me straighten in my chair. Papa appears in the doorway, his usually perfect appearance slightly disheveled. His tie hangs loose around his neck, and his dark hair shows traces of gray that seem more pronounced than they were this morning. He looks older suddenly, like the news has aged him ten years in the span of an hour.
