Da believed that bullshit, but I didn’t.
Knowing it was pointless to argue, I licked my lips and raised my other hand to do as he bid.
Before I could tap the button, he told me, “You could have prevented this, Brennan. Remember today. Your ma would be safe at home if you’d just done as I fucking asked you. Women, be they your wife or your mother, are queens. They’re to be protected and sheltered at all costs.”
As much as those words resonated with me, I wanted to ask why he’d laid Ma’s responsibility on my shoulders if she was so fucking important to him, but I knew why.
Sure, I still went to school, but that was only to keep up appearances. Plus, he wanted his sons to rub shoulders with Manhattan’s elite, so off we went to learn BS we’d never need, before our real jobs started once that shit was over and the uniform was off.
To him, I was a made man.
To him, it was my duty to protect her.
He wasn’t wrong.
I should have waited in the shop with her until Stephen arrived to take my place. It was my fault we were running late. She’d told me twice to get up, but I’d ignored her, and she’d paid for that when I darted off to catch the bus.
I was a bad son.
A terrible one.
I licked my lips as I let my gaze drift over the Aryans. They’d almost killed Ma, had done things to her that I’d heard Da sobbing over last night as he got drunk in his office.
They deserved to die.
My hand hovered over the button, but I kept my gaze trained on them as I lowered it.
When the pincers flared wide, the men screamed, but not for long as the mechanical jaw chewed them up and spat them out.
Blood spurted everywhere like a geyser. Da and Uncle Frank laughed, but me?
I just puked.
Two
2009
The final journal entry by Mariska Vasov
I never imagined there’d come a day where I wanted you to read these journals, my darlings, but I hope you read about the mistakes I made and I pray that they don’t lead you down the same path I took.
When you were a little girl, Camille, and Inessa was barely two, I was at a political fundraiser with your father, and that was where I met him.
He was only in his early twenties, and shouldn’t have held any power in that space, but Brennan O’Donnelly dominated the room. He commanded everyone in its vicinity. Truly, I’ve never felt anything like it before—he drew me to him like a moth to a flame, and I’ve never been more okay with being burned.
Brennan is a man like no other. Even if I was only an affair, a change of pace—an older woman, a married one at that, making our time together charged and heated with the fear of us being caught—he was different. So unlike any other man I’ve met in this world of ours. He was honorable. Kind, in his own way. A modern day protector. Whenever I was in his arms, I wished that I was his. That we could be together, that my fate wasn’t tied to Antoni’s, but… that simply wasn’t to be.
I don’t like sharing my secrets with you, not when they cast me in a painful light, but the truth is, I need you to know about Brennan. About the kind of man he is.
Decent.
Generous.
Honorable.
Don’t mistake him for not being dangerous, because he is. He’s just not like your father.
Accept this now, my darlings, that we are broodmares to men like Antoni. Our worth falls to the fruit we can bear, and I’m sure you know this by now that it’s the sons who matter. I wish that weren’t so. I wish that you hadn’t been raised in a world like this, but you have. We don’t just have glass ceilings, but glass cages.
It distresses me more that I have to tell you I knew from early on in my marriage I would die in childbirth. Carrying Camille and then Inessa wasn’t easy, and my doctors advised against having another child. Of course, with no son, that was never going to happen.
Brennan was a spotlight in the darkness. A chance of something more in the middle of a life that I knew was coming to an end. Getting pregnant again felt impossible, and with each passing day, I knew I was becoming surplus to requirements. Call him my last act of rebellion,
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