Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
“What are you doing?” she asked, startled.
“Washing you,” I told her firmly.
I worked my way over her body, soaping her skin and then sluicing the suds away, washing all the stress of the last few hours out of her until I felt her muscles unknot. We didn’t speak a word the entire time. Eventually, her breathing had slowed, and her body was relaxed, and I knelt beside the bath, my big, suited form hulking over her naked one, stroking her back over and over like a cat’s.
God, I loved this woman. Needed her like I’d never needed anyone. I could have gone on stroking her like that forever...but it was time.
I began, keeping one hand on her body to help me get through it. “The Aristovs weren’t always criminals,” I said slowly. “My father was a good man. He worked for the government. My mother was a dance teacher.” I met her eyes for a second. “I was going to be a businessman. Valentin wanted to be an actor. Gennadiy, a doctor. What I turned us into...it wasn’t what I intended. Wasn’t even what I wanted. It was what was...necessary.”
I swallowed. It felt like I was standing at the top of some stairs leading down into a pitch-black basement. I hadn’t ventured down into it for years and I was scared. Not because I didn’t know what was down there but because I did.
But I’d promised.
“One night when I was fifteen, my father came home and told my mother that he’d stumbled on something at work. Corruption, on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions being secretly siphoned off. She begged him not to talk to anyone because she was afraid of what might happen to him. But he couldn’t let them get away with it. He was that sort of man. They argued about it for hours: that’s how my brothers and I found out about it, listening from the next room. A few days later, he reported what he’d found. But he’d underestimated how far the corruption had spread. A man called Olenev, a man my father thought was his friend, came to our house...and stabbed my father to death, right in front of us.”
The pain began, a jagged tear, deep in my chest. “Seconds later, the police burst through the door: Olenev had friends in the force.” I sighed and closed my eyes. “And they arrested us. Valentin, Gennadiy, and me.”
I heard the water slosh as Bronwyn twisted around in the bath. I could imagine her leaning close to me, her eyes wide. “What?!”
“It wasn’t enough to kill my father. Olenev knew that he’d probably told my mother about the corruption, and maybe us, too. But he couldn’t kill the whole family, that would look too suspicious. So, he invented a story about the three of us killing our father. He said our father had found out we were selling drugs and confronted us, and we’d killed him in a drug-fueled rage. It didn’t matter that we’d never touched drugs. It didn’t matter that Gennadiy was only fourteen and Valentin only twelve. Olenev had sway with the prosecutor and the press. They painted us as feral kids who rebelled against their good, honest father. The three of us were sent to a youth detention center, and not in Moscow, where we lived. A particularly brutal one, for violent youths...in Vladivostok.” Even now, I have trouble saying the name. The pain in my chest grew, the wound ripping wider.
I opened my eyes. “Olenev was clever. We were out of the way, no one would ever believe us, and he could use us as leverage to make sure our mother stayed quiet: he told her that if she went to the press, he’d arrange for us to be killed while we were behind bars.”
Bronwyn was staring at me, her mouth open in a silent O of horror. I focused on the droplets of water on her bare shoulders, on the bubbles that clung to her red hair like snowflakes. I was descending fast, now, into that dark basement and I needed to be able to climb back out.
“We were three pampered city boys from a good family. Every other boy there had been into gangs and drugs for years. We were soft.” I said it without emotion. “Easy pickings. And Olenev, he knew the warden. That’s why he had us sent there. The warden and his guards tried to break us.” It was getting harder, now. I could smell the place, bleach and piss and fear. I could see the cold tiled walls and my blood splattered on them under the flickering fluorescent lights.
“They’d withhold food for days, until we were too weak to fight. Or beat us with rubber hoses. And it went on week after week, month after month.” My voice slowed. I was unleashing memories I’d kept locked down under layers of ice for decades, and it felt like they were going to suffocate me. I remembered seeing Gennadiy being kicked to the ground and then pissed on, while I was held down, unable to help. I remembered seeing Valentin, my baby brother, howling and sobbing, as they burned the soles of his feet with cigarettes. I remembered the pain of being kicked in the ribs when they were already fractured, bruises layered on bruises, cuts reopened before they had a chance to heal. “They had different ways of torturing each of us. With me, their favorite thing was to make me stand outside, naked, in the snow.” I looked down at my shoes, then met Bronwyn’s eyes. “That’s how I lost some of my toes. Frostbite.”