Chapter 21
21
DARYA
“ I really am sorry I blackmailed you into helping me.” I squeeze Abby’s hand.
“If you apologize one more time, I’m not giving you any more of this wine. Oh, wait.” She looks at the lone wineglass on the table. “I haven’t given you any of the wine anyway. Which means I drank that whole bottle. Which means...” She makes a conclusive circle with her index fingers and holds them up with dramatic flair. “That you’re either someone impersonating my friend—or pregnant.”
“Abby!” I almost choke on my peppermint tea.
“Well, which is it?” She opens another bottle and fills up her glass. “I mean, I already have to learn to call you Darya, so I guess you are a different person. But if memory serves, you were supposed to be taking a test last time I saw you. Which leads me to conclude that option B is still on the table.” She closes her eyes briefly as she swallows a mouthful of wine. When she opens them to look at me, her wineglass pauses in midair and her eyes widen.
“Wait. You’re not really fucking pregnant, are you?”
I grimace. My right shoulder moves a hesitant inch upward, and I give her a tentative smile.
“Shut the front door!” Abby’s mouth is open, her wine threatening to spill onto the couch. I hastily take it from her hand and put it on the coaster. “I mean... wait.” Her eyes snap back into focus, and she pins me with a hard glare. “Tell me you didn’t know this when you ran.”
“There wasn’t much I could do about it—”
“Oh, dear lord.” She is shaking her head slowly, still staring at me. “No wonder CEO Man was ready to rip the entire town apart.”
“No.” I look around nervously. “He doesn’t know. Abs, you can’t tell him. He has enough going on with the children missing.”
“He doesn’t fucking know? ” She snatches up her wine and downs most of it. “Are you insane? However much he might piss me off, even I know Roman Stevanovsky isn’t the kind of guy you keep secrets from, Luce—Darya. Fuck.” Her face screws up impatiently. “It’s going to take me some time to get used to that. Anyway. You can’t keep that from him. It’s not fair.”
“I know, Abby, alright?” I stand up restlessly, making myself more tea to keep my hands busy. “But I really don’t want him to deal with it now. I don’t want to deal with it now. He needs to focus on getting the girls back.” The familiar horror presses against my chest. “We both do.”
The gleaming steel surface blurs with the memory of Ofelia and Masha’s terrified faces. They haunt my every minute, whether my eyes are open or closed. It’s hard to sit still. Hard to think, let alone speak, even to Abby, when I can so easily picture them in Orlov’s hands.
“You don’t know what Vilnus Orlov does to girls.” I start to pour tea but stop because my hands are shaking. “You can’t begin to imagine how sadistic he is.”
Abby looks at me for a long moment, her expression unusually opaque. Then she stands up abruptly. “Right. I’ve had a horrible day dealing with Nikolai crying about how unfair life is. You’ve had a horrible day dealing with... well, everything. We’re both going to take long, hot showers, then I’m going to make us a proper meal. And then”—she points a firm finger at me—“you and I are going to sit down and do something we should have done a long time ago.”
“What’s that?”
She fixes me with a stern eye. “You’re going to tell me the truth. Abby and Darya, two point oh. The reboot. This time with the life story. The real one. Deal?”
I meet her eyes and smile faintly. “Deal.”
It’s after midnight, and Roman and Dimitri still aren’t home. Abby’s amazing spaghetti marinara is long finished, as well as a panna cotta I found in the fridge and most of two bottles of very good red wine, neither of which I’ve touched. We’re ensconced on the couch, my third pot of peppermint tea almost finished and Abby eyeing the rapidly dwindling contents of her glass.
“So all this time,” she says, staring at me in fascination, “I was living with a bratva princess? Heiress to some great fortune from imperial fucking Russia? ”
“Well, not heiress, strictly speaking.” It’s incredibly cathartic to actually talk about it, or at least the parts I know. “We’re Russian, and very traditional. My brother is my father’s heir. Daughters are there to look beautiful, take care of their papas, and marry into profitable alliances.”
“Well, in that case, I’d say you’ve smashed it out of the park.” Abby holds up one hand. “ Beautiful: tick. A hundred ticks. Take care of your papa: fucking target hit, above and beyond. Marry profitable alliance: Oh, let me check. Does billionaire bosshole tick that particular box?”
