The Heir

It’s dark inside, almost as dark as the train tu

You can still see the remnants of my mother’s decorating from the time when we first moved here, when I was a toddler and she still had the focus and energy for projects.

I don’t actually remember that time, other than a few snippets—a few bright flashes nestled in my memory like jewels. My mother with paint streaks on her face, laughing and telling me not to ride my tricycle in the house. My father coming home dressed nicely in a suit, bringing me a little bag of Tula gingerbread, telling me to guess in which pocket it was hiding.

I can see the work she did—the blue floral wallpaper in the dining room. The gold chandelier shaped like elkhorn. The soapstone fireplace with its pile of white birch logs, never burned, never touched since.

All those rooms are filled with shit now. Piles of books stacked taller than I stand. Piles of newspapers, too. Magazines, old bills, and receipts. And then the boxes: things my father ordered and never even opened.

So many boxes. Telescopes and globes. Toasters and binoculars. Stationery, photography equipment, power tools, and shoes. I couldn’t guess what’s in half of them. I don’t know why my father started ordering all this crap. And I don’t know why he piles it up on tables and chairs, never even bothering to look at most of it.

I climb the long, curving staircase up to his office. He expects me to check in when I get home at night.

I knock on the door, waiting for him to say, “Enter,” before I turn the knob.

He’s seated behind his vast walnut desk, dressed neatly in a dark suit with a cleric collar. His ash-blond hair is combed back. He has carefully shaved the side of his face that grows hair.

His hands are folded on the desktop in front of him—one smooth and pale, one red and scarred. That hand doesn’t work as well as the other. The tissue is so tough and knotted that he can’t even grip a pen.

My father is jarring to look at.

He’s so handsome and so ugly at the same time.

The left side of his face is beautiful almost to the point of femininity—his eye a particular shade of blue that almost looks violet, striking against his fair skin and white-blond hair.

The right side is a mass of blistered, discolored flesh, like a dry river bottom baked and cracked by the sun. His hair is burned back to show a patch of shiny skull, and he has no eyebrow on that side. Even the eye itself is milky and pale. He can’t see out of it. His mouth twists up at the corner as if he’s smirking, though he never actually is.

The scars run all the way down the right side of his body. Down his arm and leg.

He looks like a strange kind of cyborg—part human, part something else. Not a robot—a monster. Maybe “chimera” is the best term.

I’ve only ever seen him without a shirt on one time. He hates to be viewed that way. He hates to be viewed any way, really.

He’s only become more sensitive about his appearance over time.

When I was small, he would let me sit on his lap and touch the roughly wrinkled skin on his right hand.

By the time my mother left, he wouldn’t let her near him. They slept in separate rooms so she wouldn’t even see him changing.

My father is a powerful man. He holds a high position within the Bratva—the derzhatel obschaka, the bookkeeper. The head accountant for all illegal dealings within the city of Moscow.

He has a team of men who work under him. He is subservient to only two men at the Moscow high table.

And of course, like any criminal, he has enemies.

But it wasn’t his enemies who did this to him.

It was family.

All his deepest wounds have come from the people he loved.

He loved my mother once. Maybe he even loved me.

Not anymore.

He looks at me with his one good eye and that milky orb.

I used to think that my father’s dual appearance represented the good and evil inside of him. The days when he was kind and brought me gingerbread, and the days that he raged and threw my mother’s decorations against the wall, smashing everything inside the house.

Now I think there is no devil and angel inside of people.

There’s only the appearance of good, and then what people actually are: weak and flawed. Destined to hurt you in the end.

My father looks at my boxing trunks.

“You fought today?”

I nod.

“Did you win?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Of course,” my father mimics me. “You are arrogant.”

“It’s not arrogance if it’s true. I’ve never been beaten.”

My father snorts softly. “I sounded like you once,” he says. “Stupidity must be universal at that age.”

His good eye flits down to the toe of my shoe, where the junkie’s blood makes a dark stain on the dingy canvas.

“Your blood or his?” he says.

“Neither. Someone tried to rob me on the way home.”

My father nods without interest in hearing more. “They didn’t know who your father was,” he says.

He’s not bragging, just making a simple statement of fact. No one would attack the son of a Bratva on purpose.

He shoves something across the desk toward me. An envelope: heavy, expensive, and slate gray in color.

“What’s that?” I say.

“Open it.”

I crack the wax seal keeping the flap closed. Then I slip out the dual sheets of stationery, skimming down the ornate script.

“I was accepted,” I say.

“Danyl Kuznetsov recommended you.”

“I’ll call to thank him.”

“You’ll do more than that. He expects two years of labor from you after you graduate.”

I nod. It’s a reasonable demand, considering the value of the favor.

Most students accepted to Kingmakers are from legacy families—those where the father, the grandfather, and the great-grandfather all attended the school.

My grandfather was part of a KGB task force, instructed to hunt down Bratva. He only rose through the ranks of the organization once he defected. The Bratva hated and distrusted him at first. He forced his way into their world. He advanced through violence and ruthlessness.

Kingmakers is beyond exclusive. They’re scrupulous about who they allow through their doors. Only those who can be trusted with the secrets of mafia families from around the world are allowed to enter.

I scan the letter once more.

“They accepted me to the Heirs division,” I say.

I wasn’t sure if they would. Moscow is divided into three territories with three separate bosses. Technically, my father isn’t one of them. But in our section of the city, the actual boss has no children, and neither does the next man down.

If I do well at Kingmakers, there’s nothing stopping me from ascending to the position of Pakhan in time.

I look at my father’s face, searching for some hint of emotion: pleasure, anticipation, pride.

I see nothing.

“I’m tired,” I tell him. “I’m going to bed early.”

He nods and turns back to the papers spread across his desk.

I go down the long, gloomy hallway to my bedroom.

I strip off my clothes and stand under the boiling hot shower spray for as long as I can stand. I take my exfoliating sponge and I roughly scrape every millimeter of my skin, cleansing it of the sweat from my fight, the filth from the subway tu

I soap myself over and over, rinsing and then starting over once more.