Chapter 34 Katarina #2
He pushed me back until I fell onto my elbows. We’d been sitting on the rug before the fire, and suddenly the location seemed too intimate. I wondered what the rug would feel like on my naked skin.
“Just trying? I better step up my game if I want to keep you satisfied, little stray. You’re awfully demanding,” he said, his dark eyes dancing.
“Are you complaining?” I wondered.
He prowled across me and laughed, and the dark intention in his voice sent goosebumps down my spine. This man was sin personified and, God help me, I was crazy about him.
“The day I answer yes to that, I’ve been body-snatched. Call the cops,” he said, giving me a wicked smile as he lowered his head to kiss me.
He was just about there when the doorbell rang. It echoed through the house.
“Shit, Paolo’s not here,” Massimo murmured. “Fuck it, ignore it.”
A banging followed, loud and authoritative.
“Police, open up!” The shout reached us on the fourth floor.
Massimo frowned. “You know I was kidding about calling the cops.”
I scrambled up. “What do they want?” Suddenly, all the illegal shit that Massimo had done felt like a huge flashing sign above our heads.
“I’ll go and see. Stay here, just like this, don’t move,” he instructed, clearly not bothered at all about the cops visiting.
He left the room, and I rushed to follow. I listened from the stairs but couldn’t hear much.
“We’re taking you in for questioning regarding the potential arson at Hallow Hall,” a loud voice announced.
I froze on the bottom step and watched the sight before me. Massimo in handcuffs. It was wrong on every level.
The detective who had been at Hallow Hall the day of the fire stared at me.
“Unless you have a warrant for her arrest, look the fuck away,” Massimo growled at him, looking mad enough to almost break the handcuffs apart with sheer, brute strength.
“We are only interested in you,” the detective said, and nodded to the officer holding Massimo’s arm.
He found my eyes with a hard stare. “Wait for me here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Then, he was gone.
I’d fallen asleep at the TV when Paolo appeared to announce a visitor. I was immediately wary, considering everything that had happened, but when I followed him to the sitting room and saw Lucy, my fear melted. I hugged her hard, and she hugged me right back.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” she murmured. “I was so worried when you were gone.”
“How did you find me?”
“Giada found Massimo’s address. I figured I’d check here.” She glanced up at her bodyguard. “We’re just going to talk. Go take a break.”
Nina considered her for a long moment and then stalked a little distance off.
Lucy let out a long-suffering sigh. “Apparently I find trouble too easily, so I need to be babysat.”
“At least she’s watching out for you,” I argued. “It’s not safe . . . anywhere, it seems like, these days.”
“Yeah, well, especially when you’re a girl,” Lucy added.
We exchanged pained smiles.
“So.” Lucy pushed her hair back and sat up straighter. “Tell me what happened after you left the hotel.”
I caught her up on what I remembered, shivering at the memory of Ivan. I’d hoped to never see that monster again. At least he was gone now. Gone. I hadn’t wrapped my head around it. Lucy listened to my rambling and my anxiety about Massimo.
“Okay, that’s a lot. You’ve been through hell, basically, in the last day.” She tapped her lip and seemed to ponder something. Then she straightened up and nodded. “Well, I have a few hours before I need to make my train. What are we doing to turn this day around?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Massimo doesn’t want me to leave the house. I can’t believe the police were here. What if they charge him with something?” I chewed my lip.
“What about your mom, though? We could go and see her,” Lucy suggested. “You said that the other guys are dead . . . so as long as we’re careful, why not?”
Excitement and nerves flared in my gut. Go and see my mom?
“If you want to, that is,” Lucy added.
I nodded. “Yes, I want to. I want to very much.”
Nina had a rented car, and we drove to my old address.
“What if she moved?” I worried, gazing out the window.
“And what if she didn’t? Let’s go and see!” Lucy pushed open the door.
I got out after her. Nina walked in front of us toward the block of apartments.
Tension and anticipation beating through me, I pressed the buzzer on the door and then waited.
Moments passed.
“I guess she’s not home?” Lucy suggested.
Suddenly, the intercom crackled to life.
“Buongiorno?”
“Hello, I’m looking for someone who used to rent this flat, or maybe she still does . . . Elena Dmitrova?” I said quickly.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know about any previous tenants. We’ve lived here two years.”
Two years! All this time in Hallow Hall, I’d been imagining my mother here, in this apartment, and she hadn’t been.
