Chapter 16
16
ROMAN
R osa is alive. My mother is alive.
My vision blurs, the world swirling around me as his words sink in.
“ Yerunda .” The Russian word rasping from my throat sounds like someone else is speaking.
Sergei shakes his head slowly. “It isn’t bullshit, Roman. It’s the truth. Your mother left the United States years before the Orlovs attacked my family, before we even knew they were a threat. She was running from the Cardenas cartel. Rosa’s father was their boss. She escaped his home in Colombia when she was a teenager, after he arranged a marriage for her she didn’t want. Her father had discovered she was in Miami. Aleksander, your father, asked me to get her to safety.”
Suddenly I’m eight years old, sitting on the landing in my parents’ house, hearing my father’s words to Sergei Petrovsky: “Get Rosa out of the country. Give her a new identity. Hide her tracks well, and don’t tell me how you’ve done it, until and unless we know it is safe.”
I know what Sergei is saying is the truth. I know it because I heard my father say it himself. But knowing it logically and understanding it emotionally are two entirely different things. The person making sense of Sergei’s words isn’t a thirty-two-year-old man running a billion-dollar empire. He’s an eight-year-old child who came home to find his mother gone and then watched his father die.
My limbs feel like stone, cold and locked in place. “You expect me to believe that my mother simply abandoned my father and me?”
“Of course she didn’t abandon you.” A flash of anger lights the old man’s eyes.
Good , I think savagely. I want him angry. I want him hurt. I want Sergei goddamn Petrovsky to feel even an ounce of the agony I do, at the thought that for all of those long, lonely years, the thousands of nights spent shivering in back alleys, my mother was out there, alive. Keeping my face studiedly neutral, I stare the old bastard down as I try to master my inner turmoil.
“Rosa loved you more than anything, Roman. You and Aleksander were her world. Her love for you both was the only reason she ran in the first place. Against my own—” Sergei cuts off abruptly, turning away and wiping a hand over his face.
Against my own advice.
I know what he isn’t saying. I remember how Sergei argued with my parents, tried to talk them out of their plan. And no matter how much I wish I didn’t, I clearly remember my father’s response: “I’m asking this of you now, for your children, as well as my own: get my wife to safety. Allow her to carry out my wishes. Let me do this for you, that all our children might live the life we dream for them.”
I don’t feel comforted by my memories. And I sure as hell don’t forgive Sergei Petrovsky. I remember all of that conversation, the promises he made to my parents.
Promises he utterly failed to keep.
I hear my father’s voice in my mind: “The Cardenases have a Russian connection. Rosa’s contact told her that is how they found her.”
“She wasn’t just running from her father.” I stare him down. “She was running from someone else, too. A Russian.”
Sergei nods. “Your father knew it was a Russian who had betrayed her whereabouts to the Colombians. But we didn’t know who or why. I didn’t know it was the Orlovs until after the coup.”
“My father had been dead for seven years by then.” I barely manage the words. “What were you doing during that time?”
“Waging war against the Cardenas cartel.” Sergei’s face is suddenly hard as a winter sky, his eyes cold and deadly. “They claimed responsibility for killing your father. They said it was punishment for having married Rosa. Half of the Russian families in Miami went to war with me to avenge your father.” He meets my eyes starkly. “Vilnus Orlov included.”
I control my revulsion with no small effort. It makes me sick to think of Vilnus Orlov “going to war” alongside Sergei.
My father’s blood was still wet on his hands.
I’m not sure what makes me more furious: Vilnus’s appalling hypocrisy or the fact that Sergei fell for it.
“And in the middle of this war, you never bothered to come looking for me?” I throw the words at him, my voice hard as Sergei’s face.
He meets my eyes without flinching. “Your house was burned to the ground. We searched every ash. We found the remains of two bodies. Dental records confirmed they were you and your father. Orlov must have switched the records, of course, and planted the second body, but I didn’t suspect that until many years later.”
I shudder despite myself. I’ve read the newspaper reports, of course. Knew some boy had been killed in my place.
“They came for me, you know.” I take a dark satisfaction in seeing Sergei recoil. “The Orlovs. Men with sparrow tattoos on their hands combed every street for me, for years. But I wouldn’t leave Miami. I couldn’t. I thought my mother would come back.”
Sergei’s eyes swirl with some emotion I can’t quite read.
Suddenly, I’m impatient. There’s no time to visit the past.
“Where did she go?” My voice rasps painfully. “No. Don’t answer that. My father gave her some kind of key. What did she do with it?”
