30. Ofelia
Ofelia
Not even earth-shattering sex sends either of us to sleep. The hours pass too fast, dawn coming long before I’m ready for the call I know we have to make.
Like I was ever going to be ready for it.
At least there are several thousand kilometers between my father and Alexei. It’s hard to shoot someone from that distance.
I hope.
“So are we doing this together,” Alexei asks as he opens the door to the secure room, “or separately?”
“Together, I think.” I sit down in front of the screen, and he pulls a second chair close to mine. “But let me do the talking, please. And after the initial bomb drop, I’m guessing Darya and Papa will want to ask me some questions in private.”
“Oh, you think?” Alexei snorts derisively.
“Should we ask them to bring Sergei in too?”
He shakes his head. “I’ll deal with my father later.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Well, then I suppose there’s no time like the present.
” I type a message to Papa saying that I will call on the secure line in five minutes and want to speak to both him and Darya at the same time.
He immediately sends back a quizzical face emoji with question marks beside it.
Then, when I don’t answer, a terse copy that.
“And now he’s already worried,” Alexei mutters.
“What else was I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know. My point is that you’re not supposed to even know he has a secure room. Let alone know the number—or how to call it yourself.”
“Oh,” I say guiltily. “I forgot.”
“Yeah.” He grimaces. “This is why neither of us could have kept this up for very long.”
I tilt my head to his shoulder, and he presses his lips to my hair. For a moment I rest there, savoring these last precious moments of peace before the storm erupts.
“That’s five minutes,” his voice rumbles against my cheek.
Fuck.
I sit upright, suddenly feeling utterly nauseous. Alexei squeezes my hand. “It’s going to be fine.”
I meet his eyes, shaking my head slightly. “Is it,” I mutter.
Bracing myself, I hit the call button.
My father answers on the first ring, his expression grim. “Why are you calling on this line?” Then his eyes shift sideways to Alexei and take on an extremely dangerous, if familiar, dark stare. “And why the fuck is he with you? Where are you calling from, Ofelia?”
“Roman.” Darya, standing behind him, puts a steadying hand on his shoulder, though her expression is no less concerned.
“I’m okay. I’m safe. We both are.” To my surprise, my voice is quite steady. “So I don’t want you to worry.”
“I asked,” Papa says very deliberately, “where the fuck you are. I would like an answer.”
I glance at Alexei, unsure what to say.
“Don’t look at him,” Papa snarls. “I’m the one asking questions.”
“Roman—” Darya begins.
“Back it down, Roman,” Alexei cuts across his sister. He speaks in the flat, hard tone I’ve heard too many times, and I don’t need to look at him again to know his face is wearing the iron-cold mask he employs to cover any emotion. “We made this call. We can shut it down just as fucking easily.”
I would find my father’s apoplectic expression almost amusing under other circumstances. As it is, I’m not entirely sure he isn’t going to blow an actual heart valve.
“Alexei!” I shake my head at him, frowning.
His mouth hardens, but he subsides.
“Ofelia.” Darya takes advantage of the momentary silence to address me directly. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you came to be there with Alexei? Did something happen to you?”
Oh, God, I love you, I think, my heart twisting with gratitude at her sympathetic tone and the lifeline she’s just thrown me.
“Yes,” I gulp, struggling to speak through the sudden rush of emotion. “Yes, something did happen. But I don’t want you to worry, okay? I’m fine. I really am.”
“Ofelia,” my father growls warningly, but at least he’s looking at me instead of Alexei now, and to my relief, I see his hand steal up to hold Darya’s. He’s always calmer when she’s touching him.
I take a deep breath. “Yesterday, some men tried to kidnap me on the street, in Granada.”
Darya’s hand flies up to her mouth.
Every last hint of color fades from both her and my father’s faces.
It makes me sick to watch, but it can’t be helped either. This has to be said.
“It’s a long story, but the short version is that they’d been spying on me for some time. They planned to use me as bait, to get to Alexei.”
“Who, exactly, are they?” Papa asks, dangerously quietly. His and Darya’s eyes swivel hard left, narrowing on Alexei with twin precision. “And why,” my father continues, “did they choose Ofelia as bait?”
I slide my hand over Alexei’s out of sight of the camera, warning him against answering. “Because they knew Alexei and I are together.”
The words come out surprisingly easily. And once they’re out, I find it oddly simple to continue, despite Papa’s and Darya’s blank looks of shock.
“I recently spent a week with Alexei and told someone about it. Unfortunately, her phone was bugged. Yesterday the people who bugged it launched a coordinated attack that took out both of my security detail, then snatched my friend and me outside an ice cream place in Granada. We managed to escape on the outskirts of town. I got clear and made it to some friends of Alexei’s, who brought me here, to him. ”
Papa’s eyes shift from me to Alexei and back again. “I am going to ask this again,” he says tightly. “Who are they, and where, exactly, is here?”
Feeling Alexei stiffen, I answer hastily. “Mak will give you everything we know about your first question soon. But neither he nor Alexei will answer the second one, Papa. Not even on a secure line.”
“You can’t tell me,” he says slowly, staring at Alexei. “But you had no issue telling my daughter where to find you.” His mouth curls in contempt.
Alexei is terrifyingly still beside me. I know he’s only staying silent out of respect for me.
“It was my choice.” For the first time, I can feel myself getting angry.
“All of this has been my choice. I told Alexei’s team to bring me here, instead of home to your finca.
