Chapter 20
Nikolai
At some point in my life, I started choosing pain. I couldn’t select a specific memory or event that triggered it—sometime in my childhood to be sure. Or maybe a fight during which painstartedto border on pleasure. The lines that tended to converge picked up and merged until they were one and the same. Endorphins and adrenaline levels spiked whenever I allowed myself to fight, train, or compete in any of these activities. I began to crave it and couldn”t find relief without it. It is now simply a part of me, a piece of my life that is present at all times. I wouldn”t know what to do with myself if a part of me didn”t ache or twinge at some point. I doubt I could stand it for long.
I suppose it all boils down to balance.
Whether my fist is colliding with padded punching bags, or cracking bone, it all allows me to center myself. I feel like I am at my very best when I am active. It is one of the only reasons that I have continued my MMA fighting well past the point that it was still logical for me to do so. Though, I always liked street fighting more. It kept me grounded, reminded me that I am alive—that I’m mortal and bleed just like everybody else.
Today has been centered around finding my focus once more.
I allowed her to get under my skin.
Last night when I was laying there in bed with her, she got me thinking about things that I should not be. Today, of all days, should be focused on mourning my mother, and the annual trip to my tattoo artist in downtown Moscow. That is all that I should have been doing until my business meeting. Instead, I spent the morning pounding the stuffing out of my weighted bag at the small gym in the slums I still frequent when I’m home. Then getting the tally mark added to my tattoo as well as a few other odds and ends touched up while I was there.
I held meetings over the course of the afternoon and double-checked in with Daniel to see if there had been any more word as to my present situation. Still no word from Mr. Griffith. I don’t like it. The whole situation seems dirtier to me by the day. I cannot believe that he has not put the pieces together, and it simply doesn’t make any sense that he has not made a move yet. In his position, I would handle things very differently. I do not handle quietnesswell, and I handle waiting even less well. If he does not come to me, I will simply have to make my move.
It is late afternoon before Daniel informs me that the property purchase I asked him to expedite has been completed, and way past sundownbefore he informs me that the Italians have finally caved, and their supplier is now mine. Only after that do I allow myself to return home.
In the span of only a few days, Anya has gone from the annoying burden that I must saddle myself with, to the tempting creature working her way further under my skin with each passing glance that she offers to me. Now, I suppose, that conversations must be had. I can put it off no longer. She started something yesterday with her questions, and now we must conclude our business.
Snow is piled high on either side of the drive back up to my mansion. We pull into the garage, and I remove my shoulder holster and guns from my torso, passing them to one of my men for safekeeping. My legs nudge me to move faster into the house, but I refuse. I”m not sure if she”s broken any rules, because if she has, the conversation will have to wait until she”s been punished. Maybe she”s been good and is curled up with a book she found somewhere.
I jog up the stairs from my underground garage into the mansion and heat envelops me. I undo the buttons of my shirt and pull it from my body, leaving me in only the black cotton t-shirt I had underneath, and my black slacks. “Where are they?” I ask my man by the door, and he nods down the furthest hallway, so that is the direction that I take.
I find Ivan standing outside of a sitting room that I have only been into once or twice because the old furnishings were annoying to me. Something about the patterns on the antique furniture offended my eyes, but there is Anya in the middle of it all. Somehow, she found my mother’s easel and a white canvas. How fitting for the day I’m having. She”s sitting in a satin camisole and shorts, with the matching robe pooled around her waist and thighs, as if she pulled it off but couldn”t be bothered to take it off completely. A small table with an empty coffee mug and a palette of watercolors is set up beside her. She”s only made a few strokes on the canvas. I have no idea if she paints as a hobby, or if she decided to spontaneously pick it up today because she could not find anything else that she wanted to do with her time.
She has the paintbrush clamped between her teeth as she stares at the canvas. I stand there quietly, watching her for a moment as she turns her head this way and that, but does not move to start painting. “What are you doing?” I ask when I finally can’t take any more of her inactivity.
Anya jolts and turns to look at me, yanking the paintbrush from her teeth as pink embarrassment colors the apples of her cheeks. “Nothing,” she says fairly honestly. She points the end of the brush at the canvas. “Unfortunately, a whole lot of nothing.”
“I did not take you for a painter.” I slide my hands into my pockets as I wait for her to explain, or to inevitably ask where I have been all day. Behind me, Ivan pulls the door to the room shut to give us some privacy.
“Oh, I’m not. I just got so wrapped up in all of the art in the hallways that somewhere along the way I thought to myself, hey, that can’t be that hard, right? So then I found these—” she points to the paints and the canvas. “There were a whole bunch of them so I didn’t think that you would miss just one… and now I regret taking one because I can’t even think of something I want to attempt to paint. Which is probably for the best.” She presses her lips together at the end of her sentence, and her shoulders slump downward. Something passes across her features that I can’t place, and I don’t ask.
“Those were my mothers,” I tell her simply.
“Shit.”
I can’t tell if she’s worried that I will be pissed, or that she has somehow offended the memory of my mother by touching things that had once belonged to her. She lowers the brushes with a guilty look in her eyes, waiting for whatever comes next.