Sergei lights another cigarette, draws on it deeply. “It takes more than just fingerprints to open the vault.” His eyes flicker to Darya, who is watching him as closely as I am. “There are also two keys. Your father gave one of them to Rosa. After I got her out of the country, she followed Aleksander’s orders to the letter. She went to Switzerland and placed the key to the vault in a safety deposit box. Then she ran, just as your father ordered her to.”
Switzerland.
The word thrusts me back to the horrible day when I stood in front of the safety deposit box, staring at the Fabergé egg inside it. Expecting to find my mother. Finding that meaningless piece of goddamn history instead.
“Bullshit,” I say, again in Russian. “I went to Switzerland. She wasn’t there. I opened the safety deposit box—”
“That was the first time I truly believed you might still be alive.” Sergei’s mouth twists painfully. “Your mother always believed it,” he says softly. “She never gave up, Roman. Not for a moment. And she never stopped looking for you. But it wasn’t until she told me that box had been opened that I began to think she might actually be right, that by some miracle, you really might have survived.”
I can’t meet his eyes. I can barely breathe, let alone speak.
It’s too much.
I don’t know what to believe. I’m torn between wanting to tear Sergei limb from limb and bombarding him with the million questions torturing my brain. It’s a relief when Darya interrupts us.
“And the other key?” Her voice is almost as hard as my own. “Where is the other key, Papa?”
He meets her eyes, and for the first time, his composure cracks slightly. “Your brother has it.”
The hurt and anger in her face fires my own.
“You have to be kidding.” I stand up restlessly, unable to sit still. “The same brother who’s been working with the Orlovs for fuck only knows how long has the other key?”
“Alexei isn’t working with the Orlovs.” Sergei’s answer comes hard and fast. I rather suspect that if he had a gun, I’d be staring at it right now.
Not that I give a fuck.
“Then why did he stay?” The heartbreak in Darya’s voice kills me. “If you thought Roman was dead, then you knew there was no way to open that safe. Why would you make him stay?”
Sergei stares at Darya for a long time, as if warring with himself. When he finally answers, his voice is rough and uneven.
“Not me.” He speaks as if the words are being wrenched from somewhere deep inside him against his will. “I pleaded with Alexei to come with us. But he said that Rosa had visited him. She... came through the tunnels when I was still unconscious. She told Alexei that the Orlovs were scouring the city for Roman.” His eyes flicker to me. “That’s why she was so certain you were still alive.”
“And neither of you told me this.” Darya’s voice is hard as glass. “Not in all these years.”
Sergei reaches a hand out to her, but she jerks away from it.
“Orlov was torturing you!” His voice breaks. “Alexei wasn’t going to give that bastard anything to use—”
He swallows, gaining control of himself before he goes on.
“I promised Rosa long ago that I would protect her son. When I was unconscious, she reminded Alexei of that promise. Alexei promised her he would stay close to the Orlovs, find out if Roman was still alive.” He looks at me, then back at his daughter, his face white with grief. “You must not blame Rosa. She’d suffered so much. If there was a chance—even the smallest one—that you were alive, I owed it to her to find you. Owed it to Aleksander.”
He meets my eye without flinching. “Even so, I’m ashamed to say that I still begged Alexei to run with us. I was furious when I discovered that Rosa had risked her life by coming back to Miami and breaking into the compound. I was even more furious when she told Alexei that he couldn’t run, that someone needed to stay, in case you ever came back. I argued with him. I said that if you were alive, Roman, there must be another way to find you, one that didn’t involve him staying in that house.” His lips harden into a grim line. “But Alexei... he refused to go back on his word to your mother. And that promise aside, he was determined to stay and one day fight to regain what we’d lost.” Sergei’s face is gaunt. “I didn’t agree with him. But I respected his decision.”
Darya makes a low noise of frustration. She stands up and moves away, turning her back on both of us. Sergei’s eyes follow her, but he doesn’t speak.
I fold my arms and stare the bastard down. “Tell me where my mother is now.”
“At this moment,” he says quietly, “I believe Rosa is in Switzerland.”
“Then why didn’t she find me when I opened that safety deposit box?”
“Rosa wasn’t in Switzerland when you went to the bank.” Sergei is still watching his daughter’s stiff back.
I can’t stand the sadness in his eyes; I don’t want to feel sympathy for him.
