Page 4 of Ricochet
Both of them turned at the same time, my mother taking a step toward me.
“Nikolai, look. It’s Ophelia.” I wasn’t sure if she was drunk or high, or maybe even both, but I didn’t recognize the person in front of me. “Did you come to join us, baby?”
She was smiling, while my father carved this man like a pumpkin. Did I somehow step into a parallel dimension? Her eyes were glassy, unfocused, and the fear I had never felt around her started creeping in.
Did I come to join them?
Was she serious? Nikolai, my father, stepped away from the man, taking a cloth from the nearby table, and wiping the knife clean. He didn’t seem fazed by my presence. As a matter of fact, he looked so cold; colder than what he usually was. His blue eyes narrowed at me, the same look on his face whenever he wasn’t pleased with something I did or said.
The one just before the beating.
“Hello,doch’.”
Daughter.
Never Ophelia, never with affection, just the Russian word for daughter. The Aster family used to be Asterov, immigrating from Russia shortly after the Nightingales settled here. Almost three hundred years later, and he still insisted on us knowing the language, as if I was ever going to use it.
“Hi, Papa.” My voice sounded small, timid. I could feel fear coursing through me. How many slaps did I get throughout the years for answering fully in English? Hundreds. So I learned.
I learned Russian better than my brother and sister. I learned because there was no stopping him when he wanted to hurt me, and me knowing his beloved language at least pleased him a little bit. He stepped in front of me, and I flinched involuntarily when he raised his left hand toward my face. The hand that had just held a knife at another man’s throat.
The hand coated in blood.
“I won’t hurt you,dorogoy. You are just in time.”Darling. He never used terms of endearment with me. His hand caressed my cheek, and the metallic smell of the blood traveled up my nose. I gagged, holding the food I had earlier in my stomach. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I vomited all over the floor.
Breathing through my mouth, I met his eyes, the mirror of mine, and asked, “In time for what, Papa?”
“For your initiation to the family, of course,” my mother squealed, the amber liquid sloshing in the glass as she jumped around. “Your brother and sister already went through theirs.”
Theo and Maya knew about this? Why didn’t they tell me?
“I wanted to wait until your eighteenth birthday, but we can do it now.”
What are we going to do? Was this a sick joke? Ha-ha, let’s pull a prank on Ophelia.
“Papa, what are we doing?”
He walked away from me, and only then did I notice an array of instruments on another table, further inside the room. Knives, screwdrivers, clamps, a gun, they all laid there, ready to be used.
“Did you know that our ancestors shared the same bloodline with the Romanov family?” He looked at me. “The last Russian Dynasty?”
“Yes, Papa. You told me this story when I was a child.”
“But I never told you why we ran away. My great-great-grandfather was a leader of one of the largest crime syndicates of that time, and when he found out they were going to attack us, he moved the whole family to the States, starting anew.”
Crime syndicate? I’m sorry, what?
“Everybody feared him, as they should have. His name was Alexei Dimitri Asterov. Now, he didn’t want his family to be weak, and since only boys were part of the syndicate up to that point, he decided to include females as well, bringing them deeper into the family. Guess what?”
“What, Papa?”
“They were better assassins than his sons. We continued his legacy, our empire growing with each year, and now we control most of the States as well as Eastern Europe. Our friends, the Nightingales,” he smiled at me, “they were one of our allies here in the United States.”
The Nightingales were involved in this?
“I thought we owned a real estate business—”
“Oh we do,moy dorogoy. We have several legal businesses around the globe, but that is just a small part of what we are.”
