Anna
Weeks have gone by, and I’ve spent them in a blur of sleeping in, eating needlessly decadent food, wild sex, and extra-long showers.
I’ve always tried to envision what it’s like for people with money to live in the same world as me, wondering how they spend their time when they don’t have a child to feed or a landlord to beg for more time on rent.
It turns out that not having a schedule or routine can actually be maddeningly boring. Of course, my first instinct is to feel immensely guilty at even the idea of being bored by the gratuitous luxury I’ve stumbled into. But there’s a stagnancy that comes over you when you don’t work for anything in life. Your whole brain becomes foggy and apathetic, and a light depression settles into the grooves.
Before Luka leaves the house to meet with a few of his men, I approach him coyly, wearing only a tight white t-shirt and pink silk shorts that he bought for me. “Hey, I was wondering… since it’s still dangerous for me to leave the house too often, is it alright if I get some painting supplies? I’ve been watching painting videos all day for weeks, and I realize it makes more sense to actually try it myself,” I say.
He stops walking towards the front door, looking back at me and raising an eyebrow. “Yeah, I’m sure I can arrange for something. You’re probably going insane having to stay in the same place all the time.”
The next day, Luka grants my wish with a complete collection of painting supplies, some of which had been purchased from an exclusive French painting shop downtown. I can’t even pronounce some of the colors, which both excites me and makes me feel intimidated.
It takes me a while to warm up to the process of painting, and at first, I fear that I lack the patience to persevere beyond the beginning stage when everything is vague, muddy, and ugly.
After I’ve practiced tenaciously, I can ease into the piece I’m working on, taking my time until something recognizable emerges and I’m not left with
a collection of regrettable streaks and poorly blended edges.
I’m working on a painting of a sunset beachfront when Luka sneaks up on me, startling me and causing me to mark the deep blue water with a red streak.
“Jesus Christ, Luka,” I shout, partially from adrenaline as well as out of frustration for my ruined painting.
“You scare super easy for someone who grew up in a bad neighborhood,” he teases.
I playfully slap his shoulder. “I grew up in tons of different places, and nobody ever tried to sabotage my artwork in any of them.”
“Then maybe you should go back to one of those houses where you can have ramen for breakfast again. You know, if you miss it so much,” he replies, smirking at me as he wraps his arms around my waist.
Without hesitating, he pulls my hair to the side and begins to kiss my neck, and my thoughts blur together as I try to fight the distraction.
“Come on, I have to fix this before it dries,” I reply, unable to contain my anticipation of his hands on my tits, around my throat, or up my skirt.
“You can say that it’s abstract, or whatever. I don’t know shit about art,” he whispers into my ear, biting slightly.
Suddenly, the painting doesn’t matter so much. Do I want to fight back?
Or do I want to give in and enjoy him yet again?
“Don’t you have a job or something to go to?” I ask flirtatiously, easing his hands off me and feeling them land right back on my hips.
He bites my neck, working his way down to my shoulder and pulling the strap of my tank top and bra down until he’s viciously marking my skin.
“Damn! I still have nerves in my skin, Luka,” I say, giggling as he continues. While it does hurt, I always enjoy looking at the marks he leaves, little vampire prints along my flesh where he saves his place until he picks up where he left off.
“Sorry, you just smell so goddamn good all the time,” he replies, moving to the other shoulder and repeating the process until he’s sending chills down my spine.
“Fuck,” I whisper, feeling him grinning impishly against my skin as he feels my resolve begin to slip away.
He continues along my shoulder and up my neck on the other side, stopping suddenly and pulling away. “So, my brother Leo is coming over for dinner tonight. I just wanted to let you know,” he says.
I collect myself and sit up straight. “Okay, um, when should I be ready? Who’s cooking? Why are you just now telling me about this?” I ask.
Luka pauses for a moment. “I hired someone to cook for us at six, so don’t worry about that. Put on something sexy. I want him seething with jealousy when he sees you,” he replies.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll look too good for him? Maybe you’ll be the jealous one,” I tease.
He smirks. “Not a chance, sweetie. I know your pussy belongs to me. A pretty dress won’t change that.”
True.
Luka leaves me alone with my painting again.
