Chapter Text
“A thousand miles and poles apart. Where worlds collide and days are dark. You may have my number, you can take my name, but you'll never have my heart.”
As the door closed, Tara made sure all the layers were secure. Jax could not believe his eyes as she was opened the closet door and revealed a weapons depot.
“Jesus Christ, Tara. What the fuck is going on here?! One minute we’re making love and the next you’re standing here looking a beautiful fairy tale princess and the next you’re a Bond girl. I don’t know if I should make love to you, capture you, or both.”
Tara pinched the bridge of her nose trying sort out how she was going to drop this bomb. “Jax, we are safe here for now until the Irish get here so I can tell you exactly what’s going on.”
“THE IRISH? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?”
Jax sat down on the bed in the room which he finally realized was decorated like some kind of Eastern European palace bedroom.
”CALM DOWN. The Irish that took Abel are not the Irish that are coming here. The ones that coming are Fenian Irish and have come to protect me from the Russians.”
Jax looked at her like she had three heads and at that point she felt like she did too.
“Here is the story. Since the Russians are here, we will start with their reasons for wanting me.”
Tara pulled an album out of the trunk at the foot of the bed. It had Cyrillic gold leaf script on it and she opened it.
This story involves pictures that can be seen in the Ao3 version.
“The first picture is my grandmother in Ukraine in 1917 when she was fourteen years old.”
Jax interrupted, ”Holy shit that is YOU.”
Tara looked at him, “Yes, but no. That’s part of the story, now pay attention.”
“My grandmother was a peasant from a village outside of Kiev. When WWI broke out, Russia was also involved in their own civil war. The Bolshevik Reds versus the White Russians, supporters of the Czar.” She paused to make sure he was following.
“So in the middle of all of this, she left her village to study ballet on a scholarship in Kiev. While she was there she joined up with the Ukrainian dissidents opposed to the Bolsheviks. They aligned themselves with the White Russians hoping that the monarchy would prevail.
Plot twist: It didn’t.
They had to get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak. She was in love with another dissident who eventually became my grandfather, but not before she was rounded up by the Reds at a meeting they thought was secret.
It wasn’t. They were betrayed by another dissident who was obsessed with her. He stalked her and was hell bent on keeping her and my great-grandfather apart. If he couldn’t have her, there was no way in hell my grandfather could; so he literally sold her out to the Reds.
Sound familiar?
Of course, the higher ups saw how beautiful she was and one of their leaders fell in love with her. She refused all of his advances but he was determined and forced her into marriage. The Communists hated religion but knew that the Church was still entrenched in the culture so they had a Russian Orthodox Christian priest marry them.
Plot Twist II: She was not Russian Orthodox Christian, she was Ukrainian Orthodox Christian, so by her rights the marriage wasn’t valid.”
Tara took a breather. This was all so much to process growing up but to finally tell the story was a whole other level of bonkers.
“This next part is going to sound real familiar.”
“She escaped on the wedding night so the marriage was never consummated. She headed home but it took a few months because she was on foot and had to hide when they sent out search parties. Sympathizers helped her make the trip with food, clothes, and shelter. She finally made it back to Kiev and found my grandfather. Right after that, the traitor found her and tried to rape her. She was able to stab him. My grandfather had just been to her apartment for some supplies for the dissidents that weren’t rounded up with her.
She made it out of the apartment and was able to catch my grandfather. He went back with her and shot the traitor on sight. Unfortunately, after delivering my grandmother to the leaders, the traitor made it big in the regional Soviet council and they knew they wouldn’t be believed. My grandfather would be executed or sent to a gulag and my grandmother would be sent right back to Moscow to her “husband.”
They were then married by a Ukrainian Orthodox Christian priest and went into hiding. They had my mom and uncle. He’s important too. They managed to get out of Ukraine after the Holodomor was implemented by the Soviets. Millions were dying from starvation but they managed to make it to Warsaw, then Vilnius in Lithuania. After that, they were booked passage to America.
