4
NIKOLAY
I walked upto a small church in upper Manhattan with a small, white piece of paper in my hand.
On it were the names of twenty-two, soon-to-be dead men of New York City.
The church was empty when I went inside, and I walked straight to the confession stand located in the far corner.
Then I sat down and waited.
I wasn’t a religious man. Never had been, and I doubted I would ever be, despite growing up with a father who was very much a devoted Catholic.
It was ironic, really, that he would make me go to church on Sunday, would pray and sing and kneel with dedication, only for Monday morning to come, and he would beat a man within an inch of his life because he couldn’t pay back the Solntsevskaya Bratva the three hundred dollars he owed.
My father didn’t die in the street, even if that was what everyone had expected to happen.
Instead, he died on his forty-fifth birthday when his kidneys finally gave out. Over twenty years of heavy drinking will do that to a person.
In the end, all he got was a cheap funeral and an attendant of one: me.
I didn’t even shed a tear for him that day.
I wondered if I was following in his footsteps, being just as crappy of a father to my sons as he was to me.
Gabriel still hadn’t contacted me.
I didn’t even know if he had yet made it to the strip club. And how would he know who he was looking for? I had very few pictures of my boys on my phone, and those pictures were of them when they were toddlers.
I had nothing else that could tie them to me.
Before Alina left, she had set fire to the crappy two-bedroom apartment we’d been living in, destroying everything.
I wondered if that fire had been symbolic of her hatred of me or of her life with me.
Perhaps a little bit of both.
The paper crinkled in my hand, and I forced myself to relax.
The door on the other side of the confession stand opened then. I didn’t react. I waited until Priest got settled.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said, looking straight ahead. “And I’m about to do it again.”
A deep voice came from the other side of the booth. “And what are you about to do?”
I slipped the piece of paper through the slight crack at the bottom of the separation window between us. He grabbed it, a brief silence settling in between us as he read the names.
“What shall the penance be?”
“A million dollars per count. I want them alive. They’re worthless to me dead. Two million for the first name on the list, Javier Russell.”
Fucking Javier Russell was the so-called leader of the insurgent group, and I was sure he was the one Leo was working with directly.
Now I had the Bratva, the Blood Nation Sinners, and every bounty hunter and hit man on the East Coast looking for them. It was open-fucking-season.
“Understood. I’ll get the word out.”
I smiled. “Perfect.”