“We could check the church? You said she went there often,” Lucy suggested after I thanked the person on the intercom and they hung up.
It was finally a sunny day; the world gleamed white and pure and clean where the sunlight fell on the snow. I didn’t want to go home and obsess about Massimo in police custody.
I turned in the direction of the church. “Let’s go and see.”
The church was quiet as we entered and glanced around. My heart fell when I saw that she wasn’t inside. Sure, she might be at work, but we’d passed the tiny seamstress shop where she’d been employed, and it had been closed. She might have changed jobs, though. It had been three years.
A nun walked down the aisle, and Lucy bustled over to her.
They spoke quietly as I stared up at the stained-glass window that I’d looked at every Sunday for years, when I was younger.
The world had felt like a safer place then, before I’d known a place like Hallow Hall even existed.
Now that I knew about the evil of the people who worked there, I couldn’t forget it.
I was forever marked by that wickedness.
The sister walked away, and Lucy and her bodyguard talked softly. Lucy seemed upset.
I wandered toward them. “What’s wrong?”
Nina moved away, turning to face the door, giving us privacy.
Lucy seemed pale, her dark eyes bright. She watched me steadily, making me nervous.
“Seriously, what’s going on?”
“I asked that nun about your mother, since you said she used to come every day.”
I nodded. “Did she know something? Was she already here today?”
Lucy was quiet for a long, long moment, and when she spoke, her voice was soft. “She wasn’t here today. She hasn’t been here in a long time. The sister remembers her, though, she spoke very highly of her.”
“She changed churches? I guess after Vargas was excommunicated, maybe,” I rambled.
Lucy just watched me.
“What? You’re making me nervous.”
Her hands reached out and touched mine, threading our fingers together. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to do it. I don’t want to lie to you. The sister remembered your mother, and she remembers what happened to her . . .”
“What happened to her?” I repeated, my heartbeat slowing down. “What happened?”
Lucy blinked, a tear appearing on her lashes, and I knew.
In my heart, in that second, everything changed.
“No,” I whispered softly, shaking my head like that could change reality. “No, it can’t be.”
Lucy took a deep breath. “She said she’s laid to rest here in the churchyard.”
I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “I don’t believe it. It’s a lie—show me.”
It took half an hour to find her headstone.
The snow had been falling for days since the terrible storm the night of the fire, and no one had cleared the headstones in the old graveyard.
My mother’s final resting place was right before the wall met the woods behind the church.
The world was still as I cleaned snow off the entire thing and confirmed it for myself.
Here lies Elena Dmitrova. A mother.
My attention caught on the date of her passing.
I couldn’t stop staring at it. Two years ago?
For two years, I’d been held hostage in Hallow Hall, believing it to be the only thing I could do to keep my mom safe.
It had all been a lie. Not only had I been there two years longer than I’d needed to, but I’d missed being with her in the end.
Lucy had already called Giada to ask her to look into how it had happened.
Cancer. She’d always hated going to the doctor and had avoided it at all costs.
When she’d finally gone, it had been inoperable.
I sat on the ground beside the grave for hours. My feet and legs were frozen through, but none of it mattered. The only person in the world who had cared about me was gone.
“We should get you home,” Lucy said. She’d given me time alone with the grave for a while before returning to urge me to go and get warmed up.
I couldn’t stop staring at the name of my mother, written in stone.
“It’s too cold out here, Kat. You’ll get ill.”
“What does it matter? What does any of it matter anymore?” I mused. I couldn’t seem to cry. It was like the tears were frozen inside me and they wouldn’t thaw enough to fall. Maybe I’d feel better if they did, but right now, they burned inside my chest.
“Because she wouldn’t want you to get sick. Right or wrong, everything she did was what she thought was best for you, misguided or not.”
“And now I’ll never see her again. Now I have no one.” My words lashed at my heart. There was no emotion there. It had all been burned away.
“Don’t say that—”
“It’s true. You don’t understand. You have your sister with you through everything. You can’t imagine what it feels like to know . . . you are alone.”
Lucy touched my back, and I fought a flinch. She didn’t deserve my anger. She didn’t do anything wrong. It was me.
“You have Massimo, don’t you?”
Massimo. The cold inside my chest warmed as I thought of him. A safe harbor in the storm. God, I hoped the police would be done with him and let him go. I couldn’t stand being apart for too long.