Page 24 of Keeping My Enemies Closer: Pt. 2

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she huffed.“I’d love nothing more than to confront her.Still, walking into the diner and causing a scene is going to do nothing but get me arrested.”

“I would never let you get arrested,lepestok,”I smirked, running my hand across her left thigh.

Her hazel gaze regarded me carefully as she said, “I need to have a better plan in place before I confront her with everything that I know.I want answers, Kasimir.I want answers from her, not denials or feigned ignorance.”

“I can understand that,” I said as I gave her a simple nod.

“Can we just leave now?”she asked, sounding tired all fucking over again.

“Sure, baby,” I replied before instructing Yuri to start driving again.

Nothing more was said during the rest of the drive to Zoya’s childhood home, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what Zoya had said about wanting answers.The only way that she could get the answers that she was seeking was to come along for the ride, but I couldn’t allow that.Interrogations came easily to me, and I had no problem sleeping like a baby afterwards, but Zoya wasn’t like me, and I didn’t want her to be.I wanted her to be a Korolev in name only, keeping her soul as pure as possible.

Chapter 13

Zoya~

I stood just before the front steps, staring at the house, blood rushing through my ears.I was only a few feet from opening the door, but I just couldn’t make myself move forward.When I opened that door, my mother wasn’t going to be on the other side.There was going to be no life inside the walls, and I knew that our blood stains were still soaked into the carpet of the living room, still smeared on the kitchen floor.

The chair that had been part of my mother’s final moments was still going to be where the police had tossed it when trying to perform life-saving measures on her.Though the police had taken the duct tape on her mouth as evidence for DNA testing, that didn’t help me much.All of my most favorite family memories rested on the other side of the front door, but so did my most horrific ones.

I also didn’t know what I wanted to do with the house, though Kasimir kept assuring me that I didn’t have to make any decisions soon.He had already offered to pay off the house, then leave it for whatever I wanted to do with it, but that was the problem; I had no idea what I wanted to do with it.While the good memories outnumbered the bad ones, the bad ones were impacting me harder than the good ones.I couldn’t remember how my room had been decorated when I’d been six, but I’d never forget seeing my mother get shot in our living room.

“There’s nothing wrong with discovering that you’re not ready, Zoya,” Kasimir finally said behind me.“If you want to go back home, we can.”

“No,” I replied quietly.“I...I want to do this.I just...I’m just trying to steel myself for the pain.”

“Well, however you want to do this, I’m here,” he said supportively, making me feel better if only just a little bit.

I wasn’t sure how much longer I stood staring at the door before I finally put one foot in front of the other, but when my hand shook hard enough to cause my keychain to fall to the ground, Kasimir was there to pick it up for me.He was also astute enough to unlock the door himself, and I could feel my heart racing in my chest as he stepped back to give me room to enter the house.

Finally taking that first step, I walked into the living room, and the first thing that I saw was the chair where my mother had spent the last moments of her life.I stared at the chair, and that’s when I realized that there were six stages of grief, not five.

Revenge.

Revenge was the sixth stage of grief when your loved one wasn’t a victim of an accident or illness, and that particular stage came before acceptance, I could see that now.Standing inside the living room, the chair, the bloodstains, the disarray surrounding me, the anger that gripped me felt nothing like what I’d been feeling earlier.Earlier, I’d been feeling a mixture of anger, confusion, and sadness, but that wasn’t the case anymore.Right now, all I felt was a hollowness that was lined with a fury that I’d never experienced before.I felt enraged at the unfairness of it all.While Marcelle was smiling at customers, going on with her life as if nothing had ever happened, I was standing in the middle of an emotional destruction that was never going to go away.