I’m laughing despite myself, despite everything. “I’m not really sure my father will see it that way. For that matter, Roman has never mentioned marrying me.”
She rolls her eyes. “That’s coming, Darya. That’s been coming from the day you came down from his coffee delivery with your shorts undone and that glassy-eyed look. The man is obsessed with you, anyone with eyes can see that.”
There’s no time for either of us to be obsessed with anything at the moment.
Guilt and exhaustion wash over me again, as they do every time I momentarily forget the agonizing terror of Masha and Ofelia being in that compound.
Abby covers my hand comfortingly. “There’s nothing we can do but wait,” she says, for the fiftieth time tonight. I nod. There isn’t much else to be said.
“But I want to know more about this Naryshkin fortune,” she says. “What’s the actual story? Did your father really escape with it?”
I know she’s trying to distract me. But I don’t particularly mind. I’m exhausted from worrying at the thought of the girls in that damned room.
I turn my teacup in my hands. “There are parts of Papa’s story I know,” I say slowly, “and parts I don’t. Some that I’m just starting to piece together now. I’ll tell you what I do know, the part of the story my father impressed upon us as children.
“Papa’s father, my grandfather, was a prince who was imprisoned during the revolution. Papa never told me that my grandfather’s name was Naryshkin; that part I’ve pieced together myself over the years, and it’s only speculation. What I do know is that my grandfather and his best friend risked their lives helping many Russian aristocrats escape—including Peter Carl Fabergé, the jeweler. They remained loyal to the imperial family to the very end and were thrown into a gulag with one of the royal sons as a result. They risked their lives again to help him escape and got him safely to exile in Finland. They and their families were imprisoned in a gulag for the rest of their lives as punishment. Both my father and his best friend were born in the gulag.”
“Your father was born in prison?” Abby is openly shocked.
“And raised there.” I smile. “He never spoke about it like it was a hardship, though. When he spoke about it at all, which was rare, he told us about being taught by the imprisoned aristocrats in the gulag. Literature, music, languages, art... Papa said once that he and the other sons were schooled as rigorously as any student in an elite college. He used to describe sitting around a lone candle during freezing nights while someone read from a book they’d hidden.” I smile, remembering Papa’s reverence for the written word. “Our home was filled with books in Russian, French, Latin, Italian—room after room of rare books. I think if Papa could own every book in the world, he would, just to make sure they were safe.
“The older men also taught their sons useful things. How to hunt and fight. But most of all, they taught them their own skills. Everything from watchmaking to leather work, any skills they had were passed on to the sons born into captivity, as best they could be.” I cast Abby a sideways glance. “Including safe making—and breaking.”
“So that was Roman’s grandfather? A safe maker? What did you say his name was?”
“Borovsky. He was my grandfather’s best friend, although Papa never told us his name when we were growing up. He never used names in general. Everyone he knew in the gulag was explained to us using nicknames: Papa’s father, for example, was nicknamed Graf , or the Count; Roman’s grandfather, Borovsky, was Glaza , the Eyes. My father never mentioned his own nickname, but he did say that his best friend, Borovsky’s son, was known as Ruki— the Hands.”
“And you think this Ruki was Roman’s father?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. You have to understand how secretive Russians are, particularly those who were raised in gulags. My father will never stop looking over his shoulder until the day he dies. They trust no one but one another. My father might have told Alexei his stories, because Alexei is his son, the rightful heir to our tradition. But not me.” It’s difficult to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Especially after all we’ve been through together, all I’ve done to keep Papa safe, it’s hard to accept that he still sees me as his daughter, someone to protect and shelter, rather than trust as he does Alexei.
If Roman and I do make this work , I vow, it’s going to be different between us, traditional or not.
“Anyway,” I go on. “When Papa was around thirty years old, long after their parents had passed, the gulags were closed, and he and Ruki were released.” I shoot Abby a wicked grin. “And this is the part of the story Papa would reluctantly tell, but only to us, his children, and only after too much vodka, when he was in a very good mood.
