Stolen Heir: Chapter 1

Ten Years Ago

On my way home from work, I stop and buy a bag of fresh chrusciki for Anna. Little spots of grease seep through the paper bag from the egg and cream pastries, dusted with powdered sugar to suit their name of “Angel Wings.” She’s writing her university entrance exams today. I already know we’ll have something to celebrate. Anna is brilliant. I’m sure she’ll pass with top marks.

We may be twins, but you’d never guess it. She has brown hair, while I’m blond as corn silk. She devours every book she can get her hands on, while I left school at fourteen.

I didn’t have much choice about that. Someone had to pay the rent on our dismal little flat.

Our father had a good job at the Huta Warszawa Steel Works. He was a maintenance technician, bringing home a salary of almost six thousand zloty a month. Enough to keep us all in new shoes with a full fridge.

Until he was cooked like a lobster in a pot while working on a blast furnace. He isn’t dead. Just so badly burned that he can barely work the buttons on the remote while he watches television all day long, holed up in his room.

Our mother left. I heard she married an accountant and moved to Krakow. I haven’t heard from her since.

It doesn’t matter. I make enough at the deli to keep us going for now. Someday Anna will be a professor of literature. Then we’ll buy a little house, somewhere other than here.

We’ve lived our whole lives in the Praga District, on the right bank of the Vistula River. Across the water, you can see the prosperous centers of business and finance. We live in a slum. Tall, rectangular, filthy brick buildings blocking out the sun. Empty factories from the communist era, when this was the center of state-run industry. Now their windows are smashed and doors chained shut. Addicts break in to sleep on piles of rags, injecting themselves with flesh-rotting Russian krokodil.

Anna and I will have a proper house with a garden, and nobody above or below us, banging and shouting at all hours of the night.

I don’t expect my sister home for several hours, so when I open the door to our flat and spot her school bag on the floor, I’m confused and surprised.

Anna is scrupulously tidy. She doesn’t dump her backpack on the floor, letting the books spill out. Some of her textbooks are muddy and wet. The same with her shoes, abandoned next to the bag.

I can hear water running in the bathroom. Also strange—Anna doesn’t shower at night.

I drop the bag of pastries on the kitchen table and run to our one and only bathroom. I knock on the door, calling out for my sister.

There’s no answer.

When I press my ear against the door, I hear her sobbing over the sound of the shower.

I ram my shoulder against the door, hearing the cheap wood splinter as the lock gives way. I force myself into the tiny bathroom.

Anna is sitting down in the shower, still wearing her school clothes. Her blouse is almost torn off her body. The thin material only clings to her arms and waist.

She’s covered in cuts and welts—all over her shoulders, arms, and back. I see dark bruises around her neck and the tops of her breasts. Even what looks like bite marks.

Her face is worse. She has a long gash down her right cheek, and a black eye. Blood leaks from her nose, dripping down into the water pooled around her legs, diffusing like watercolor paint.

She can’t look at me. After the first glance up, she buries her face in her arms, sobbing.

“Who did this to you?” I demand, my voice shaking.

She presses her lips together and shakes her head, not wanting to tell me.

It isn’t true that twins can read each other’s minds. But I do know my sister. I know her very well.

And I know who did this. I’ve seen the way they look at her, whenever she leaves our flat to go to school. I see them leaning against their expensive cars, arms folded, their sunglasses failing to conceal how they leer at her. Sometimes they even shout things at her, though she never turns her head or answers.

It was the Braterstwo. The Polish Mafia.

They think they can have whatever they want—expensive watches, gold chains, phones that cost more than I make in a month. Apparently, they decided that they wanted my sister.

She doesn’t want to tell me, because she’s afraid of what will happen.

I grab her by the shoulder and make her look at me.

Her eyes are red, swollen, terrified.

“Which ones did it?” I hiss. “The one with the shaved head?”

She hesitates, then nods.

“The one with the dark beard?”

Another nod.

“The one with the leather jacket?”

Her face crumples up.

He’s the ringleader. I’ve seen how the others defer to him. I’ve seen how he stares at Anna most of all.

“I’ll get them, Anna. Every last one of them will pay,” I promise her.

Anna shakes her head, silent tears sliding down her battered cheeks.

“No, Miko,” she sobs. “They’ll kill you.”

“Not if I kill them first,” I say grimly.

