Daddy Dearest

Chapter Fifty-Five

Alex

I woke up to a bloody nightmare. Melody was gone. She was taken from the penthouse suite while everyone was knocked out from the gas. 

I asked my mother to call her brother, my Uncle Vanya, to find out if he'd heard anything about this going down. My uncle was Russian Secret Police and went undercover to join the Bratva to topple their father’s organization, but discovered the government was more corrupt than the organizations so he switched sides. Nothing went down in the LA criminal underworld that my Uncle Vanya didn’t know about. Everyone respected and feared him.

I suspected that one of the people following Melody around was Rosa’s older brother. I’d noticed his car around a few times while she and I were out, but I’d see it parked along the sidewalks at school, too. I took down his license plate number and hacked into the DMV to look him up. Just for kicks, I hacked into other systems to find hospital, academic, and criminal records. The guy is clean. It was a little more challenging breaking into the Marine Corp’s database, but I managed it. He’s a decent guy, just a little too obsessed with my girl.

I decided to leave him alone because Rosa is Melody’s friend and he hadn’t technically done anything to harm Melody. She wasn’t even aware of him. He’d had nothing to do with any of the shit happening to her at school. I knew who was doing that.

Violet Rogers. Her brother Teddy is computer savvy and at the night of the dance when those lights from the catwalk nearly crushed Melody, Teddy was the only one who saw a person supposedly go up the catwalk. No one else did. I never told Melody this, but in the tenth grade, Violet had a major crush on me, but I didn’t like her back. She wasn’t my type. I only wanted Melody and since Violet was her friend, I didn’t want to ruin any chances of me and Mel getting together just because I dated her friend. But Violet didn’t take rejection very well.

She left me notes in my locker and texted me naked pictures of herself in explicit poses (I deleted them right away). She’d leave gifts and little creepy letters in my car. I was dating a girl called Alison at the time, who was a high school senior, and she received hateful notes from Violet, too. The crazy bitch manufactured stories about me cheating on Alison in order to get her to hate me. When that didn’t work, she sabotaged the brakes on Alison’s car, which caused her to crash. Thankfully, she survived, but after that she moved to another school to finish her senior year. For university, she applied to colleges in the East Coast and enrolled in one of them.

For a while, Violet stopped and seemed to forget that I existed. That coincided with the arrival of Father Sidney from the Vatican. It seemed she had a new target and I was relieved. I would have destroyed her if I had to, but her father was a cop and things would have gotten sticky. She stopped bothering me and I thought that was it. She had moved on.

I was wrong. When shit started happening to Melody, I suspected Michelle Robinson at first because she was very angry about our breakup and she didn’t like Melody to begin with. Then I found out someone messed up her bike and I suddenly realized it had to be Violet.

As the notes got nastier and the attacks more frequent, I knew I had to do something but I didn’t have solid evidence. I couldn’t go investigate on my own because I was too busy guarding Melody. I thought about sending some of my guys after her-—comrades I made while training in Sistema and aren’t always on the right side of the law-—just to warn her to cut the shit, but decided that would have been overkill.

I can be a bad man, but I'm not evil. Though my mother tried to keep me away from the less savory aspects of our family tree, I am my Uncle Vanya’s favorite and he sees me as the natural heir to his vast criminal enterprise. I've been around violence all my life. I know exactly what Russian gangsters do to people who fuck with them.