The Sleeping Water

Ava
“Interesting” Kat hums to herself the next day when I tell her what happened with Kira.
I shoot her a questioning look and arch my left brow, “What’s so interesting about it?”
We were currently lazing about by the pool which is something you wouldn’t expect two adults to be doing on a Monday afternoon. Kat had insisted that a pool day was what we needed to solidify our bond in best friend-in-lawhood – her words, not mine- and I was too much of a people pleaser to refuse and just sort of went with it.
“What is so interesting about it is that Kira doesn’t just crawl into bed with anyone after having a nightmare. She only prefers it when Nikolai consoles her and the fact that she went to your room after one is just… odd.”
I kick my feet against the water as I listen to her. “There was nothing odd about it.” I tell her, “Nikolai wasn’t home, and I just so happened to be the only one awake. I’m sure if she knew that you were awake too she would’ve gone to you and Ivan’s room instead,”
Kat shrugs her shoulders, exhaling deeply. “I highly doubt that. The one time she did she ended up crying because she thought Ivan was mad at her for waking us up. My husband can look pretty cranky when he doesn’t get his beauty sleep”
I laugh at that, but it sounds forced and nothing at all like the easygoing laugh I intended. Once my laughter dies down, a silence falls over us. I glance over at the guards stationed on either side of the pool.
When I’d asked Kat if the guards were necessary, she said that they were the only reason our husbands allowed us out of the house in the first place.
“She remembers everything you know,”
Kat says and I turn to look at her. She was lying on one of the sun lounge chairs, dressed in a yellow floral bikini, with dark sunglasses covering her eyes from the burning rays of the sun. Her blonde hair sprawled behind her in a bed of golden waves. She looked like she belonged on the cover of an issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit magazine rather than in the pool house of a brutal mafia lord. I, on the other hand, was dressed in a plain white bathing suit.
“What?” I say when I realize I have completely zoned out from the conversation.
“Kira, I mean. She remembers everything.”
I purse my lips. “Right.”
“I’m serious. When she was four, Nikolai had her tested by a doctor because she could recall things about the fire with a scary amount of precision that worried him. They call what she has Eidetic Imagery or something like that. It means she has a photographic memory. She remembers everything as long as she’s seen it”
“I see” I hum. That would explain why she was able to recall the fire last night so vividly. Because she remembered it. Down to the last detail. Did that mean that there was a possibility that she might have also seen who started the fire three years ago? Oh my God, what if she did? What if she had seen the person who started the fire and it wasn’t my father?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Kat says. I blink at her regaining focus.
“I’m not thinking about anything,” I say and she chuckles.
“My God you’re a terrible liar. You should work on that if you plan on lying to my cousin one day. Nikolai can smell bullshit a mile away. It’s kind of like his superpower.”
I turn away and glance back at my reflection in the pool. “I’m not lying,” I say.
“Yes you are,” she snorts, “It’s so obvious what you’re thinking about I can practically hear the wheels turning in your head”
“Okay, so what am I thinking about then?”
She straightens slightly in the lounge chair and uses her index finger to push down her glasses a bit so that she can see me.
“Okay then, since you’re so adamant about lying to yourself, you think that just because Kira remembers everything, there may be a chance that she might’ve seen the person who started the fire.”
I blink at her. Apparently, Nikolai wasn’t the only person who could sense bullshit a mile away.
“For the record, she doesn’t remember what happened that day.”
“But you just said she remembers everything.”
“Yes, as long as she sees it. Kira was asleep when the fire started. Mikhail barely managed to get her out before going back to get Nadia.”
I assumed that Mikhai and Nadia were the names of Nikolai’s brother and his sister-in-law. I weigh Kat’s words for a moment, my shoulders sagging under the weight of defeat.
“Oh,” I say, swirling my big toe over the surface of the water. I guess I thought If there was a chance Kira had seen the person who caused the fire then there was a chance that I could prove to myself that my father wasn’t capable of the crimes he was being accused of.