“Until recently,” he continues, “Rosa hadn’t been back to Zurich since the day she closed that safety deposit box. It was months before she got the news that someone had come to open it, and even after the bank notified her, she wasn’t sure that person was you. We were both worried it might be a trap. You must remember, Roman: I’d seen what I thought was your body with my own eyes. I truly believed you were dead. Despite what Rosa said about the Orlovs hunting for you, I thought your mother’s faith was just grief, wishful thinking.” He shakes his head tiredly. “She went to Switzerland anyway, of course.” He drags his eyes back to mine. “I had no chance of stopping her. Rosa never was one for being told what to do.”
There’s a reluctant admiration in his voice that I don’t want to hear.
Sergei’s reminiscences only further remind me of what I’ve had to live without all these years. The fact that he, and not I, could see my mother, touch her, talk to her...
I clench my fists to stop myself from beating him senseless and swallow hard to bury the lump of hurt and loss blocking my throat.
“After she told you the box had been opened, what did you do?” I wince at the pain I can hear in my voice. I don’t want the bastard to know the effect his words have had on me. I don’t want to give him a single fucking thing.
He’s taken enough from me already.
“The bank wouldn’t show Rosa footage of whoever had opened the vault. But there was no doubt it had been opened, and the key was still inside it, as was the egg. There was no trap, nobody waiting to capture her. I truly began to think she might be right.” He half smiles. “Oddly enough, that was when Rosa became the skeptic. I think she was afraid to start believing again, after so long. Either way, neither of us had the faintest idea where you might be.” He looks at me, his eyes painfully gentle. “Right up until the day I saw you with your father’s earrings.
“Even then, it seemed impossible. An unimaginable coincidence.” He shakes his head. “I thought I was seeing things. Imagining what I wanted to.”
I can’t do this.
Not now. No matter how fucking much I want the truth.
Right now, what I want to do most is run as hard and fast as I can, a million miles from here.
Away from the sympathy in Darya’s eyes and the pain in Sergei’s. I neither want to understand his pain nor hear his fucking explanations.
I’ve lived without answers for two decades and more. I can live without them until I have my girls back and Vilnus Orlov is dead.
And just like that, my world snaps back into focus.
“None of this matters.” I brutally cut off whatever Sergei was about to say. “We don’t have time for any of this. We’ve got the codes to the tunnels and a map of the underground chamber. Everything else can wait.” I stand abruptly. “We need to go, Darya.”
For a horrible moment I think she will stay with her father. I’m almost afraid of how furious that makes me feel, how utterly alone.
When she slowly stands beside me, it takes all of my self-discipline to hide my relief.
“Wait.” Sergei presses against his chair, grimacing with the effort to stand. “There’s so much more you both need to understand. I haven’t begun to explain—”
“Will any of it help me get into that compound and get my children back?” I stare down at him, daring the old bastard to waste one moment more of my fucking time.
He stares at me for a long time. Then he nods in reluctant acquiescence, slumping back in his chair, his face pale and tired. “You know the key is in the Fabergé egg?”
My mouth twists in contempt. “I figured. Is there any other trick I should know about?”
“No.” Sergei shakes his head. “Your father designed the vault to be opened by three sets of fingerprints and two keys. He hid one inside the egg your mother took with her.” He meets my eyes. “And like I said, Alexei has the other one.”
“Oh, and he’s just going to hand that over, is he?” Fury churns inside me.
“Yes.” He meets my eyes steadily. “Yes, Roman. He will.”
I stare at him for a long moment, anger and pain like poison inside me. “Well,” I say finally, “I guess we’re about to fucking find out, aren’t we, Sergei?”
I’m about to walk away when Darya speaks up. “Wait.” She’s staring at her father, her eyes narrowed. “If Rosa wasn’t in Switzerland all that time, then where was she? And how was she talking to you about going back to Switzerland when we were on the run?”
When Sergei meets his daughter’s eyes, it’s the first time I see his composure truly begin to slip. “Dayushka,” he says hoarsely. “There’s so much you don’t know—”
“Argentina.” She says the word flatly, a statement of fact rather than a question. “That’s who we traveled all that way to find, Papa, wasn’t it? Rosa is your contact in Argentina. All this time, both you and Alexei have been communicating with her. And neither of you ever told me.”
“We had to protect you—” Sergei stretches a hand out toward her. Darya jerks back as if she’s been stung.
“Protect me?” Her voice is low and furious. “While I was looking over my shoulder and working every job I could to keep food on the table, you and Alexei tried to protect me?” Her strangled laugh is painful to hear.
“Please, Dayushka.” Sergei’s voice cracks. “Just let me explain—”
“No.” Darya cuts him short. “No, Papa. Not this time.”
She slips her hand into mine. “Take me home,” she whispers.
We turn around and walk away, leaving the old man sitting in his chair, alone in the growing chill.