I sigh heavily, flustered by his teasing. Now I’ll be thinking about him for the entire meal, completely unable to focus or make conversation like an adult as I imagine him picking me up and fucking me on the table with a live audience. I’m going to spend the entire night fighting the urge to drag him into the half-bath off the living room and let him rearrange my guts.
I splash a little bit of blue oil paint over the red streak Luka caused on my canvas, trying to push the filthy thoughts from my head. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more of those when it’s time for dinner.
When five-thirty rolls around, I’m panicking while I dig through my endless closet for an outfit that Luka will appreciate without giving Leo the wrong idea. Luka almost exclusively buys me clingy, short dresses that are made to show more cleavage than I even have. He hates it when I wear jeans and a t-shirt. If he had his way, I’d wear nothing but a fishnet body sock every waking minute of my life.
I end up choosing a lacy red cocktail dress with gold hoop earrings and understated nude makeup. I glance nervously at myself in the mirror five or ten times before I leave the bedroom, and just as I exit, I hear the front door open.
Instead of a loud, boisterous greeting from one man to his brother, Leo and Luka shake hands and nod awkwardly as though they’re about to enter a business meeting. I’ve been clear with Luka that I want no part in his lifestyle or his “arrangements”, so if he’s dragging me out just to look pretty while he discusses his latest victims, I’ll be furious.
“Leo, this is Anna,” Luka says as he gestures towards me.
I pull up a seat at the dining room table, giving an awkward little wave as my customer service personality threatens to take over. As much as I’ve always hated working in bars and restaurants, I know I’ll always have a sunny, agreeable disposition that I can pull out of my ass if the occasion calls for it.
“Anna, so lovely to meet you. I’m Leo,” Luka’s brother replies, extending his hand towards me. My hand meets his, and he grips it firmly. Perhaps I’m a part of the business meeting now.
“I’ve got some drinks if anyone wants anything,” Luka says as Leo breaks from our handshake and sits down.
“Bourbon, perhaps?”
“Bourbon? You were always more of a vodka guy,” Luka says, laughing uncomfortably.
I can’t get a sense of what the issue is, but something is off. Luka seems supremely uncomfortable, nothing like he was when he was urging me to dress like a slut for dinner.
Leo chuckles, clearly less bothered than Luka is. “I was twenty-seven the last time you saw me, Lukie. Vodka no longer suites me.”
“I’ll take some wine, if we have any,” I interject, hearing my high-pitched waitress voice chiming through.
Luka glances at me questioningly but doesn’t say anything as he leaves the room to grab the drinks.
“So, I suppose it doesn’t make sense for me to ask how you and Luka met,” Leo says after a moment of deafening silence.
“Oh? Why is that?” I ask, taking a sip from a water glass.
“I mean, I know what happened. He told me your sister owed him some money,” Leo replies.
I’m stunned by his straightforwardness. “Um, yeah, that’s how it started. Now he’s letting me and my sister stay here. It’s been really awesome,” I reply, holding back all the obsessive gushing that I could do if given a chance to talk about Luka. Something tells me that I should keep my eyes and ears open with a closed mouth for this encounter.
“Luka’s always been like that, but it’s good to know he’s treating you well,” Leo responds sincerely, and I can see a closer resemblance to Luka than I could before. They both have the same soft depth to their eyes when they’re saying something genuine. That’ll make him easier for me to read.
Luka returns with the drinks, carefully setting my glass of wine in front of me and smiling curtly. I know it isn’t me he’s nervous about, but I can’t help but feel self-conscious. He’s just acting weird.
“This is the only bourbon I have. I hope that’s alright,” Luka says to Leo as he hands him a tumbler of something that’s probably tragically overpriced.
“I could never complain after being offered a place in your home for dinner,” Leo replies.
I glance at Luka for whatever context I can possibly extract. For as much time as I’ve spent with Luka, I know absolutely nothing about his relationship with his brother.
Luka nods and sits down next to me across from Leo. “Pavel should also be joining us soon, too. He’s bringing his daughter so that she and Rachel can hang out in the guest house,” Luka says, throwing back an overfilled shot glass of vodka.
