Total pages in book: 31
Estimated words: 28975 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 145(@200wpm)___ 116(@250wpm)___ 97(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28975 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 145(@200wpm)___ 116(@250wpm)___ 97(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”
“This looks good.”
“Then start eating.”
He watched as she picked up a heavily laden cheese fry and stuck it into her mouth. She nodded her head. “It’s good.”
With that, he started to eat his own food.
“I want to kill my father and his whole family,” Anastasia said.
And this did surprise him, but it also delighted him.
Chapter Four
One Week Later
“What is this all about?” Anastasia asked.
“I want to see how good you can shoot.”
They were at his country home, far away from the city house, and he’d lined up several boards and handed her a simple gun. It looked like a Glock to her, not that she was an expert in guns.
“Why do I have to do this?”
“I want to know how good you are. Simple as that.”
Since her request to kill her father, life had gotten a little strange. Well, it might have been strange to her, but maybe that was just like with Bogdan. They went to three additional parties, where she spent all her time at his side. He hadn’t left her to be standing alone in the corner of the room while people pointed.
Bogdan kept her close. She was with him on business trips as well. They went to casinos and this time she got to sit with him while he was in meetings, which had been a new experience. She also got to see Galkin in his home, and they enjoyed a late lunch.
Again, it was no different than how she’d been spending the last few months, and yet it felt different. Each occasion Bogdan kept her close.
“Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?” she asked.
“And what is that?”
“Testing Gustov!” She glared at him. “He was good at what he did.”
“I don’t know. If we were under attack, I’d say you would have been dead long ago.”
“Ha, ha, ha, very funny.” She held the gun within her grasp. It always unnerved her how much she enjoyed holding a gun.
Her mother would often laugh, but it was true. She enjoyed it in her hand, and in that moment, she wondered what it would feel like to point it directly at her father’s head. To have that kind of power. Why hadn’t she thought about that before? There had been many occasions she had the chance to kill her father, her stepbrothers, her stepsisters. All of them. Yet, she hadn’t taken it.
Lifting it now, she looked down the barrel of the gun, and in her mind, she saw her mother’s smiling face. She thought back to the few times they had been together when her father arrived. Looking back now, she saw the difference. The moment of panic and grief. Her mother hated her father, and yet Anastasia hadn’t seen it, and that alone pissed her off. It made her want to kill.
She fired her gun, twice at each target, loving the feel as it blasted out the end. Gustov taught her to be calm when firing a weapon.
Did Bogdan know he would take random items from around the house and force her to use them? In fact, there was one occasion where her mother waited outside, and Gustov, along with several of the soldiers he hired, were meant to form an attack, and she was to choose whichever item was in each room to fend them off.
The attack was over after an hour and a half, and she ended up trashing the whole house. She’d been worried about her mother’s anger at breaking stuff. It turned out that the night before, all valuable possessions had been stored and locked away. Everything she broke and used in self-defense was not valuable.
She trashed the house that day, throwing vases, using pokers, even pens. The soldiers hadn’t held back. They had been able to attack with guns, and it all came to an end right in the bedroom, where Gustov made his final attack, and she pulled his gun out, locked it into place, pointed it at him, and fired. He hadn’t loaded his gun. Otherwise, she would have killed him that day.
Gustov had smiled. To him, she had passed.
Holding the gun out to Bogdan, she waited.
Gustov had stopped randomly attacking her, but that didn’t mean she didn’t stop training. Her mother didn’t seem to mind her randomly going off shooting at targets. She never hunted. Killing live animals was not something she ever wanted to do.
“Not bad,” Bogdan said.
She glanced toward the targets and saw each one had two shots to the head.
“Are we done now?” she asked.
“No, you have to the count of twenty to find yourself a weapon.”
“What?”
“I want to know how you deal in hand-to-hand combat.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“One.”
“Bogdan, come on.”
“Two.”
She had eighteen seconds to make her escape, and the son of a bitch had taken her right to the bottom of the gardens. There was no way she was going to make it to the house where the weapons would be. She didn’t know the grounds well enough to find a garden shed.