Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70518 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70518 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
She didn’t answer right away but slowly pulled away. “Okay, but first I have to pee,” she said. “Then we can talk.”
“Deal.” I followed her into the bathroom and we cleaned up together before getting back into bed. She moved into my arms easily, reminding me again how good it was between us. That was why I had to tell her everything. Before we got any more involved.
“I grew up in Siberia,” I told her quietly. “Very cold, very poor, very hard life.”
“In my head I didn’t think regular people lived there,” she said. “I always thought of it as where a prison is.”
“Yes. But regular people live there as well. When I was thirteen, my grandmother took me to another town, where there was work for her in a bakery and I could play hockey. I went to school in the morning and then to practice after, while my grandmother worked fourteen-hour days for us to live. This was when I met Svetlana. Her mother was dead and her father abused her both physically and sexually. At night, after my grandmother was asleep, I would help her sneak out and we would meet with our friends to drink, smoke, whatever trouble we could find.”
“Sad, lonely teenagers with no one looking out for them,” she said softly.
“Yes.” I nodded, rubbing one of my hands up and down her arm as I talked. “It was okay for a while, but my grandmother fell. She broke her leg and there was no money for care, physical therapy, nothing. One of my friends, he told me about a place I could go to make money. Fighting.”
“Like boxing?” she asked.
“More like MMA. Except without rules. Without referees. Two men in a cage. You fight until one gives up. The winner gets half the money that is bet, while the men running the fights kept the rest.”
“So underground fighting.”
“Yes.” I took a breath. “And I was good. Small in those days, but fast and strong. I learned quickly how to play dirty. Kicking out a knee, the kidneys, whatever it took to win. I had no choice.”
“Oh, baby.” She squeezed my free hand, tipping up her face to look at me as I continued.
“By the time I was fifteen, I had made a name for myself. Not just in the town where we lived, but back home in Siberia. People heard about Konstantin Volkov, the Siberian beast. My fists had become lethal and this was when the trouble began.”
I took a breath, wondering how to condense a lifetime of pain and misery into a simple conversation for the woman I was falling in love with without scaring her off.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
“You’ve heard of the Russian Mafia, the Bratva, things like this?”
“Sure.”
“There was another faction—it’s difficult to explain if you are not from there, but Mafia is easiest for conversation.”
“Okay.”
“There was a man. Dmitri. He ran everything dirty in Siberia and all the surrounding cities. He began sending a van for me every Friday night, bringing me to wherever he arranged big fights. Higher stakes. More money. Women. Drugs. Anything we wanted. And I made a lot of money.
“During this time, Svetlana had had enough with her father and left home, but had nowhere to go. She was living on the streets, sleeping with rich, powerful men who would give her a room for the night, a meal, whatever she could get out of them. We were not a couple, you understand? We were just two scared, inexperienced teenagers with nothing to look forward to in life who found comfort and friendship together.”
Lucy was listening quietly, so I kept going before I chickened out.
“My life changed just before I turned sixteen. This night, my grandmother came and gave me money—everything she had. Told me to have Svetlana bet it all on me for the upcoming fight. When I won—and I had never lost so it wasn’t even a question at that point—I wouldn’t have to fight anymore because we would get five times the original bet. She wanted me to focus on hockey.
“Dmitri, who ran the fights, also wanted Svetlana. He’d tried to claim her many times, but he was three times her age, and she knew firsthand how rough and dangerous he could be. Normally, she stayed away from the fights because of him, but she came that night to place my grandmother’s bet. She disappeared once we got there, and Dmitri called me to his office. He told me he needed me to lose. That he would give me more money for losing than I would make by winning.”
“Oh no.”
“And there was no way to tell him what my grandmother had done or to stop Svetlana from making the bet. It turned out my opponent was Dmitri’s illegitimate son and the boy’s mother, Dmitri’s mistress, begged him to let her son think he could beat me. So there was nothing I could do but agree.”