I leave her there in the shower. I go into my bedroom and pry up the floorboard, under which I’ve hidden my metal lockbox. It has all my savings in it—the money intended to send Anna to school. She missed her exams. She won’t be going this year.

I fold the bills into a wad and stuff them in my pocket. Then I leave the flat, running through the rain over to the pawnshop on Brzeska Street.

Jakub sits behind the counter, as he always does, reading a paperback with one half of its cover torn off. Stoop-shouldered, balding, with coke-bottle glasses in thick plastic frames, Jakub blinks at me like an owl that woke up too early.

“How can I help you, Mikolaj?” he says in his raspy voice.

“I need a gun,” I tell him.

He gives a hoarse chuckle.

“That would be illegal, my boy. What about a guitar, or an Xbox instead?”

I fling the wad of bills down on his countertop.

“Cut the shit,” I tell him. “Show me what you have.”

He looks down at the money, not touching it. Then, after a moment, he comes out from around the counter, shuffling over to the front door. He turns the latch, locking it. Then he shuffles toward the back.

“This way,” he says, without turning his head.

I follow him into the back of the store. This is where he lives—I see an old couch with stuffing coming out of the holes in the upholstery. A square television set. A tiny kitchen with a hot plate, which smells of burned coffee and cigarettes.

Jakub leads me over to a chest of drawers. He pulls open the top drawer, revealing a small selection of handguns.

“Which one do you want?” he says.

I don’t know anything about guns. I’ve never held one in my life.

I look at the jumble of weapons: some carbon, some steel, some sleek, some practically ancient.

One is all black, medium in size, modern and simple looking. It reminds me of the gun James Bond carries. I pick it up, surprised by how heavy it is in my hand.

“That’s a Glock,” Jakub says.

“I know,” I reply, though I actually don’t.

“It’s a .45. You need ammo, too?” he says.

“And a knife,” I tell him.

I see the look of amusement on his face. He thinks I’m playing commando. It doesn’t matter—I don’t want him to take me seriously. I don’t want him warning anyone.

He gives me a Leatherneck Combat Knife in a polymer sheath. He shows me how to grip the sheath to pull the blade free, as if he’s demonstrating for a child.

He doesn’t ask what I want it for. He doesn’t offer any change, either.

I hide my weapons under my clothes and hurry back to the flat.

I intend to check in on Anna before I track down those walking corpses who dared to put their hands on my sister.

When I unlock the front door once more, I feel a strange chill creep down my spine.

I don’t know what it is, exactly. Everything looks the same as before—the backpack is in the same spot in the hallway, my sister’s sneakers right next to it. I can still hear the low chatter of the television in my father’s room, a sound that runs day and night in our apartment. I can even see its blue light leaking out from under his door.

But I don’t hear the shower running anymore. And I don’t hear my sister. I hope that means she’s resting in her room.

That’s what I expect. I expect her to be laying in her bed under the covers. Hopefully asleep.

Yet, as I pass the bathroom door on my way to check on her, I hesitate.

There’s a small sound coming from within.

A steady dripping noise. Like a faucet not quite turned off.

The door is ajar—I splintered the frame, forcing my way inside the first time. Now it won’t close all the way.

I push the door open, the bright fluorescent light momentarily dazzling my eyes.

My sister is laying in the bathtub, staring up at the ceiling.

Her eyes are wide and fixed, utterly dead. Her face looks paler than chalk.

One arm dangles over the side of the tub. A long gash runs from wrist to elbow, open like a garish smile.

The floor is coated in blood. It runs from the tub all the way up to the edge of the tiles, right up to my feet. If I take a single step inside, I’ll be walking on it.

Somehow, that paralyzes me. I want to run to Anna, but I don’t want to walk through her blood. Foolishly, insanely, I feel like that would hurt her. Even though she’s plainly dead.

Yet I have to go to her. I have to close her eyes. I can’t stand the way she’s staring up at the ceiling. There’s no peace in her face—she looks just as terrified as she did before.

Stomach rolling and chest burning, I run over to her, my feet sliding on the slick tile. I gently lift her arm, putting it back inside the tub with her. Her skin is still warm, and for a second, I think there might be hope. Then I look at her face again, and I know how stupid I really am. I put my hand over her face to close her eyes.

Then I go into her room. I find her favorite blanket—the one with the moons and stars on it. I bring it into the bathroom, and I cover her body with it. There’s water in the tub. It soaks the blanket. It doesn’t matter—I just want to cover her, so no one else can look at her. Not anymore.

