Chapter 34
ZINAIDA
I stare through the tinted windows at the gray London streets, breathing deeply to try to calm myself.
It doesn’t work.
My heart thuds dully, my skin alternately hot and cold. Bogdan Kozlov’s cold eyes float in front of my own, a spectral ghost from my worst nightmares, one I never thought I’d see again.
I wish Luke was here.
Had the room not been full of my staff and his, I’d have fallen into his reassuring solidity the moment I saw that face on the screen, and to hell with my best resolutions.
By the time he cleared the room, I’d gathered myself enough to know I need to have this conversation first. And that I don’t want any witnesses to whatever is about to be said.
“Zin.” Charlie’s concerned voice comes through the intercom. “We’re here.”
“Thank you, Charlie.” I step out of the limo before she has a chance to open the door for me, keeping my face averted. “Wait here.” I don’t need any of my staff close to this particular encounter.
Tension prickles my skin as I approach the private apartment adjacent to Sophie’s House and enter the code for access. Sally, sitting just inside the door, takes one look at my face and says, “I’ll be outside if you need me.”
Then I’m alone.
The apartment is warm, bright, and freshly scented with candles I chose. It’s silent but for the soft whirr of kitchen appliances.
There’s no sign of the woman I came to see. But I can feel her here, sense her waiting for me.
I take a deep breath. “I’m here,” I say into the silence. “Can we talk?”
She appears in the doorway, pale faced, brown hair scraped back into her customary ponytail. She’s painfully thin, her eyes cavernous in her face. For once, though, her fingers don’t pluck restlessly at her clothing, and there’s a spark in the soft brown eyes that could almost be defiance.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” Meeting her eyes is harder than I imagined it would be. “All this time. Working here, of all places.” I gesture around at Sophie’s House. “You must have guessed it was named for you.”
She blanches, her eyes widening in shock. “You know?” Her voice is a harsh whisper. “When?”
“An hour ago.” I suppress a shudder. “When Luke showed me a photograph of Bogdan Kozlov’s face.”
Her eyes narrow as she studies me. Then, suddenly, her shoulders go limp. She looks down at the floor, biting her lip, swaying as if she might fall.
“Sit,” I say gently, leading her to a chair.
“I’ll make coffee.” I go to the kitchen counter, almost pathetically grateful for the distraction.
After all these years of waiting, now that I’m finally facing my cousin, I have no idea what to say to her.
Nor am I at all sure that she wants to hear anything I might have to say.
“Do you remember that day at Tetya Ana’s?” She begins speaking while my back is turned. “When Bogdan took me away?”
I wince, closing my eyes against the memory, which only brings my father’s face into sharp mental relief. I see the disgust on his face as he looks at Sophie, hear his sneering voice: “Add this one to the special delivery to New York.”
And I remember Bogdan Kozlov standing beside him, eyeing me greedily: “You want me to take them both?”
Then my father’s horrible laugh: “No, muy droog. Nobody touches this one but me. Not for many years to come . . .”
I turn around, forcing myself to face my cousin. “I remember,” I say dully.
“When I woke up that day, he was angry.” Sophie’s voice is small and thin, but oddly, it’s also stronger than I’ve heard it before.
She meets my eyes directly. I wonder if she was ever truly shy or if it was just a mask for her deceit.
“I was on the back seat of his car, tied up. Bogdan was drinking and talking to himself. He said it wasn’t fair that Oleg always took the pretty ones.
Bogdan felt he deserved better. He always believed that,” she says, a bitter edge to her voice.
“That was why he kept me for himself, instead of putting me into the container bound for New York. It was also why he left Oleg, in the end.”
I swallow hard. “He kept you?”
Her mouth twists. “Oh, yes,” she says softly. “Bogdan kept me close. He liked to tell me that you were living the high life. Oleg had made you his star attraction, he said. You were the best dancer in his club, treated like royalty. He told me you had forgotten all about me.”
I stare at her, unable to hide my shock. “Like royalty?” I give a choked laugh. “Did he tell you Oleg had me chained inside a cage, and that my star act was being whipped by him for the enjoyment of his friends?”
Sophie’s already pale face blanches. “No,” she whispers. “I only found out about that after I came here.”
I shake my head, breathing deeply against the old fury rising inside me. “It doesn’t matter.” I hold her eyes. “I want to know your story, Sophie. Not tell you mine.”
