My Mafian Intern

Chapter Two (0.5) [EDITED 05/02/22]

Valentina's Dairy

Fifteen years old.

I vividly remember papa telling me (yes, told me, not ask) that I was going to get married to him. Nikolay Semenov. The man who had a scar down the side of his cheeks, the man who I'd mutter Nikolay Semen every time he'd swear at me for not being able to give him the correct proportion of food whenever he'd visit my papa.

I was fifteen years old when my papa promised my life to someone else, and I didn't even realise that my life had just been signed away. I'll never forgive myself for not releasing soon enough that I was meant to marry that man, because when papa said:

"Nikolay will feed you and clothe you as long as you live in his house and obey his orders. Lo entiendes?"

And silly fifteen-year-old me thought I was going over there to work. Because that's what my papa normally does when he wants peace and quiet in the house from time to time. So, did I truly understand?

Maybe I didn't, but I remember nodding yet I didn't feel happy or excited even. Maybe because something inside of me knew that my papá normally never sends me over to a man's house to work, so this must've been serious if he was sending me there.

But I was fifteen; fifteen and innocent, fifteen with a childhood, fifteen and I shouldn't have known the meaning of bondage by that age.

But my mama used to tell me that no one can ever control fate because it decides itself who it wants to be its next victim.

I didn't understand what she meant by that, so I acted like it was one of those things she says to sound old.

Oh, but Dios, I wished I asked her more about what she meant by that before she died, no, before she was murdered.

It's Felipe's graduation today. I remember when mama was still alive, and she wished my big brother good luck at the start of his internship by buying him a brand-new phone. I also remember sixteen old me being angry at my mamá buying my twenty-five-year-old brother (who was perfectly capable of buying a phone himself) when I had been asking her for a new one for the past two years.

The ceremony had already finished after two long gruesome (and boring) hours, and now finally it was the after-party. Papá didn't let me eat anything before coming to Felipe's graduation and when I asked him why he simply said:

"No man wants a fat virgin. People like virgins, skinny, flexible. Being fat doesn't equal flexibility, Valentina."

I'm not fat. Or I like to think so. I have curves in all the right places, but papá keeps telling me no one likes curves anymore; men like women skinny, not curvy or what he calls 'fat'.

But I knew what he meant by what 'men' like; what men like Nikolay Semen like.

I knew he was going to be here today, he's always where I am—watching me, scrutinising me, or praising me for what I'm wearing. He thinks no one notices but I see that glimmer in his eyes whenever he sees me in dresses (like now). He hasn't been able to stop watching me—and if he were any other man, I'd call that cute, I think I'd throw in a little blush even—but when it's him when it's Nikolay Semenov, I feel nothing but repulsion. Disgust.

I'm seventeen and he's forty-four. I'm a child and he's an adult. This shouldn't be right. Out there—out in the legal world—this isn't right.

And how I wish sometimes I was out there, I know my life has been signed, secured, and passed down in here. In this illegal world that I call hell.