Tempted by the Mafia Queen

My whole life, I have been trained to be the obedient wife. I have been locked up, treated like I am nothing of importance. A woman needed to know her place. She is nothing but a servant to men, a thing that should been beautiful to look at, but not heard. Most know me as the Russian mafia princess, but I see myself as a survivor. “Have you cleaned your brother’s room yet, Nataliya?” My mother’s soft and timed voice reaches my ears where I am slumped over the servant’s kitchen table. Exhaustion pulls on every muscle, on every nerve. “You know better than to not have the rooms spotless by the time they come back from their duties to ensure that this family is protected. You know how hard they work to keep us in power.” My mother, Mira Barsukov, has always been the soft spoken, graceful woman of the house. Before I came along, she used to be the one to cook, clean and then service my father as if that was the only aspiration she ever had in life. I am nothing like her. I will never be anything like her. It doesn’t matter how many times my father beats me, or how many times my two older brothers lay their hands on me to prepare and train me to please my future husband. I. WILL. NEVER. BE. LIKE. HER. “He can clean his own f*****g room for once.” I let the words slip, my anger building up as I lift my head to look at the woman that gave birth to me and my brothers. Not all of my brothers were bad. Dimitri, my twin brother, the one I shared my mother’s womb with, he was my savior, never my nightmare. Where my older brothers thought they had a right to teach me how to be a woman, my twin had never touched me, had stood up for me time and time again. He didn’t care that it meant he would be beaten, or that my mother would suffer when they couldn’t get a reaction out of him. The only person he ever cared about was me, but he paid with his life in the end. Two years ago, my oldest brother, Vladimir came into my room, ready to teach me another one of his lessons. He was hoping to find me still asleep, but instead, he found Dimitri sitting at the foot of my bed, with a gun in his hand. Dimitri was done with my abuse, was refusing to sit back and watch me get beaten time and time again, sometimes restrained, sometimes not here to stop it in time, but he would force himself to watch every second of my abuse through the cameras that were installed in my room and throughout the house. He had gotten Vladimir to leave that night, but the next morning, I woke up with a box on my nightstand. I was horrified to find a dismembered d**k in it. When I screamed, I heard my father and brothers laughing outside my door. My father came striding into the room, looking at me with glee in his eyes. “Your brother clearly didn’t know how to be a man, so we removed the last thing that made him one. Sadly, he did not survive the dismemberment, but I hope you will at least learn something from this.” My father said, not an ounce of remorse in his voice. I had screamed and raged, but it did nothing, only made my father and brothers laugh harder as I was beaten again and again. They taunted me for months on how my brother had screamed, how he had slowly bled to death and how they had fed what was left of him to the dogs. They thought they had broken me that day, but instead, their worst nightmare was born when my brother died and soon, very soon, they will regret ever laying a hand on him. “Nataliya, please.” The fear in my mother’s voice is what brings me back to the. “In two weeks, you will be free of this house. Your father has found you a match, and you will be free, but you need to do what is expected of you until then. Please don’t make me lose another child.” She says, and I am shocked that she would even bring up my brother, as she hasn’t mentioned him since the day he died. “I will not be free. I will just be switching one cage for another. I will just become you, and I will be very clear with you, Mira, you are pathetic and weak. You think I will let another man touch me? You think I will allow the devil to sell my soul to that old slime? You haven’t been paying attention, mother.” I might be exhausted, but I have earned every ache, ever straining in my muscles. I have ensured to stay just skinny enough that no one would suspect that I train every single night. I have learned to shoot a gun, cut through bone and throw a knife with speed and accuracy that would make a grown man piss himself. For two years I have been training, and tonight, when the clock strikes twelve, I will be taking my own eighteenth birthday gift. Tomorrow I will no longer be the Russian mafia princess of the City of Los Angeles. I will be the motherfucking queen.