“During those long nights spent telling stories in the gulag, Ruki had been taught by his father how to make—and crack—safes. Papa had been taught how to fight and hunt. When they were released from the gulag, they broke into Papa’s family home, which by then had communist officials living in it. Papa never told us exactly what they stole. All he ever did was give us a wink and a wicked grin and tell us that he and Ruki ‘took back what belonged to Russia.’ Then they fled the country.”
I can’t help the note of pride that comes into my voice in this part of the story.
“They walked the entire way to Switzerland, just the two of them, in the dead of winter. Those were the stories my father would tell, about the rabbits they caught, the berries they ate. It’s why I remember the name Ruki so well. Papa always told us that his father had taught him that only one thing mattered: keep Ruki safe . Keep his best friend’s hands safe. Papa told us his father even had a saying for it, that Alexei and I learned when we were children: Glaza boyatsya, a ruki delayut. In English it means the eyes are afraid, but the hands do . It’s a bit like ‘feel the fear, and do it anyway.’ Papa always said that until he and Ruki were safely far away from Russia, his job was to make sure that Ruki’s hands were kept safe, no matter what happened to them both.”
“But what did they steal? Or—take?” Abby is fascinated.
I shake my head, smiling. “I don’t actually know. No,” I laugh, when she starts to protest, “truly, I don’t. I don’t know much before Papa came to America. I do know that he lived in France before that. Mama told me he was even married there and had children. I don’t know what happened there, only that his wife and children died. He never spoke of those years, just like he never opened the vault in our home and showed me what was inside. When I’d ask, he’d always say, ‘that is a story for another day, myshka.’ Then he would take me to the library and give me a book and say that the only true treasure lives in our heads and hearts.”
My heart twists at the memory. I can almost smell my mother’s cooking stealing through the compound, feel the rich paper of Papa’s old books beneath my fingers.
There’s something incredibly cathartic about telling someone about my past. I’ve never told my story to anyone. Our family was a tight circle of trust, our stories told in our kitchen, and only ever to us. I don’t know when I first knew that our secrets weren’t ever to be shared, but I do remember the heavy feeling that came with keeping them. The shadows of the past lingered in every corner of our room, in the books my father reverently took down from the shelves, in the priceless art on the walls. We were surrounded by the past, but it was also a world my brother and I were never allowed to fully understand. The past was a mystery that haunted my father’s eyes when he thought we weren’t looking, that lived in the thousand brutal scars on his body. When I got older, I understood that the stories he’d told us of the gulags were rose-colored memories fit for children. His own father died when Papa was still a teenager, and yet he lived in the gulag for years after that. The gulag raised him. It created Sergei Petrovsky, the man who built and then lost a family in circumstances he’d never speak of. The gulag created the fierce pakhan he then became, the warlord who created an empire that inspired both respect and fear.
Papa might have told my mother the full story of that past, but he never told us. Not ever.
“Wow.” Abby’s eyes shine, her wine forgotten. “That’s the most incredible story.” She shakes her head. “How did it end? I mean... how did your home get taken from you?”
My smile fades. “Papa had been at war with a Colombian cartel ever since I was a child. He’d made allies of the biggest Russian families in Miami, formed a coalition to fight the Colombians. I don’t know if anyone told me Papa was the head of that coalition; I just knew, from the way the other men who visited us deferred to him. But then Papa had a stroke.”
I will remember that day as long as I live: my mother’s shriek, the shrill of ambulance sirens.
“The doctors said he probably wouldn’t survive. Mama, Alexei, and I slept at the hospital, too scared to go home in case he died while we weren’t there. While we were sitting at his bedside, one of Papa’s allies, a man named Vilnus Orlov, launched a coup.”
I wrap my hands around the teacup, trying to warm myself on the inside. But there isn’t anything that can melt the frozen memory of that night, and what came after it.
“We had no idea,” I tell Abby softly. “When Vilnus came to the hospital and offered to drive us home, told Mama she needed to take a break, we thought he was being kind. It was only when we got inside our home that we first saw the bodies and the blood.” I grimace. “Vilnus hadn’t even bothered cleaning up before he brought us home. He was too anxious to get us locked up, I guess. That first night, I slept in a bloodstained room, beside a dead body.” My mouth tightens. “It didn’t get any better after that. Vilnus had launched the coup because of what was rumored to be in the vault. He wasn’t happy when none of us could tell him how to open it.