It took them twenty years through all of this, but they eventually made it Sacramento and settled there into what they thought was going to be their happily ever after.
What they didn’t know was that a bounty had been issued by the Soviets for my grandparents.
Kill him. Bring her back alive.
Now onto my mom. She had also studied ballet in Kiev while they were hiding but when they had to leave, it was cut short. When she got to America they settled in Sacramento. They Americanized their names, became Catholic, and only spoke Ukrainian at home because my grandparents had a pretty good idea that this wasn’t over by a long shot.
My mom grew up in Sacramento. She grew up quietly in Post-WWII suburban America with the picket fence and all that. She was even the cutest Nancy Drew Bobby sockser you’ve ever seen.
Then she found out about the bounty after my grandparents were killed in a car “accident.” The Soviets found them after all of those years and came to collect my grandmother and kill my grandfather. My grandparents managed to kill both of the bounty hunters but not before they were run off the road and were killed too.
The bounty then passed onto my mom because while the Russians were Soviets, they were still Russians who liked to collect beautiful women.
They were also Russians that didn’t take kindly to their women running away on the wedding night. They might be Soviets but they were still Russians that believed in curses. This was a big NYET when it came to Slavic curses. An unconsummated marriage is all kinds of bad luck.
My mom was now running from them. They knew there was a daughter so the bounty passed to her since they failed to collect my grandma alive. They were also instructed to kill any males, so my uncle changed his name and was drafted into the Army. She only held onto Taisia because she couldn’t bear to lose that last part of her parents.
My mom then went bohemian and was anti-Vietnam because of this and traveled around protesting. This also gave her the perfect way to hide. She was anti-war, not anti-soldier though. She knew that most were forced into service like her brother by the American draft. It reminded her of the stories her parents told them about the Soviets doing the same in all the countries behind the Iron Curtain in the Eastern bloc.
After the war ended, she went to school and became a social worker who helped soldiers transition back to civilian life after Vietnam. She was one of the first people that pushed for recognition that PTSD was real and soldiers needed help to deal with all of the anti-war sentiment on top of the horrific things they saw in combat.
That’s how she met my dad. Her brother came back from Vietnam and they started a local support group at UC San Fran. He brought Dave Knowles from his platoon for the first group meeting. He fell truly, madly, deeply in love at first sight with my mom. She loved to say that he was just traumatized and should have gone out and bought a puppy dog but she was just as in love with him and they got married.
She was scared but told him about the bounty and he promised to keep her safe. My dad grew up in Charming so they moved here. It was perfect for my mom. Semi-rural and somewhere no one would expect her to be.Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum. When he got back to Charming, his platoon buddies, John Teller and Piney Winston, had rolled into town with their newly formed MC brought by Gemma Madock. She’s hitched to JT with a bouncing baby boy named Jackson to boot. Everyone knows your story. MC Prince of Charming. Man Slut. Yada Yada Yada.
Then along came me. My mom didn’t want to scare me with talk of curses, but when she was dying, she had to tell me. We also spoke Ukrainian and Gaelic at home. I never took any of it to school with me because honestly, who would believe that shit?
So I was the good girl gone bad boy with Jax Teller. I knew the Russians would show sooner than later so I worked my ass off to get into a college far enough from Charming but where I could still see my dad. I couldn’t completely let go because he was all I had left.
I didn’t count on falling in love with you. I mean our first encounter since childhood wasn’t exactly a Hallmark romance movie. Pushing up on me by the smoking area was every girl’s dream.
“Oh shit, I remember you in that get up. . Do you still have that uniform?” He smirked while she swatted his arm.
“Maybe. But anyways, I fell for your special brand of bullshit hard. Hell, you took me to prom with your leather jacket on.
Jax laughed, “Hey I was best looking guy there. All the girls wanted me.”
