Sold to the Hitman(14)

We come out the doors of the chapel as man and wife, a Bratva assassin and his wife who’s never so much as spent time alone in a room with a man. As we’re ushered into the reception shortly after, that much and more becomes clear to me.



* * *



The reception hall is a wide room dotted with round tables, and after an arduously long prayer session in which everyone in the room was asked to link hands and bow their heads, the rest of the guests begin to eat while Cassie and I sit side by side at the table in the center of the room, where we’re victims of all the passing-by relatives.

A number of them stop by to try to make conversation with me, but while Cassie is seated quietly to my left, her parents have taken up posts to my right, fielding most of the prying relatives’ questions.

“So, are you a friend from Cassie’s home church?” an older man with patchy, white hair inquires. The term itself is foreign to me.

“No,” Arnold Meadows, Cassie’s father, interjects. “He and Cassie met over business, actually. Andrei’s father is an entrepreneur, you know, very well-traveled man, self-made. Never able to stay put anywhere, so the poor man couldn’t make it, but Andrei’s been handling the business on his behalf here in the States, and well,” Arnold pats me on the back as if I were a nephew or something, “he just fit right into the family!”

The old man seems satisfied, and he and Arnold chat a while as I peer around at the rest of the room, only half paying attention. The lies that roll off her father’s tongue are easy and practiced, like someone who has been lying his entire life. He very likely has, to get to the point where he’s willing to sell off his own child to a stranger at that auction.

I hear the family chattering about who knows who from where, what “denomination” this part of the family has defected to, who’s acted wrongly against whom in the family, and so on. It all sounds remarkably like the kinds of things the Bratva discusses at big, informal meetings, I realize. This whole ceremony has felt a lot like that, with just as many falsehoods being spun.

There was nothing like this back home in Siberia. As a boy growing up in an orphanage, I remember very little interaction with the Orthodox Church, and I rarely heard anything about it. It was simply outside my sphere of life, and as I grew into a man who had to do what he had to to get by, it was almost out of my mind entirely.

Being surrounded by a group of people whose entire life is clearly oriented around this institution is strange, but not incomprehensible. This is all clearly about relations, and as a man nearly bound to the Bratva, it isn’t too unfamiliar.

But this isn’t even like the Churches I know of here in the States. There’s an air of secrecy and deception thick in the air, not just from her father, but from the others as well. They all ask questions expecting a coded lie, and respond in kind.

I turn to my bride, and I find her picking at her food uncomfortably.

“Do you like it?” I ask, and she jumps a little, enraptured in her own world.

“Oh, yes, it’s...it’s good. I think one of my aunts made most of the food.”

An awkward pause lingers between us. I can only imagine the fear that’s binding her, but just as Oskar had promised, she seems intent on pleasing me and all the people around us. I clear my throat before swiftly changing the subject. “So, you know most of these people well, yes?”

Cassie shifts in her seat and looks around, pursing her lips. “Kind of.”

I wait for her to say more, but nothing else comes. She only looks at me for a moment as if she too were waiting for me to say more, but she averts her eyes and takes a drink after half a moment. She’s still shaken up. I can’t blame her, after everything she’s been through in the past few days.

Arnold’s voice catches my ear again, and I glance over at him, catching part of his conversation.

“Oh no doubt,” he’s saying to another man about his age, “a young girl her age can’t be going out to dances like that so late, that’s a ticket to trouble. I’ll bring it up at the next PTA meeting, and I’ll be praying for her in the meantime, brother.”

“You know, I said the same thing to her youth pastor, but these young people just can’t keep their hands off each other, even with chaperones,” the other man says, and I tune out of the conversation, figuring it’s going to go on like this for a while.

I realize I have a level of growing contempt for Cassie’s father. Arnold reminds me of Sergei in too many ways. He’s all smiles around other men who hold the same power as he, but when it comes to handling himself in private, I can smell the brute of a man he really is.