Natalia POV

I decided on a dark purple knee length dress with black flats, pairing well with my black purse and silver jewellery. My blonde curls were pulled up into a bun with loose curls framing my face. I pulled on my glasses, the thick frames crowing my vision for the first few minutes until I got used to them.

I had barely gotten enough time to get ready when there was a knock at my door. The apartment was small, so it only took me a few seconds to go from my bedroom at the back of the apartment through the living room and kitchen to the front door, where I knew a certain detective would be waiting for his date.

I opened the door, whilst putting on my earrings, and giving the man on the other side a bright grin.

I mentally reminded myself to keep my accent away for the rest of the night.

‘Hi Detective,’ I smiled at the man, who looked quite handsome in dark pants paired with a light blue button up, covered partially by his dark jacket. His short hair was styled nicely and I could smell his cologne from the short distance between us.

The detective cleaned up well.

‘Call me Dexter,’ he corrected, a smile plastered to his face ‘You look beautiful Natalie’

‘Thank-you Dexter,’ I blushed, grabbing my purse and walking towards him, locking the door as I went.

‘So, where are we going tonight Dexter?’ I asked the man, who gave me a sly smile.

‘It’s a secret.'

‘A secret?’

‘You’ve never heard of a secret?’ He laughed and I couldn’t help but smile.

We walked down the hallway and strolled down the stairs, casual conversation flowing between us as we went.

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‘What is this place?’ I asked, bewildered.

We had just gotten out of his car after driving for about twenty minutes.

He parked in a small car park and started walking towards the large building before us.

The building looked to be some sort of store or warehouse from this angle, its dark brick walls making it hard to identify.

We walked through the back door and I was instantly hit by bright lights and loud noises, a few seconds later I realised that I was standing in a kitchen, where a group of people where cooking in large pots over industrial sized hotplates.  

One man, an older man with dark skin, looked up and saw us, a big smile instantly being transformed onto his features, directed at the man standing next to me.

‘Dexter!’ He greeted, walking over and pulling the other man into a fast hug. He then turned his attention onto me, ‘You must be Natalie! Dexter here told me that you two would be stopping by’

I smiled at the man, then shot Dexter a confused look.

Where was I?

This was not an ordinary restaurant.

‘Here,’ Dexter said, handing me an apron.

He laughed at my confused expression.

‘This is the Chicago soup kitchen, I help out here every Friday night, and since you’re with me tonight, how do you feel about helping out?’

The real me was screaming that I would rather die, but since Natalie was a ‘good girl’ I just smiled and replied, ‘Sounds great’, before grabbing the apron and pulling it over my head.

‘We can go somewhere else after this, but we can just stay here for an hour?’

‘Yeah sure,' I smiled a fake smile and the older man came over to us and gave us some jobs to do.

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Well it seems that I was back to my high school job, except this time I wasn’t getting paid and this wasn’t a five star restaurant, this was some beaten down soup kitchen in a pretty sketchy area of Chicago.

I just wanted to leave here, it was dirty and the people here are not the kinds of people I unusually associated with.

I was given the job of clearing tables, as I walked around one of the tables I passed a small family. The woman was sitting on one of the chairs, a toddler in her lap and a small child, probably around four or five next to her, the child’s hair in messy curls, a small pink bow clipped into the side. There was a teenager, she looked barley thirteen, who was sitting on the other side of the mother, staring off into the distance. The four girls all shared the same blonde hair and pale skin, but the young child wasn’t laughing or smiling like you would expect a young girl to act, instead she was staring intently at her empty bowl. Her mother fussing over the baby in her lap.

I reached out to get the empty bowl from in front of the young girl when she jerked away from me, a terrified look in her young eyes.

‘Are you ok?’ I asked her.

The small girl seemed to be even more scared of my voice and hugged tighter into her mother’s side, bawling up the side of her faded skirt in her small hand. The mother looked up at me, showing the purple and green bruise that was covering the side of her jaw and eye. There was a cut on her forehead which left a small trail of blood down to her eyebrow.

‘I’m sorry about her,’ The mother said in a soft voice, meeting my eyes for a second before turning them back to the baby in her lap.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked the mother, taking a seat where the young girl had been ‘That cut looks pretty bad’

‘Oh, uh, I’m fine,’ she told me, the lie obvious in her soft voice.

What had happened to this woman? I wanted to help her and I decided that I could, remembering the first aid kit I had seen in the other room.

‘Can I get the first aid kit and clean that up for you?’ I asked her and she looked at me, surprise held in her expression.

She nodded hesitantly, ‘Can you come with me?’ I asked.

She handed the baby girl to the teenager before kissing the child on the head and following me to the side room which veered off before the kitchen.

I motioned for her to sit on one of the two chairs in the small, faded white storage room. She did and I grabbed the first aid kit, sitting on the adjacent chair.

I had learned first aid as a child, when my older brothers would come home in cuts and bruises. We had a nurse on retainer who would fix them up, and she had spent time teaching me the basics, and I had needed them on numerous occasions. My brothers did dangerous work and would regularly come to me for simple treatments, needing to avoid hospital records when possible.

I grabbed what I needed from the kit and got to work on her cut.  I noticed the beaten up state of not only her clothes but her body. Bruises followed down her arms and shallow cuts peaked out from the neckline of her faded blue dress.

‘You probably think I’m stupid,’ she told me, looking at the floor after a few minutes of silence.

