She couldn’t help it. She didn’t know what had happened to Nikolai as a child, but she knew it couldn’t be good. And her instincts were telling her that this man walking beside her, the one Indiana hockey fans called Mount Nik, was way more vulnerable than he’d previously let on with his balcony invitation and his bedroom manipulations and his hard stares.
With her heart beating in her throat, she said, “I’m assuming you read all the stuff your lawyer dug up on me?”
A pause, as if he was considering whether to tell her the truth or not. But eventually he answered with a quiet, “Da.”
“Then you know I wasn’t exactly raised in a great situation either. My mom had the potential to be a good parent, but she had zero self-confidence and she was really pretty, which turned out to be a fatal combination. She got involved with some awful guys. My dad was the first of them, and the biggest favor he ever did her was catching his life sentence without possibility of parole while she was pregnant with me.”
Sam thought about the man she’d only known through prison pictures. He’d died in a prison riot when she was ten, but it wasn’t like that really mattered in the grand scheme of things. His imprisonment meant her mother had been given a long enough respite from his violence to give birth to her. But that respite had been brief in her mother’s otherwise permanently stormy sea. After that, she’d never been able to carry a pregnancy to term again.
“After my father, it was one guy after another beating her up. My stepfather was the worst of them, so of course he was the one she married. He got some work in Indianapolis soon after and we followed him to Indiana when I was sixteen.”
“Did he hurt you?” Nikolai asked, his voice a cold wind on a warm night.
“No,” she answered. “He came at me a couple of times, but my mom taught me well. Go and hide when he started drinking, she’d tell me. Remember when I described how I found Pavel hidden in the cabinet that night? That was me all the time. I was like the queen of cowering while my mother was getting hit.”
She let a few beats go by before asking, “Did Slimy Kevin’s fact-finding mission say why I shot my stepfather on my eighteenth birthday?”
He didn’t answer, so it must have. Yet she still felt compelled to explain, to tell him all of it. To make him understand what happened.
“Growing up, I thought my mom was so weak and I got sick of it. All the drama, patching her up after my stepfather was finished. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. When I was seventeen, I met this guy name Anthony… and he felt sorry for me, I guess. He convinced his parents to let me stay with him, just until I finished school. I got a thirty-one on my ACT, so I automatically got a full ride to IU. So it was only supposed to be for a few months.”
Her face darkened, remembering. “It wasn’t the best situation. I felt really ashamed all the time, being around Anthony and his perfect family. All of them acting like Anthony was a saint for dating me and convincing them to let me stay there—which he was. I’m still very grateful someone showed me that kind of compassion. I just… I just wished things were different. I spent a lot of time back then resenting that I’d had to impose on him and his family like that. And I hated my mother for putting me in that position.”
She sighed thinking of how judgmental she’d been before getting her degree in psychology, before she’d been able to understand something had happened to her mother to make her think these were the only kinds of relationship she deserved. But Sam pushed through her personal shame to continue with the story.
“My mom called me on my birthday, begging me to come over to eat my cake. She always made me a German chocolate cake on my birthday. I can still remember her limping around a few times while she was making it, but she always did it, no matter what. I told her not to bother, but she begged me to come over. Begged me. I still can’t believe I made her beg…”
Sam had to pause while another wave of shame knocked her around. “But eventually, she wore me down. I agreed to come. I only planned to stay for a few minutes. One slice of cake I told myself…”
The memories choked her up, clogging her throat with tears. She stopped.
“Tell me rest.” Nikolai’s voice was quiet, but strong in its command.
She had to finish the story. Not just for him, but for herself. Sam took a deep breath, made herself calm down “So yeah, when I got off the bus, I took a detour to my favorite neighborhood sub shop. Ate a whole twelve-inch meatball grinder so I’d be nice and full when I got to my mother’s and wouldn’t have to stay too long. If I hadn’t stopped to do that, maybe I would have gotten there in time, but I did and when I came through the door, my stepfather was standing over her body with a knife.”
The image of her mother lying on the floor, her beautiful face frozen in a rictus of terror, like she’d known this would be the last beating, the one that ended her—that image came back to her like a perfectly preserved movie scene. So much blood…
“I know the statistics now,” Sam said, gritting her teeth against the pain of the memory. “I know physically abusive relationships often escalate to murder. That forty-percent of murdered women worldwide are killed by their partners. That many women like my mother don’t think they’re deserving of good relationships, and their spouses alienate them from everyone they know, make them feel worthless, like they’re all alone… so they don’t seek help.”
Sam shook her head. “But back then, I didn’t take the violence seriously. It was just this big thorn in my side, something I imagined my mom enduring for the rest of her life, because she was too dumb and weak to leave my stepfather. So I did the worst possible thing. I left her alone. I was her last resource and I left her alone with him. Made her beg me to come home.”
Sam’s voice cracked, as regret over her ignorance flared anew inside her chest. It took a few more shallow breaths before she was able to talk again. “Anyway, they didn’t live in a great neighborhood and like a lot of people, my stepfather kept a gun in their apartment. Near the door, in fact, so it was easy…”
Sam grimaced. “I don’t remember much, just being angry, and then the gun was going off, and I guess I was a better shot than expected, because the bullet hit him in the face.”
Sam wrapped Nikolai’s jacket tighter around herself, suddenly cold. “So that’s how I ended up getting tried for murder. Because technically, he’d already killed her. There was no reason for me to kill him. Even my boyfriend couldn’t deal with that. He visited me once in juvie to say he was sorry but his parents didn’t think he was equipped to continue associating with somebody who had my kind of issues. He made it real obvious he thought I was a nut job for killing my stepfather,” Sam thought of her stepfather’s prediction when she moved out to live with Anthony. “Too much trouble for a piece of ass, I guess.”