Did it make it pitiful that a part of me had clung to the hope that my father might be innocent after all? Probably.
Kat sighs, “Ava I’m going to be real with you for a second.” She removes her shades completely, placing the accessory beside the glass of orange juice on the table by her side.
Sunlight bounced off her almost golden hair, highlighting her usually soft features which were narrowed at me in a look I could only consider as concern mixed with frustration.
“Nikolai is hell-bent on killing your father. Hell, even I want to see the mother fucker dead, pardon my French. The only reason I’m trying to get to know you better other than the fact that I think you’re really pretty and you’re Nikolai’s wife is because your father did you wrong too and I’m just waiting for you to realize it.”
I knew this. I did. I was aware that her kindness didn’t just stem from the fact that I was the wife of her husband’s best friend or that she was in desperate need of some female companionship other than the five-year-old little girl in this house.
She had a point too. My father had done me wrong on so many levels yet I was willing to forgive him because he was the only surviving family I had left other than my brother.
I could understand why nobody in this house could comprehend why I am still willing to defend him after everything he had done to me but at the end of the day, the fact remains that I am still his daughter. His blood still flowed through my veins and like any child, I refused to see the darkness that resided in the heart of my father. Sure, I could hate him. I could feel anger towards him for putting me in the middle of this mess, but at the end of the day, I wouldn’t want him dead.
Why was that so hard for any of them to believe?
“He isn’t as terrible of a father as you think,” I say but even I could hear how pathetic that sounded.
She arches a brow in my direction, “You do realize that he sold you, twice, if my sources are correct.”
I nod, well aware of the abundance of bad decisions that trailed my father’s name.
“I do.”
“And you still don’t hate him for what he did to you?”
I shake my head, “I do, I just don’t hate him enough to want to see him die.”
Did I think my father should’ve chosen not to sell me the both times he did? Yes, obviously I did. But do I think his entire existence should be erased because two very powerful men saw an opportunity to exchange another human being for their selfish reasons? No, I did not.
“Wow,” she whistles, throwing her head back, “You’re really something.”
I stiffen, eyeing her defensively, “What’s that supposed to mean?’
“It means you’re either really retarded or really forgiving.”
My shoulders tense at her words, and I’m taken aback by her bluntness. Kat locked her gaze with mine, unfazed by my reaction as she continued.
“Don’t get me wrong, Ava, I think you’re really nice and everything, but don’t you think that everything that has happened so far seems a tad bit too sketchy to you?”
I press my lips together. It would be a lie to say the thought hadn’t occurred to me. But my brain had been too tired on both instances to formulate why I should be weary of my father’s decision to marry me off to Antonio.
“Just because I don’t want him dead, doesn’t mean I have forgiven him for what he did to me.”
She pulls her right leg up to her chin, then buries her hands between the crook of her knee, “Then enlighten me.” She says, tilting her head to the side, “Why are you so hell-bent on trying to prove to yourself that your father hasn’t done the things Nikolai has accused him of?”
“Because,” I say, “I know my father. He might be as despicable as you think he is but he wouldn’t force me into this situation if his hands weren’t tied.”
I know that my father wouldn’t have done something like this without his reasons.
“Think about it Ava, your father was a weapons dealer and not a pretty good one at that. Do you think that he would be able to afford the house you guys lived in with how much he was late on shipments? You may not have been born in the mafia world, so I’ll forgive you for not knowing, but the Italians are very traditional people, especially the Moretti’s.”
I knew that already. Most crime families under the Italian Mafia were strict with their traditions and the Moretti’s were not different. If anything they were more rigid when it came to their traditions than most Mafia families.
“They are as ruthless as they come, especially when it comes to one of their own,” Kat explains. “What I’m saying my dear, best friend-in-law, is that if your father sold faulty guns to the Morettis and if those faulty guns were the reason for the death of Alessandro’s nephew, then Alessandro would be expected to abide by mafia tradition and kill your father as the head of the outfit. Una vita per una vita (a life for a life) is the one law the Italians do not compromise on. So if Alessandro thought that your father committed the crime he said he did, I can fully guarantee you that he wouldn’t want you to marry his son as a punishment.”