“We were kept alive because Vilnus worked out that our fingerprints were needed to open the vault. Unfortunately for him, our fingerprints alone weren’t enough.”
“Roman.” Abby nods. “Dimitry kind of told me this part.”
“Yes. Roman’s fingerprints are needed, too.” I don’t mention the key. That is Roman’s secret, not mine to tell. “Vilnus was convinced that we knew more about how to open the vault than we were telling him. We didn’t, or at least not back then. When my father didn’t die, Vilnus thought Papa might have the answers he wanted. But Papa was unconscious for months, then a complete invalid for years after that, and Vilnus got impatient.
“He targeted my mother, because he knew it killed Alexei and me to watch her suffer. Then, after she died, he and his men used their fists, and knives, on Alexei and me. It was like a sport to them. They did anything they liked to us, except to the parts of us the rest of the world could see. And they didn’t rape me. At first, because it would have lessened my value. Later, because they were scared I’d cut my own fingerprints off.”
Abby blanches.
I hear the brittle note in my voice and shake it off, thrusting the memories away. I don’t want to think about what Vilnus did to me, not while he still has Masha and Ofelia. And besides, I forced myself to deal with those memories long ago.
Vilnus Orlov stole years of my life. I wasn’t going to allow him to make me a victim for the rest of it.
“Finally I managed to escape with Papa,” I say. “You know most of the rest, or at least the parts that matter.”
Abby pours the last of the bottle into her glass, her face pale. “How old were you?” She glances up briefly. “The night of the coup?”
I stare at the wall behind her, seeing the bloodstained walls, the head blown clean off the guard who had watched me every day since childhood. “I was just seventeen,” I say softly. Her face swims back into focus. “One year older than Ofelia is now.”
She grips my hand. “They’ll get her back, Darya. You know they will.”
I clutch her hand silently, unable to echo her reassurance. We sit in silence until the night is deep and my eyes are drooping.
Finally I give up and see Abby into the guest room. Then I crawl into Roman’s enormous bed and fall into oblivion as soon as my head is on the pillow.
I come half awake to the vague rumble of voices, which seem to be getting louder. Through a fog of exhaustion I feel the mattress shift as Roman kneels against it, his lips on my cheek. He smells like blood and gunpowder, and my stomach lurches with fear.
“What happened?” I ask, almost dreading the answer.
“Nothing that matters. Go back to sleep,” he whispers against my hair.
“The girls?”
“Not yet. I promise I’ll wake you if anything happens.”
“Mickey?”
“Safe in bed.” He pulls the covers up over me. “Dimitry and Abby are on the floor below us in your old apartment. I’m going to take a shower. Go to sleep, milaia .” His lips graze my cheek again, and I turn toward him, but he’s already stripping off his clothes, heading for the bathroom. I watch through eyes that keep closing, seeing the old scars on his flesh as if they’re new, the war wounds from the years he’s spent fighting. No amount of scars can dent the breathtaking power of him, the solid wall of muscle that is his back, the hard-corded thighs. In the dim light of the bathroom I watch him shower, marveling that he’s mine, that even amid this chaos, we’ve somehow still got one another.
I’m dozing when he makes it to bed, only semi-waking when he rolls me into his arms, murmuring soothing words into my ear. I fall back to sleep with his hard body cradling mine, his hand cupped around my breast and his breath warm and sweet on my neck.
When I wake again, Roman is already gone, and I discover with a shock that it’s almost midday. There’s a message on my phone: I’ll call as soon as there’s news. Abby is in the kitchen.
I shower and come out into the kitchen to find her perched on a stool, eating watermelon with her coffee.
“There’s no news,” she says by way of greeting.
I nod silently and try to sip the peppermint tea she’s made me, fighting the ever-present morning nausea. For once I seem to be winning, but that might just be because there’s not much left to throw up.
“Did they tell you anything?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
Abby lifts a shoulder. “Nikolai is dead.”