She turns her coffee cup in her hands. “I don’t think Bogdan planned to keep me.
Not at first. He just held on to me as a way to rebel against Oleg.
That was, until he met him. Simon Lowbridge,” she says bitterly when I look confused.
“Simon has a knack for finding ambitious people who feel overlooked and putting them to use. He was trying to go legitimate and needed someone to run the illegal side of his business. Bogdan was perfect. He spoke Russian, was corrupt through and through, and he hated working for Oleg. Simon offered him the chance to build an entire business in Romania. Bogdan leaped at it.”
Simon. Bogdan.
The familiar way she uses their names is a jarring reminder that, for years now, these men have been her world, as real to her as Oleg the Whip was to me.
At the thought of those years, a flicker of memory tugs at the back of my mind.
“Wait.” I frown, remembering. “Did Kozlov go by a different name back then?”
“A nickname, yes.” Sophie’s mouth curls. “Oleg used to call him Oggie. Bogdan hated it.”
“I remember that,” I say slowly. “Oleg and his men teased him that he had a face like a Cornish pasty—”
“Yes!” Sophie looks almost animated. “Cornish pasties are called oggies, and it sounded like the name Bogdan. Like I said, though, he hated it. He wanted a threatening nickname, like ‘the Knife’ or ‘the Fist.’ Instead Oleg named him after a pasty and made fun of him.”
No wonder his name meant nothing to me. I’d forgotten about Bogdan Kozlov, his face and name lost in the blur of revolting men who frequented my father’s club in those early years. But I remember the way Oleg whipped me when Oggie disappeared.
I thrust the memory aside.
“Oggie was Oleg’s connection to the supply chain of girls he had working in his club,” I say. “When he left, Oleg had to find a whole new supply. He wasn’t happy.”
Understatement of the year.
Sophie nods. “Bogdan was gleeful about that. He thought Oleg’s club would die without him.”
“It didn’t.” I meet her eyes. “Not then, at least.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “I heard, later, about the fire, and how you ended it.”
I want to ask a thousand questions. But I know there isn’t time, not today.
“You said that things changed for you when Bogdan met Lowbridge,” I say. “Why?”
She grimaces. “Simon had big plans for a webcam business in Eastern Europe. Bogdan had contacts in Romania, but he was a criminal, not a bookkeeper. He didn’t understand the first thing about numbers or cash flow.
After his first meeting with Simon, he came back to the flat with a business brief that Simon had given him.
It included numbers, projections. Bogdan couldn’t make head nor tail of it. ”
“But you could?” I look at her curiously. “You were eight years old, Sophie.”
“I knew I wasn’t going to survive for much longer.
” She says it bluntly, and I do my best not to flinch.
“At first, he played with me, like I was some kind of doll. He’d make me dance, over and over, to the music from one of those horrible jewelry boxes, you know the ones, with the ballerinas inside? ”
I nod, doing my best not to react at the images I can see all too well in my mind.
“But the novelty wore off soon enough. Especially once he’d .
. . taken me.” The dead expression on her face when she says it makes me sick inside.
“Bogdan stopped feeding me, except for a few odd scraps. I knew he’d grown bored with having me around, and by then, I understood enough to know that unless I could make myself useful, I wouldn’t last much longer.
The night he brought the file home he got angry because he couldn’t understand it and beat me to a pulp.
Then he got drunk and passed out. I read the file while he slept.
I’d always been good at maths, do you remember? ”
I nod. “I do. Tetya Ana always said you had a gift for numbers.”
“Yes.” Her eyes flare briefly. “I didn’t understand what the file was about.
Not then. But I did understand the numbers.
They made sense to me. And I knew I had to find a way to convince Bogdan I had value.
I knew by then I wasn’t pretty,” she says bitterly.
“He told me that all the time. Not that it stopped him from—” She breaks off, her face closed and tight.
I wait, breathing through my own disgust and anger.
“When Bogdan woke up,” she goes on eventually, “I explained the numbers to him. For the first time since he took me away, he was actually listening. He asked me if there was a way to make more money for himself, and I told him there was. I didn’t know how, then.
But I was determined to find a way.” She gives me a small smile.
“That was how it started. We moved to Romania soon after that, where Simon gave us the money to set up the webcam business. By the time I was twelve, I was managing all the books for Bogdan’s end of the business—and making sure he was taking a decent profit for himself. ”