Then I go back in my own room. I sit on the floor, next to the empty cash box, that I haven’t yet returned to its hiding place under the floorboards.

I’m feeling a depth of guilt and sorrow that is unbearable. I literally can’t bear it. I feel like it’s tearing away pieces of my flesh, pound by pound, until I’ll be nothing but a skeleton—bare-bones, without muscle, nerve, or heart.

That heart is calcifying inside of me. When I first saw Anna’s body, it beat so hard that I thought it would burst. Now it’s contracting slower and slower, weaker and weaker. Until it will stop entirely.

I’ve never spent one whole day away from my sister.

She’s been my closest friend, the only person I truly cared about.

Anna is better than me in every way. She’s smarter, kinder, happier.

I often felt that when we formed in the womb, our characteristics were split in two parts. She got the better part of us, but as long as she was close by, we could share her goodness. Now she’s gone, and all that light has gone with her.

All that’s left are the qualities that lived in me: focus. Determination. And rage.

It’s my fault she’s dead, that much is obvious. I should have stayed here with her. I should have watched her, cared for her. That’s what she would have done.

I’ll never forgive myself for that mistake.

But if I allow myself to feel the guilt, I’ll put that gun to my head and end it all right now. I can’t let that happen. I have to avenge Anna. I promised her that.

I take every ounce of emotion remaining, and I lock it deep down inside myself. By sheer force of will, I refuse to feel anything. Anything at all.

All that’s left is my one objective.

I don’t execute it at once. If I try, I’ll get myself killed, without achieving my goal.

Instead, I spend the next few weeks stalking my prey. I find out where they work. Where they live. Which strip clubs and restaurants and nightclubs and brothels they frequent.

Their names are Abel Nowak, Bartek Adamowicz, and Iwan Zielinski. Abel is the youngest. He’s tall, lanky, sickly-looking, with a shaved head—a nod to his neo-Nazi ideology. He went to the same school as me, once upon a time, two years ahead of me.

Bartek has a thick, black beard. He appears to be in charge of the prostitutes in my neighborhood, because he’s always lurking on the corner at night, making sure the girls hand their earnings over to him without giving away so much as a free conversation to the men seeking their company.

Iwan is the boss of all three. Or the sub-boss, I should say. I know who sits above him. I don’t care. Those three will pay for what they did. And it won’t be quick, or painless.

I track down Abel first. That’s easy to do, because he frequents the Piwo Klub, as do several of our mutual friends. I find him sitting at the bar, laughing and drinking, while my sister has been laying in the ground for seventeen days.

I watch him get drunker and drunker.

Then I stick a scribbled sign to the bathroom door: Zepsuta Toaleta. Broken Toilet.

I wait in the alleyway. Ten minutes later, Abel comes out to take a leak. He unbuttons his tight jeans, aiming his stream of piss against the brick wall.

He has no hair to grab hold of, so I wrap my forearm around his forehead and jerk his head back. I cut his throat from ear to ear.

The combat knife is sharp, but still I’m surprised how hard I have to saw to make the cut. Abel tries to scream. It’s impossible—I’ve severed his vocal cords, and blood is flooding down his throat. He only makes a strangled gurgling sound.

I let him fall to the filthy concrete, laying on his back so he can look up at my face.

“That’s for Anna, you diseased prick,” I tell him.

I spit in his face.

Then I leave him there, still writhing and drowning in his own blood.

I go home to my apartment. I sit in Anna’s room, on her bed, which has been stripped down to the mattress. I see her favorite books on the shelf next to her bed, their spines creased, because she read them over and over again. The Little Prince, The Bell Jar, Anna Karenina, Persuasion, The Hobbit, Anne of Green Gables, Alice in Wonderland, The Good Earth. I look around at the postcards pinned to her walls—the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal. Places she dreamed of visiting that she’ll never see now.

I just killed a man. I should feel something: guilt, horror. Or, at the very least, a sense of justice. But I feel nothing. I’m a black hole inside. I can take in anything, without any emotion escaping.

I had no fear as I approached Abel. If my heart won’t beat over that, it won’t beat for anything.

One week later, I go after Bartek. I doubt he’ll be expecting me—Abel has too many enemies for them to guess who might have killed him. They probably won’t think of my sister at all. I doubt she’s the first girl the Braterstwo attacked. And I haven’t breathed a word to anyone of my desire for revenge.

