Maksim: A Dark Mafia Romance (Akimov Bratva) by Nicole Fox (read aloud .TXT) 📕

“Yes,” I mutter. As he walks away, I consider running past him, getting to the doors before him, and running through the halls, searching for my daughter. I’ll fight every teacher and security guard in the building to get to her.

And when I find her, she’ll know me. She’ll know just by looking that I am her mother. That we belong together. That she was stolen from me.

My heart aches.

A large shadow casts over me. I look up to see Maksim.

“I know where you live,” he says, the phrase slipping by before I can grasp its meaning. “I can drive you there if you’d like.”

I glance back at the school.

“I don’t believe they’ll allow you back inside,” he remarks. “Despite the neighborhood, it’s a good school. Security seems tight as well. I’m surprised you managed to get so far.”

He offers me his hand. For reasons I don’t understand, I take it. My hand feels small in his. He keeps a guiding grip on my elbow as he leads me to his car. It’s a black Camaro. Of course.

He opens the door for me. As I sit down, I smell the new leather. Before he gets into the driver’s side, he checks under the car. I don’t ask what he’s doing and he doesn’t explain.

We don’t talk. I risk looking at him a couple of times, but it makes it hard for me to breathe again, so I quickly snap my eyes back to the road. The rhythm of the car is soothing, like a mother rocking her child to sleep.

But I feel a consistent string pulling me in two directions—one toward my daughter and the other toward the man sitting silently less than a foot away from me.

6

Cassandra

I settle onto my ass beside my bed, dragging out a box of shoes. The black heels are cushioned by a layer of tissue paper. I take the shoes and the tissue paper out. Underneath, a thin photo album lies snugly at the bottom of the box. I pull it out. The edges have frayed over time.

I open the album gingerly, my fingertips barely touching it.

The first photo is when I was seven years old. I’m grinning at whoever is taking the photo as the candlelight from my cake makes the lower half of my face radiate. My father is sitting to the left of me, looking over his shoulder. In the faint light, there’s another man behind him. The edge of a gun is visible under his sports jacket.

In the next photo, I’m nearly twelve. I’m embracing our new puppy, Shana, as we’re surrounded by a warm winter’s slush. We’d never had a pet before. Nearly a month later, my father told me that Shana had been sent to another home. When I was fourteen, he admitted she’d actually been poisoned by his enemies.

Next page. I’m thirteen. My father is standing beside me, his arm around my shoulders as we’ve finished a trail. One of his men took the photo; he followed behind us as we hiked. For a long time, I thought the men that traveled around with us were a normal security team. In this photo, I’m fully embracing my father. He’d been attacked less than a month before and told me it was a robbery attempt. I bought the story then. Now, I doubt it was true.

Flip. I’m still thirteen, but as my father takes a photo of me standing tall in a pale blue dress, ready to go to a school dance, I’m looking at him like a deer eyes a hunter. I’ve seen him, the real him, as he beat the man who followed us on the hike. He later told me that he had to set an example—he told me that he had to hurt that man in order to ensure that no one would repeat the man’s mistakes.

Another page. I’m sixteen now, standing in front of a brand-new Mustang. It’s in that Mustang that I’ll end up picking up some men from a meeting point after they’ve killed members of a Columbian gang, at my father’s orders. It’s also the first time I’ll meet my daughter’s father.

Then I’m eighteen, cooking a meal for my father and me. I’m already plotting to leave him and never talk to him again. I can see it my body language—the tense arms but the lowered shoulders, the forced smile while I try to keep my eyes wide open like I’m innocent. It hadn’t been long since he snatched my daughter from my arms and jettisoned her into the void.

It’s too much.

I shove the photo album back into the box. The box breaks at the edges, but I ram the tissue paper in along with the shoes. The top doesn’t fit until I fix the edges. I jam the box far enough back that I can’t reach it anymore. It’d be for the best if I never look at it again.

I lean against the side of my bed. I try to not think about anything—I’ve been told meditation is good for my health—but my mind keeps returning to two opposing thoughts.

First, my daughter. She had the same hair as me. I didn’t expect that. I’ve spent years trying not to picture her, to think of what she might look like or smell like or be like. I try to recall her face from the park, but everything now is a blur. It all happened so fast. I wasn’t ready for any of it.

Worse, I can remember Maksim’s face perfectly. The sharp jaw, the incisive gray eyes, the stubble that is so easy to imagine against my hand, against my cheek, against my inner thigh.

I propel myself to my feet. I’ll focus on work. I’ll focus on anything other than everything that’s haunting me.

Walking into the Fifth Avenue Journal, I feel like I’m in a mental hospital. Everyone seems to be on the brink of a meltdown.