“Well, you’re wrong because he did,” I say quickly, shaking my head as images of my almost wedding with Antonio flashed in my mind. I could still feel how revolting his fingers had felt against my skin.
She sighs, “No, he didn’t”
“And how would you know?”
“Because,” she says throwing her hand in the air and letting them fall to her lap, “Nikolai, tapped your house”
My heart plummets at her words, I stare at her, hoping I misheard her. “What?” My voice was deathly low, and from the corner of my eye, I could see the guard at my right shift uncomfortably as he looked up to the sky, probably wishing he was anywhere but here.
“We weren’t aware of your father’s decision at first, but Nikolai instructed that Ivan taped your house to see if they could gather any information on your father that would lead us to the person who called the hit three years ago, and that was how we found out.”
She tells me how they listened in on a conversation between my father and Alessandro. How in return for allowing my father to expand his warehouses on his turf, Alessandro expected my father to give me to him.
A lump forms in my throat by the time she is finished speaking and I find it difficult to swallow the bile that follows shortly after.
My first curl in my lap as mortification flushes through me at the revelation. I could sense the truth in her words. My father didn’t just sell me because Alessandro demanded it, he did so because he saw me as some sort of bargaining chip to get what he wanted.
I felt disgusted, with him and worse with myself for believing that he was doing all of this to protect me. To protect our family.
My stomach churned violently as Kat continued “One of the terms of the agreement with Alessandro was that in return for allowing your father to do business in one of his warehouses he would ensure Alessandro got the one thing he has always longed for.”
“An heir” I finished. Alessandro has been desperate for someone he could train to be his replacement after his death. Antonio might’ve been the obvious replacement if it weren’t for the little fact that nobody saw him as a suitable replacement for his father.
Antonio was a dickhead who spent most of his time blowing through his father’s money faster than a gun hit its target. He was a vile rapist who preferred the comfort of a bottle than his actual responsibilities.
Kat nods, “Exactly and who better to make his dream come true than the twenty year old girl who would do anything her father asked of her.”
Not only did my father hand me over to a man twice my age to secure a deal, Not only did he barter my body like I was nothing but a commodity, to be traded whenever it suited him, but he lied to me about it and I, like a fool, had believed him.
I thought I was doing what was best for my family. I thought it was my duty to help my father, to protect him like he protected me but now, now I see how stupid I was for believing that a man who had sold his daughter, whatever the reason might have been, had done so to protect me.
I steal a glance at Kat whose piercing sapphire eye hasn’t left me
“How can you be so sure you didn’t mishear him?”
It was a dumb question because unlike Nikolai, Kat had nothing to gain from lying to me. They might be working together but I could sense that Kat wasn’t as interested in revenge as her cousin.
Her expression softens as she looks at me, “Believe what you want to Ava, I have no reason to lie to you. I might hate the fucker, but I would’ve sympathised with him, if his reasons for doing what he did were more genuine. But there weren’t and somehow he’s strung you along and you can’t even see him for the monster he truly is.”
I drop my gaze back to the pool, kicking my feet gently against the water. I knew deep down that what Kat said was true but a part of me that was still loyal to my father still struggled to come to terms with the weight of his betrayal.
I stare into the shimmering body of water, watching the reflection of the sun bounce off its surface. The water rippled gently under my feet, reminding me of how things might look calm on the surface, but with the right amount of force the tides could change and the waves could turn into a raging force destroying everything in its path.
I was done trying to justify my father’s decisions. I was done being the dutiful daughter who tried to hold her family together despite all the cracks that were pulling us apart.
I was going to be the force that turned the sleeping water into a full on tidal wave ready to destroy anything on her parth.
it was time to grow some balls and finally do something about my life.