I follow Bartek to his girlfriend’s flat. From what I hear, she used to work the street corner herself, before being upgraded to his mistress. I buy a red cap and a pizza, then I knock on her door.

Bartek opens it, shirtless and lazy, smelling like sex.

“We didn’t order any pizza,” he grunts, about to shut the door in my face.

“Well, I can’t take it back,” I tell him. “So you might as well keep it.”

I hold up the box, wafting its tantalizing scent of pepperoni and cheese.

Bartek looks at it, tempted.

“I’m not paying for it,” he warns me.

“That’s fine.”

I hold it out to him, looking him right in the eye. He doesn’t show the slightest sign of recognition. He’s probably forgotten about Anna already, let alone wondered if she had a brother.

As soon as his hands are full of the pizza box, I pull my gun and shoot him three times in the chest. He drops to his knees, his face comically surprised.

Once his bulk is out of the way, I realize that his girlfriend was standing directly behind him. She’s short, blonde, and curvy, wearing cheap lace lingerie. She claps a hand to her mouth, about to scream.

She’s already seen my face.

I shoot her too, without hesitation.

She tumbles over. I don’t have a glance to spare for her. I’m looking down at Bartek, watching the color fade from his skin as he bleeds out on the floor. I must have hit his lungs, because his breath has a whistling sound.

I spit on him, too, before turning and walking away.

Maybe I shouldn’t have left Iwan for last. He might be the most difficult. If he’s at all intelligent, he’ll put two and two together, and guess that someone has a grudge.

But that’s the only way I can do it—the only way I can feel the full weight of catharsis.

So I wait two more weeks, searching for him.

Sure enough, he’s laying low. Like an animal, he senses that someone is hunting him, even if he doesn’t know exactly who.

He surrounds himself with other gangsters. He’s always watching as he goes in and out of his flash car, as he takes his tribute from the low-level dealers of the neighborhood.

I’m watching, too. I’m only sixteen years old. I’m skinny, half-grown, wearing my deli apron under my coat. I look like every other kid in Praga—poor, underfed, pale from lack of sunlight. I’m a nobody to him. Just like Anna was. He would never suspect me.

Finally, I spot him leaving his apartment alone. He’s carrying a black duffel bag. I don’t know what’s in the bag, but I’m afraid he might be planning to leave town.

I chase after him, impatient and a little reckless. It’s been forty-one days since Anna died. Each one has been an agony of emptiness. Missing the only person who meant anything to me. The only spot of brightness in my shit life.

I watch Iwan walking ahead of me, trim in his black leather jacket. He’s not an ugly man. In fact, most women would probably consider him handsome—dark hair, constant five o’clock shadow, square jaw. Eyes just a little too close together. With his money and connections, I’m sure he never lacks for female attention.

I’ve watched him enter and leave nightclubs with girls on his arm. Brothels, too. He didn’t attack my sister for sex. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to torment her.

Iwan cuts through an alleyway, then enters the back of a derelict building, via an unlocked metal door. I lurk in the alley to see if he’ll reemerge. He does not.

I should wait. That’s what I’ve been doing.

But I’m tired of waiting. This ends tonight.

I crack open the door and slip inside. It’s dark in the warehouse. I hear the distant dripping sound of a leaky roof. It smells dank and moldy. The air is at least ten degrees colder than outside.

The warehouse is full of the skeletal remains of rusted equipment. It might have been a textile factory once, or light assembly. It’s difficult to tell in the gloom. I don’t see Iwan anywhere.

Nor do I see the person who hits me from behind.

Blinding pain explodes in the back of my skull. I fall forward onto my hands and knees. The light snaps on, and I realize I’m surrounded by a half-dozen men. Iwan is at the forefront, still carrying his duffle bag. He drops it on the ground next to him.

I’m hauled to my feet by two other men, my arms pinned behind my back. They search me roughly, finding the gun. They hand it to Iwan.

“Were you planning to shoot me in the back with this?” he snarls.

Holding the gun by the barrel, he cracks me across the jaw with the stock. The pain is explosive. I taste blood in my mouth. One of my teeth feels loose.

I’m probably about to die. Yet I don’t feel afraid. I’m probably about to die. All I can feel is rage that I won’t be able to kill Iwan first.

“Who do you work for?” Iwan demands. “Who sent you?”