And the only reason I had a team to take me anywhere was because Alexei made sure that if anything went wrong, I would have a way out. ”
“Which you wouldn’t have fucking needed,” says my father furiously, “if he hadn’t put you in danger in the first place!”
“My life is fucking dangerous!” I leap to my feet, fists clenched in frustration. “Do you think that danger just suddenly happened because Alexei and I are together? Have you forgotten that the first time I was kidnapped, I was with you—at a supposedly safe public event?”
“Ofelia—”
But I’m past the point of being placated. I shake off Alexei’s warning hand impatiently.
“Maybe,” I say, my voice low and furious, “if I hadn’t been so fucking terrified of upsetting everyone, I could have confided in you, and all of this could have been avoided.
Maybe, if Alexei hadn’t been so concerned about doing what was right, we both could have spoken to you.
But the reality is that we’ve spent so long worrying about what this will do to everyone else that we stayed silent—which nearly destroyed us both. ”
My breath comes in hot, angry gasps.
“And despite all of that—despite years of telling ourselves we didn’t feel what we did, that we couldn’t—we found each other anyway. And we finally found the courage to put ourselves first, instead of everyone else. We took a chance at happiness, even though neither of us felt we deserved it.”
I realize that I’m crying, and I’m helpless to stop it.
“I love you both,” I say brokenly. “And I’m sorry if this hurts you. But I have the right to determine my own future.” I turn to Alexei, tears streaming down my face. “We both do.”
His eye blazes into mine, his grip so fierce on my hand that it almost hurts.
“Of course it’s dangerous,” I whisper, and I’m no longer talking to my parents, even if they’re still listening.
“But danger is just another river to be crossed.” I touch Alexei’s face, tracing the deepest of his scars, the hard ridge that extends beyond his eye patch.
“Glaza boyatsya,” I whisper, “a ruki delayut.”
“Oh,” I hear Darya gasp.
Alexei captures my hand. He brings it briefly to his lips, then turns back to my white-faced father.
“I will ask your forgiveness, Roman,” he says quietly in Russian, “but not your permission. You also have my word that nobody will ever endanger your daughter’s life again. Not while I have breath in my body.”
When I finally compose myself enough to look back at the screen, Darya is smiling at her brother through tears, her face rich with love and sadness. But it’s Papa’s face, when I can finally find the strength to look at him, that knocks the breath from my body.
He’s staring at me hollowly, like he’s never really seen me before, and for a terrible moment, I think I’ve lost him entirely.
Then I see the damp tracks on his cheeks and the faint trembling of his hand clutching Darya’s.
“I thought,” he says slowly, “that becoming your father was the most difficult thing I’d ever have to face.” His mouth twists, and I realize how hard he’s fighting to maintain an even tone. “I never realized how very much harder it would be to let you go.”
“Oh, Papa.” I reach out to touch the screen, unable to hold back my tears. “You’re not losing me. You never could.”
He looks from me to Alexei, his expression slowly relenting. “You’ll give me a full brief on where you’re at,” he says, and despite his peremptory delivery, he’s addressing Alexei not as one of his men, but as he might Dimitry or Luke.
As his equal.
“Of course.” Alexei inclines his head with equal courtesy.
“And we’ll talk again.”
“Soon,” Alexei says.
“Ofelia.” Darya touches the screen. Her smile is so heartbreakingly beautiful and understanding that I just want to hug her, so much it physically hurts. “How can I talk to you, darling?”
“You need to use the secure room,” I say. “Just get Papa or Mickey to set it up for you.”
“Mickey?” Papa’s eyebrows draw together, and I can almost hear him putting the pieces together. “I fucking knew there was something he wasn’t telling me.”
“Don’t blame Mickey, Papa. I put him in a difficult position.”
“Well, at least I know why he’s been avoiding family dinners of late.
Boy knows how to keep his secrets, I’ll give him that.
” He shakes his head disapprovingly, but I don’t miss his grudging smile.
Papa has always put honor above all else, and keeping somebody else’s secret is, to him, the honorable thing.
“Your father,” he says, turning back to Alexei. “What do you want us to say to him of all this?”
“If you don’t mind,” Alexei says politely, “I’d prefer to have that conversation with him myself.”
“Have fun with that,” Roman says, not without some relish. He stands up. “We will hear from you soon, then?”
I nod, still swiping at the tears in my eyes, though now they’re more tears of relief than anything else. “Yes,” I say shakily. “Yes, Papa, of course you will.”
“I’ll call you later today, darling.” Darya kisses her fingers and waves them at me. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I say, crying properly now. “So much.”
“Are you okay?” Alexei touches my shoulder as their faces disappear from the screen.
I nod. “I think I might need another drink,” I say shakily, wiping my face, “before we face your father.”
He nods, his mouth hard. “If it’s okay with you,” he says quietly, “I think I’d like to talk to my father alone.”
I nod. “Please tell him I love him.” My voice is all choked.
“I will.” Alexei’s smile is forced and doesn’t quite reach his eye. “And despite your newfound alcohol addiction, and the fact that it’s not even eight a.m., I think you should make yourself a very strong Bloody Mary and take it out to the pool.”
I give him a watery smile. “I mean, since we haven’t actually slept yet, technically it’s still last night, right?”
“Now that’s some epic drinking logic, right there.” Alexei kisses me once, hard. “Go, angel. I’ll be with you in a moment.”