‘Why would I think that?’ I asked quietly.

‘I go back to the same man every time, I went back a few days ago and this happened again, so I end up here, but tomorrow I’ll be back with him,’ she sighed and I saw the pain in her eyes.

‘Why do you go back to him?’ I asked gently, wiping blood from her eyebrow.

‘Where else can I go?’ she asked defeated, a tear falling from her brown eyes ‘I have three children and no money, I have no choice.’

I was shocked. I had never met somebody in this situation but I wanted to help her. I couldn’t though, I was Natalie, the simple girl with not much, I wasn’t Natalia, heiress to millions.

She took my silence for an absence of an answer and nodded to me ‘I don’t expect you to understand or give me answers. I am very grateful for your kindnesses.’

After a minute of silence I told her that I was finished with the cut and she thanked me before saying, ‘My daughter, she’s six, the one with the curls, she has a cut on her arm, could you look at it?’

The child was six.

That poor child.

That child was in danger and what? I was just going to do nothing to protect a ‘cover’, what sort of person did that make me?

Someone that my father raised, someone as committed as my brothers, I thought.

This one time, I decided that I needed to put this child before my cover, I could help and I wanted too.

I nodded and she left to bring the child in.

I grabbed my purse and came back to the room before they arrived. I opened my purse to find seven hundred dollars, which I took out and put into my pocket along with a blank card before placing my purse near the door. I found a pen and scribbled the number of one of my father’s associates on it, who I knew would be able to help her after one call from me.

The child walked through the door, her small hand clasping her mother’s dress tightly.

The mother sat on the chair, placing the girl on her lap. The child just looked at me, fear evident in her big brown eyes.

‘Hi, My names Natalie,’ I told the child.

She looked at her mother before uttering ‘Lara.’

‘Hi Lara, can I have a look at your arm?’

She hesitantly complied, lifting her small arm towards me.

The cut wasn’t too big, she wouldn’t need stitches, but it was in danger of becoming infected. I cleaned it out as best I could and put a bandage over the top.

‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’

She sent me a small smile, and I took that as a victory. The first smile I had seen the child wear that night.

As they were leaving the room I caught the arm of the woman and put the money in her hand. She looked at it and gave me a shocked look.

‘Get your children out of that house permanently,’ I told the shocked woman ‘There’s a card in there with a number, call it tomorrow and I will make sure that they can help you out.'  

It took a few more seconds before she registered what I had said, ‘This is too much, I can’t take it.’

‘Just look after your girls,’ I told her and she threw me into a hug. When she pulled away I noticed the big smile plastered on her face and she instantly looked years younger. She walked back to the table and I stood in the entrance, just looking at them, before a figure appeared next to me.

‘I have never seen that woman that happy, she is here quite often yet I have never seen anyone be able to make her smile like that.’

I just smiled at him, a real, genuine smile.

‘Thank-you,’ He told me, kindness and gratitude showing in his deep eyes.

‘For what?’ I questioned him.

‘Whatever you did to make her day.’

I just grinned and watched the family leave the restaurant. I had helped people. Me.

It was strange, I had learnt about self-preservation from a young age, learning to put yourself and your own people first, that the company was worth more than single lives, yet this contradicted that. 

I had been soft, but for good cause, and even if my brother and father disapproved, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. I helped those children. There was nothing worth more to me than that.

‘Do you want to go now?’ He asked and I shook my head.

‘Why don’t we eat here and then get back to helping.’

I didn’t miss the surprise on his face before he nodded, leading me to get some food.

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‘Why did you decide to volunteer here?’ I asked him as we sat and ate our meals.

‘My family were quite poor growing up and when my mother died we struggled. Soup kitchens and the help of others were the only thing that kept my family together all those years,’ he told me, sadness held in the corner of his eyes.

I noticed the similarities in our stories, both lost mothers. I wondered how I would have turned out if my father didn’t have money, if we had been forced into similar circumstances. Even when my father was in prison when we were growing up, there had always been someone to look after us until his return. I had lived a life of privilege and even though I had lived through hard times, I couldn’t image what Dexter must have gone through as a child.

I had the urge to tell him I understood what I was like to lose a parent, but Natalie hadn’t, they were in Florida, so I just nodded and continued on with my meal.

This guy was nice.

I don’t think that I had ever met a man who was as genuine and kind as Dexter.

I started to lose the will to bring him down.

If I brought him down, then the charity work would stop, the criminals would stay on the streets and where would that leave me? Would I be doing more harm than good?

Wait.

‘The criminals stay on the streets.’

That was the point. Those criminals were my family.

Oleg. Papa. Leo.

The crimes they committed was to keep us safe and to keep us off the streets.

‘Are you alright Natalie?’

Dexter pulled me from my thoughts, ‘Oh, yeah I’m fine.’

‘Ok’ he said, but the concern in his bright eyes didn’t waver.

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I tried to remind myself of why I was doing what I was doing, but there was a little voice in my head that wouldn’t be silenced. It was telling me that maybe it would be better to let them take my father down, to stop the crime.

Those girls who were recruited for prostitution, those girls my father smuggled into the country, would they have been better off with my father in prison?

I thought about Lara. What sort of life did she have ahead of her? Would it be better without my father free?

What’s happening to me?

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That night I didn’t sleep a wink.

I tossed and turned all night.

Nightmares and scenarios chasing me around my mind.