The irony wasn’t lost on me even then that the dirty cash from his protection rackets and loan sharking was funding my attempt at a clean life. I found out about her death three days after it happened, when Aleksei showed up at my cramped studio apartment near campus with a bottle of vodka clutched in one hand, a little baby bundle tucked in another, and eyes so red and swollen I barely recognized him.
He’d been crying—something I hadn’t seen since we were children huddled together in whatever shithole apartment Mama could afford that month. The great Aleksei Izotov, already making a name for himself in the underworld, reduced to a broken boy mourning the woman who’d brought us into this world and then spent most of her waking hours trying to escape it through the bottom of a bottle.
“Is
