Page 88 of Corruption

“Get to it,” she says.

“I’m not taking this in front of you.”

“I’m your mother and you’re going to do what I tell you to.”

“You’re not my mother,” I snap, continuing with my lie. And, really, it doesn’t even feel like a lie anymore. She was a terrible mother. Not a tough mother. Or a mother who didn’t know how to express her love. Just a terrible one.

“And regardless, you don’t have a choice,” Vaughn says. “Now take it.”

I may be able to deny my mother, but I can’t deny Vaughn. I remember what happened the last time I tried to fight him. And there’s nowhere to run.

I snatch the test from my mother, pull down my jeans and panties, and pee on the test over the toilet. My mother immediately snatches it out my hand. I haven’t even finished buttoning my jeans when I feel the impact of a hand slapping my cheek. My mother’s hand.

“You little fucking slut. You really let some man get you naked and fuck you and put a fucking baby in you,” she screeches.

Enraged that my mother thinks she can stand there and judge me; that she’s allowed to stand there and be upset and try to make me ashamed of something I’m not ashamed of, I add blithely, “Not just some man. His wife fucked me too.”

“You—”

She tries to slap me again, but this time, I’m ready. I back up out the way and then slap her with all my might instead. She falls sideways. Hits her head on the sink. Falls onto the floor while dropping the pregnancy test face up in the process. Clear as day, with barely even thirty seconds having passed, it reads:pregnant.

Pregnant.

Pregnant!

With my fiancé’s brother’s child.

With my fiancé’s sister-in-law’s child. Because anything that belongs to Alik automatically also belongs to Nadia in a situation like this.

She was there with us when it happened.

“Well… would you look at that,” Vaughn says, picking up the test. “I knew my brother wouldn’t be able to resist keeping his hands off you for long.”

“You knew?” I asks. “What do you mean you knew?”

“Stupid girl,” Vaughn says. “You think if I’d really wanted you, I wouldn’t have had you that night? You really think I cared if you would have gone running to Adrian Fantoni with the kind of man I know Adrian Fantoni to be? The man who took a teenage girl and made her into his perfect mafia queen? No. He wouldn’t have cared.”

No. He wouldn’t have. Something Vaughn and I agree on. Addy said something different, though. That if I had told Adrian, I could have ended all of this that one night. But it doesn’t matter now. What matters is what Vaughn’s talking. So I don’t argue with him. I just let him keep talking. If I interrupt him, he might stop, and I need to stall. I need to hope that Nadia and Alik have discovered I’m missing and are looking for me. Or, at the very least, hope they’re close to discovering it.

“I knew as soon as I had you dropped off on that lawn, my brother wouldn’t be able to resist you. I saw how he looked at you at dinner that night, and I saw how Nadia encouraged it and saw an opportunity. Now he’s deflowered and corrupted my future wife. Now he’s tried to steal yet another woman from my grasp, except this time, I can actually kill him for it.”

“You’ve wanted to kill your brother this whole time?” I ask, confused and before I can stop myself. “If you wanted to kill him then why co—”

It hits me all at once. The motive Addy and I were looking for when I brought her the autopsy reports and told her the conclusions I’d made. Just because I know that Nadia wouldn’t have killed her father-in-law without Alik being complicit in it doesn’t mean that anyone else would. It’s not something you can assume from the reports.

The autopsies and the investigation all pointed to Nadia as the murderer.

Vaughn covered up his father’s murder for Nadia. Not for Alik.

Vaughn and Nadia used to date before her father betrayed Isaak Sr. and the entire family was sentenced to death.

Alik married Nadia to save her.

Suddenly, every encounter I’ve had with Vaughn is recontextualized. He wasn’t lusting for me that night at the dinner we met. He wanted Nadia and saw me as his ticket to get her. His attempt to rape me was never about wanting to have me. It was about giving him a reason to scare me and make me want to stay away from him. To send me right into his brother’s arms. When he touched me and pretended to want me during Christmas dinner at Adrian’s and Addy’s; when he forced me to kiss him on New Year’s. It was never about having me. It was about making his brother insane with jealousy so Alik would act and take me for himself.

None of this has ever been about me. I was just a convenient pawn in Vaughn’s scheme to have a reason to kill his brother that the rest of theBratvawould accept so he could take Nadia back after he lost her without starting an internal war.

“You get it now, don’t you?” Vaughn asks, stepping over my mother where she’s lying on the floor unconscious. “My brother. The perfect son. The ideal son who met every expectation and did what he was told. He always got everything. Except Nadia. Nadia didn’t want the perfect brother. The ideal futurepakhan. She wanted me. She was helping me raise my son. We were going to get married. Then she found out what her father was doing. Confided in me. Knew her father’s betrayal was a killable offense but begged me to handle it without telling my father.”

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