I spit a mouthful of blood onto the ground, spattering his shoe. Iwan bares his teeth and raises the gun to hit me again.

“Wait,” a gravelly voice says.

A man steps forward. He’s maybe fifty years old, medium height, pale eyes, deep pitted scars on the sides of his face—as if he were hit with buckshot, or had severe acne at one point in his life. The moment he speaks, every eye in the room is fixed on him, with an expectant silence that shows that he’s the real boss here, not Iwan Zielinski.

“Do you know who I am?” he says to me.

I nod my head.

This is Tymon Zajac. More commonly known as Rzeźnik—the Butcher. I didn’t know for certain that Iwan worked for him, but I could have guessed it. In Warsaw, all lines flow toward the Butcher.

He stands in front of me, eye to eye—his bleached of color by age, and perhaps all the things they’ve seen. They cut into me.

I don’t drop my gaze. I feel no fear. I don’t care what this man does to me.

“How old are you, boy?” he says.

“Sixteen,” I reply.

“Who do you work for?”

“I work at Delikatesy Świeży. I make sandwiches and clean the tables.”

His mouth tightens. He gives me a hard stare as he tries to determine if I’m joking.

“You work at the deli.”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill Nowak and Adamowicz?”

“Yes,” I say unflinchingly.

Again, he’s surprised. He didn’t expect me to admit it.

“Who helped you?” he says.

“No one.”

Now he does look angry. He turns his fury on his own men. He says, “A busboy stalked and killed two of my soldiers, all on his own?”

It’s a rhetorical question. No one dares answer.

He faces me once more.

“You meant to kill Zielinski tonight?”

“Yes.” I nod.

“Why?”

There’s the slightest flicker of fear on Iwan’s broad face. “Boss, why are we—” he starts.

Zajac holds up a hand to silence him.

His eyes are still fixed on me, waiting for my response.

My mouth is swollen from the blow of the gun, but I speak my words clearly.

“Your men raped my sister, on her way to write her university entrance exams. She was sixteen years old. She was a good girl—kind, gentle, innocent. She wasn’t part of your world. There was no reason to hurt her.”

Zajac’s eyes narrow.

“If you wanted restitution—”

“There is no restitution,” I say bitterly. “She killed herself.”

There’s no sympathy in Zajac’s pale eyes—only calculation. He weighs my words, considering the situation.

Then he looks at Iwan once more.

“Is this true?” he says.

Iwan licks his lips, hesitating. I can see his struggle between his desire to lie, and his fear of his boss. At last he says, “It wasn’t my fault. She—”

The Butcher shoots him right between the eyes. The bullet disappears into Iwan’s skull, leaving a dark, round hole between his eyebrows. His eyes roll back, and he falls to his knees, before toppling over.

A carousel of thoughts spin around in my head. First, relief that Anna’s revenge is complete. Second, disappointment that it was Zajac and not me who pulled the trigger. Third, the realization that it’s my turn to die. Fourth, the understanding that I don’t care. Not even a little bit.

“Thank you,” I say to the Butcher.

He looks me up and down, head to toe. He takes in my torn jeans, my filthy sneakers, my unwashed hair, my lanky frame. He sighs.

“What do you make at the deli?” he says.

“Eight hundred zloty a week,” I say.

He lets out a wheezing sigh—the closest thing to a laugh I’ll ever hear him make.

“You don’t work there anymore,” he says. “You work for me now. Understand?”

I don’t understand at all. But I nod my head.

“Still,” he says grimly. “You killed two of my men. That can’t go unpunished.”

He nods his head toward one of his soldiers. The man unzips the duffle bag lying next to Iwan’s body. He pulls out a machete as long as my arm. The blade is dark with age, but the edge has been sharpened razor fine. The soldier hands the machete to his boss.

The Butcher walks over to an old work table. The top is splintered and it’s missing a leg, but it still stands upright.

“Hold out your hand,” he tells me.

His men have let go of my arms. I’m free to walk over to the table. Free to put my hand down flat on its surface, fingers spread wide.

I feel a strange sense of unreality, like I’m watching myself do this from three feet outside my body.

Zajac raises the cleaver. He brings it whistling down, splitting my pinky in half, right below the first knuckle. This hurts less than the blow from the gun. It only burns, like I dipped my fingertip in flame.

Zajac picks up the little piece of flesh that was once attached to my body. He throws it on top of Iwan’s corpse.

“There,” he says. “All debts are paid.”