I nod slowly. It should mean more to me, but somehow I’m not surprised. Maybe I knew already, by the stench on Roman’s clothing when he came in, the way he held me close when he came to bed.
I can’t feel sad. I didn’t like Nikolai, and he helped kidnap the girls. I can’t forgive that, and I know Roman couldn’t either.
But it’s also a reminder that war is here again, that there will likely be more scars on Roman’s body soon.
And what if this time he doesn’t walk away?
My hand covers my belly. What happens to you then, little Borovsky? What happens to all of us if Roman loses this battle?
“Don’t think about it.” I look up to find Abby watching me. She shakes her head slowly. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. It hasn’t happened yet, and it probably won’t. You and your baby are going to be fine, even if I have to drive away with you myself.” She looks so fierce I almost smile.
“Did they tell you where they were going?” I ask.
“Roman has a meeting with some guy up at the lab, that’s all I know. Dimitry said it’s someone who can help, so that’s good, isn’t it?”
“I guess.” I stir my tea without seeing it.
What kind of help? What’s he planning? God, I hate this. I know he’s left me to sleep, and I trust him to tell me what I need to know, but knowing nothing at all is killing me.
“Fuck it,” I say aloud and pull out my phone.
Abby grins. “You go, girl.”
I hit Roman’s number, and he answers on the first ring.
“Are you alright? Is everything okay?” His voice is taut with an undercurrent of fear.
This is horrible for him, too.
“I’m fine. I just woke up. Are you okay? Abby said you’re meeting someone today.”
“I’m with him now. I’ll tell you about it as soon as we’re done, I promise.”
“Okay.” I clutch the phone, unwilling to hang up.
“But actually, since you’ve called, there is something I wanted to ask you.” His voice is studiedly casual, which makes me nervous. “When you were in Miami, did you know anyone who lived out on the edge of the Everglades? A friend of your father, or of Vilnus Orlov? It would have been a big house, with a long driveway.”
I frown, trying to remember. “I think the only time I went to the Everglades was with Papa, and then it was only to go on a boat. I don’t remember any house that fits that description. Why?”
There’s a slight pause, and I can tell Roman is trying to work out how much to tell me. “Just say it, Roman.” I hear the tension in my tone, but I’m not going to hide it either.
“Nikolai told me he and Inger were held in a house out there. That’s why we didn’t see them on the cameras. We’ve got satellite pictures of all the houses in the area, but it would help if we could narrow it down.”
“Inger?” I can’t keep the anger out of my voice. “Do we actually care what happens to Inger?”
Roman chuckles, a warm sound that travels all through my body. “You really are a savage at heart, milaia , aren’t you?” He doesn’t sound too sad about that, if I’m being honest. He lowers his tone. “From what we can put together, Inger might not be entirely guilty. Either way, I’ll deal with her myself. I don’t want the children wondering where she is or what happened to her.”
I guess I can understand that. I don’t like it, though. And I’m not sure how long I would be able to hold myself back if someone put me in a room with Inger and left a gun on the table.
Scrap that. I don’t think I’d even need a gun.
“Darya.” Roman’s voice is tense again. “There’s something I should tell you.”
“I know Nikolai is dead.” I cut him off. “It’s fine, Roman. I’m fine. I’m... glad, I guess.”
There’s a short pause. “Okay.” His voice is low, warming, and I want him here, beside me. “I’ll call as soon as I can, Darya.” But he doesn’t hang up immediately. I cling to the receiver, holding on to the connection. Finally, he says roughly, “I love you.”
The raw honesty takes my breath away.
His words aren’t said when we’re alone, in bed, with him wrapped around me.
This is Roman in his office, surrounded by his men.
He needs me as much as I need him.
“I love you, too.” My voice isn’t quite steady. I close my eyes, picturing him on the other end. We hang on in silence for a moment, then he ends the call.
I look up from the phone to find Abby with a forkful of watermelon halfway to her mouth, staring at me. “Wow,” she says. “First a baby, and now the L word over the phone, in broad daylight? You better watch out, Petrovsky. Shit’s getting waaaayyyy real, girlfriend.”