We continue making awkward small talk for the next few minutes until Pavel arrives, immediately sending his spritely, effervescent teenage daughter Petra back to the guest house to hang out with Rachel. He places a bottle of wine on the table before taking a seat.
The chef that Luka hired brings us our first course, and I’m admittedly excited for some kind of distraction from the impending discomfort from being surrounded by men I barely know who seem to barely know each other anymore.
“How was your flight here? I didn’t even ask when I first saw you,” Luka asks Leo, pouring himself another glass of vodka. He’s going through it pretty quickly, and that’s saying a lot for Luka.
“I had a six-hour layover at LAX, so that sucked. You’d think there would be more to do at one of the biggest airports in the world. This is America after all,” he jokes, and the tension in my shoulders eases a bit.
“Yeah, I’ve never flown, but I hear horror stories,” I chime in, and Luka’s eyes quickly warn me to keep my commentary to a minimum.
Leo rubs his chin, looking me up and down. “I’ve never spent much time in America, but typically you all have too much of everything. The amount of choices people have to make here every day is insane.”
I wait patiently for Luka to pick up where he silently insisted that I leave off.
“Yeah, it’s not like Russia. The US has a grandeur about it that nobody really asked for, but everybody indulges in,” Luka replies.
Pavel finishes his glass of wine in a large gulp.
I follow suit. Silence.
I can’t take it any longer. Maybe it’s the wine making the silence louder, but I need to break it somehow. “So, why haven’t you two seen each other in ten years? I know Luka can more than afford it,” I ask Leo.
Leo and Luka both glance at each other expectantly, perhaps waiting for the other to lend me a full explanation. Given the degree of unspoken panic at my question, I’m under the impression that this is something that Luka should have told me about prior. He’s always been a man of mystery, but I should know their history if I’m going to endure dinner with them.
“We’ll talk about later,” Luka finally replies, eyeing the food waiting in front of him. “Let’s eat.”
The topic is quickly swept away as we begin to eat our food, and it isn’t picked back up when we finish. Most of our conversation revolves around things I don’t fully understand foreign stock markets and some rare historical tidbits that Leo has been collecting.
After an evening of conflict avoidance and binge drinking, I head off to bed, preparing an avocado face mask in the kitchen before I shower. With the drunken voices of the three men carrying from the living room, I’m able to pick the majority of their conversation out, even as they lower their voices.
Suddenly, they’re no longer talking about trivial things. The conversation has turned to business in my absence, and what I hear terrifies me.
I pause what I’m doing, setting down the avocado in my hand on the granite counter and listening closely. I’m able to gather that Luka’s men were able to hit one of their rival’s warehouses and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs from him. After listening just a bit longer, it’s emphasized that Dmitri, the man who threatened mine and my sister’s lives with a brick through our window, is likely the one who will attempt to seek revenge for the stolen drugs.
Fuck.
Now, not only has Luka pissed off a dangerous criminal by murdering his brother in cold blood, but he’s stolen from him too, making this Dmitri freak even more of a threat. I can’t believe that he’d put us in any more danger than he already has.
Luka refuses to talk to me about work, his strategies, anything. Maybe this is why. How am I supposed to feel safe when he’s playing fast and loose with his own safety?
Maybe I watch too many movies, but if I’m identified as someone who is close to Luka, Dmitri could view Rachel and me as collateral and hurt us even worse than Alexei wanted to.
But what can I do besides getting angry at Luka and admitting that I was eavesdropping on his private conversation?
Am I even allowed to be angry about this? I’m living the life that most people dream of on the condition that my safety and life can be compromised at any moment. If given a chance, I’m pretty sure most of the kids I met in foster care would take that opportunity in a heartbeat.
So what am I worried about?
Luka might be kind of an asshole, but he’s at least got the empathy to see me and Rachel in a bad place and take us in. From what I’ve gathered, neither Alexei nor his brother has even an eighth of the empathy required to brake for a squirrel, much less have mercy on an uninvolved waitress in their attempt to maintain an empire.
I leave my homemade mask on the counter and step quietly back down the hallway to the master bedroom, my heart racing as a deep well of dread pools in my belly.
Regardless of Luka’s intentions, I no longer feel safe here.