“It is alright. She could not paint either. She tried.” My mind flashes back to her hurling a half-painted canvas across the room because she couldn”t figure it out. I shift my gaze to the far side of the room, where small yellow and black splotches of paint remain from where the canvas had collided with the wall. My mother then spent the next five minutes laughing, convinced that by destroying the wallpaper, she had somehow improved the drab room.
“I think that she had many of the same notions as you did. She tried for many months, hired people to come and teach her until the instructors became too afraid of her temper to come any longer. She was terrible, but she continued until her next whim came along. I did not know that we even had any of her materials left over.”
“I can put them back? Paint this white or something?” Anya offers.
“No, that shall not be necessary. You can try, they will not be used otherwise.”
“Alright.” She says simply and turns her attention down to her hands. I can see a muscle in her jaw feathering. There is something that she wishes to say very badly, but she is refraining for some reason.
My brow lifts, curious if things have changed that much between us. Only a few days ago she would have been storming across the room spewing her demands and questions as if she was owed something from me. Now, she is subdued. Such a curious woman every time that I interact with her.
“Out with it.”
Anya looks back up at me, and her lip pulls from her teeth with a soft pop. “This doesn’t count as my question.”
I say nothing.
“You have been gone all day.”
“That is not a question.”
“It is night, and you are just getting home.”
“That is also not a question,” I can’t help but grin. She’s being very careful with her word choice. Why?
“I needed some space.”
“Because of yesterday,” she says with finality as if she’s mentally guessed as to the reason behind everything.
“Today is the anniversary of my mother’s death, so I was out.” I lift the bottom of my shirt so that she can see the new tally mark added to the tattoo that we already spoke about. Her eyes drop to the new addition to the mark that I showed her yesterday, running slowly over the slip of black ink. For just a moment, I think that she’s admiring more than just the small bit of ink, but also the slope of muscle there.
“But yes, I needed time because of everything that we spoke about yesterday, just a little bit of distance, to process everything.”
Anya turns her body toward me, waiting for me to continue.
“Speaking with you about everything, brought some memories to the surface that are not pleasant. Things that I do not share with other people. As you can imagine, I am a very private person. I do not share things freely.”
“Us only children tend to be that way, yes.”
I nod to agree with her and move further into the room. I grab the back of another chair and pull it closer to the settee that she is perched on. I sit on the very edge of it and lean forward with my elbows on my knees. I clasp my hands together in the empty space provided there and level Anya with a serious look.
“It is more than that, I think.” I know that I have her complete attention. “When things started, I expected you to be a certain way, perhaps I allowed myself to make assumptions about how you must be. But you are proving to be nothing like that. You hardly seem like you have grown up in this life at all, and I do mean that positively.”
She listens, and gives me the space to speak. Yet another thing that I am unaccustomed to from women. Most of the women I interact with are happy to carry the entire conversation with little to no prompting from me. A couple of generic compliments and they are happy that a man who looks like me is paying them attention in the first place. Anya is nothing like them. When she noticed all of my scars and marks yesterday, I too noted the absence of scars from her body. She’s untouched, and not just because she’s inexperienced.
“I told you, I do not know anything useful to you about my father’s business dealings. I didn’t lie to you,” Anya says softly.
“Surprisingly enough, I believe you.” She has no reason to know why that statement means so much for me to say out loud. “You seem to be genuine… almost normal.”
“That would be an insult coming from somebody else.”
“Perhaps,” I agree. I can tell that she is not offended by me calling her this.
“I think that I should have paid more attention to the things going on around me when I was younger. Then this entire thing might not have happened… but I think I was content to be ignorant when it came to the more serious aspects of things. I always told my father that I could help him if he would only trust me but he never did, not really.
So, I pretended that my life was as normal as possible. Life with my mother when he was gone was normal. It was easy with her, but she died when I was young like I told you. Maybe I should go and get a tattoo like you.” Anya said with a laugh, and she might be kidding, but if she chose to do so, I would only be too happy to make that happen for her.
“As time passed, he would check in on me more, and like I said, he was lost without my mother. Volatile. Scary. His aggression would become unpredictable… and I just remember always being so happy when he was gone. I would go and sit in his office and pretend to be him sometimes. I would pretend to be a man who is so important, doing whatever he does all day that has him gone so much… but then, we started moving around more and more… I don’t even remember exactly how many high schools I went to before I graduated. Then I went off to college to have some semblance of normalcy, of routine… and things have been even more strained ever since.
He provides for me, I don’t have to worry about student loans or anything like that, and he gets to tell himself that he’s done a good job, and I’m out of his way.” Her voice thickens as she takes a deep breath to collect herself. “I’m sorry—I am not the bargaining chip that you thought I would be. I’m sorry to disappoint you there.” She looks up at the ceiling to force herself not to cry.
I slide off of the chair and onto my knees in front of Anya, knocking the easel and canvas over in the process. I take her chin between my thumb and curled my index finger to lower her face down to look at me. A single tear escapes the corner of her eye and rolls down her face. I wipe it away with my other hand. “You do not apologize, not to me, not to anybody—not for anything at all.”