Tara shot him a look that shut him up quick.
“Yeah, that was the problem then and it’s still the problem now. I tried talking you into leaving with me. I hated fighting random girls and grown-ass Croweaters. Now it’s porn sluts and more Croweaters. They’re probably the spawn of the Croweaters from back then. Oh god, you better not be banging your own kid.
So, I grew up and you didn’t. I thought our love was strong enough, but it wasn’t then, and it’s still not now.”
Jax reached for her but she pulled away.
“Remember how you told me you slept with hundreds of women? Well, I was miserable the whole first year of college. I cried every night. My cousin talked me into going on ONE date and I could barely look at him, let alone kiss him.”
Tara couldn’t look at Jax in that moment because the pain was still so real.
“I came back to the apartment and cried. I called Donna crying. I told her I was coming home. Donna stopped me, she never told me anything before but she didn’t want me making a huge mistake, or a fool of myself. She told me all about how you were living the MC life. Fucking your way through the west coast. Prison time, running guns, fucking strippers, and burning through Croweaters at all the charters. She didn’t tell me the details but the Cliff Notes version was gross enough. I knew then that you had moved on, so I made the decision to do so too.”
“And I don't want to hear a sad story full of heartbreak and desire. The last time I felt like this. It was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire. And I stood on the mountain in the night and I watched it burn. I watched it burn, I watched it burn.”
“I started helping my dad with the Fenian stuff on the side. Learning the business, so to speak because I was all he had left. They have political power. The IRA and the RIRA are the soldiers, the Fenians are the generals. My dad was the last male Knowles of the original members way back in the 1800’s. It’s patrilineal but because I am now the last of any original Fenians, I’m the legacy. They are basically sworn to protect me.
I learned Russian in college just for this moment. Because if I’m going to break a curse, I at least should be able to function in a world I’m trapped in like a folk tale princess locked away in a tower.
Now we’re full circle and back to the very beginning.
Genetics played a fun joke on me as evidenced by this picture.
I recreated this picture for a college project about heritage. It was safely tucked away because I knew it would trigger digital tracking that the Russians have plenty of. I was careful about any pictures of me being published for anything with my career and especially friends posting stuff on MySpace and now Facebook. I literally run away from cameras.
It was safe until Kohn came to Charming. Before I knew he was in town, he broke into my house while I was in San Francisco for a medical conference. He found this, scanned it with some ATF software and found out all about MY history.
When he was finally discovered and we thought sent packing, he sent this to the Russians looking for me as the final fuck you to all of us. He told me before trying to rape me that he could never let us be together just like the traitor did to my grandmother. Talk about a fucking curse. That shit curse really knows how to pack a generational punch.
The man that my grandmother was forced to marry was in Lenin and Stalin’s inner circle. The ones coming for me are his grandsons and I have the luck of becoming the blushing bride to one of them to break the curse. I’m guessing they’ll roll the dice for me.
They are oligarchs and old money. They might have been spouting Communism for all that time but it was bread lines for everyone pure black market capitalism for them. All kinds of Monopoly money for them since they won their civil war and wiped out the White Russians, well all except me.
They run the Russians that run the Russian strippers you were burning through after bailing on me. Most of them aren’t dancing for fun and exercise. They are trafficked from all parts of Russia because everyone, you included, loves an exotic Eastern European girl. And don’t give me any shit line about how you saw my face.
Apparently, this is a hundred year cycle and we are getting close to that mark.I always planned on ending this miserable cycle by leaving with them if I had to. Then the fickle finger of fate got me pregnant and that changed everything because this baby boy is now the Knowles heir and my Irish will start WWIII to protect us from this ending like some fucking cosmic karma soap opera brought you by Hades himself.
Your type of protection by ‘fucking porn sluts to protect me’ won’t get me out of this alive. So you can do what you want when the Russians either get into this room or my Irish wipe them out.
Choose wisely.”