Chapter 17 Cartier #2
I blurt it out on impulse. I don’t know why.
But from experience, I’ve always felt that Christmas brings out the best in most people, so perhaps this is what she needs to burn through her barriers and get her to be a little more …
normal around me. I’m fed up with seeing her look the other way and leave a room whenever I enter or she sees me coming.
“I … don’t do Christmas trees.”
I suspect that she doesn’t do much for fun either, but I keep that thought safely locked away. If we’re going to have any possibility of being more than strangers, getting personal isn’t going to help.
“There aren’t any rules.” I gesture to the bags strewn across the floor. “We just hang the baubles on the tree, and anything else can go around the room.”
I start unpacking stuff and spreading it out across the floor while she watches me. She hasn’t left the room. Yet.
“There’s enough here to decorate the entire house.”
For someone who ‘doesn’t do Christmas trees’, she kept everything to a wintry color scheme of white, silver, and gold. Baubles. Tinsel. Fairy lights. Candles. Snow globes. Reindeer, and nutcrackers, and snowy-white Santa figures.
When I’m finished, half the floor is covered with decorations, and the other half shimmers with a fine layer of escaped glitter. I could squeal like a piglet, but I contain myself. I don’t want to scare her away before we’ve even begun.
I stand up and face Ivana. “Fairy lights on the tree first.”
Her eyes roam the room as if she finds the whole experience too daunting to contemplate. Andrej said that she’s an enforcer for their business. How can she be overwhelmed by some Christmas baubles and a few strands of fairy lights?
“I’ll go make hot chocolate.”
I can’t help smiling. If that’s an olive branch, I’m all over it.
“Don’t forget the marshmallows.”
I half expect her not to come back, and am pleasantly surprised when the door opens, and she backs into the room carrying two mugs of hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream and topped with pink and white marshmallows.
She looks so out of place all dressed in black that I’m tempted to wrap a string of white tinsel around her neck. But I don’t want to push my luck.
The fairy lights are already on the tree.
“We’ll hang baubles next.”
It feels strange for me to give her orders, and even stranger when she follows them, but then nothing about this situation is normal.
We work in silence, stopping occasionally to stand back and survey our work. The hot chocolate fills me with warmth, and I find myself singing along to my favorite Christmas tunes. Ivana doesn’t join in.
“Do you have a favorite Christmas song?” I ask.
“No.” Her eyes barely meet mine as she hangs a silver vintage-style bauble on one of the lower branches.
Undeterred, I find a tiny snow globe with a hook and hang it close to Ivana. “What about ‘All I Want for Christmas’? Everyone loves Mariah Carey.”
She shrugs. “I don’t have time for the holidays.”
“You don’t get time off to spend with family?”
I flinch the instant the words leave my mouth because her shoulders stiffen, and she stands back from the tree, crushing a bauble underfoot.
“The Ivanovs are my family.”
“Ivana, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t need your apology.”
I feel her withdrawing, and I know that if she walks out of the room now, we’ll never come back from this.
Maybe this is a lost cause, but I’ve spent too much time around scarred women to give up without a fight.
Broken women are stronger once they’re fixed.
I sense that Ivana would be a great person to have on my side.
I turn back to the tree and hang a glittery white snowflake. “How long have you been with them?”
I deliberately avoid eye contact. If she leaves now, then I know that I crossed a line I shouldn’t have. But if she stays…
“Since I was ten years old.” She stands on the opposite side of the tree, so that I can’t see her face.
“I was two years old when my parents died,” I say. “My adoptive family gave me a photograph of me and my biological parents, taken when I was a baby. I still have it.”
I don’t press her for information. I just carry on talking.
“I don’t remember them. It bothered me for a long time, the lack of memories that I felt I should’ve held onto, but I learned to deal with it.”
“I have memories.”
The statement takes me by surprise, but I don’t break my rhythm of bauble-hook-branch.
“My sister and I ran away from an orphanage. The bad men were coming for us. We’d seen them talking to the man in charge and looking at us when they shook hands. Twins probably fetched a decent price on the black market.”
Bile rises in my throat, and I wish I hadn’t finished my hot chocolate so quickly.
“But Tamara hurt her ankle when we jumped out of the window. They caught us before we could get away.”
What the fuck!
“What happened?” It comes out as a hoarse rasping question.
“We fought them, but they were too strong. I think I killed one. I stole a knife from the kitchen. Aimed it at his heart. He tried to strangle me, and I remember Tamara screaming at him to let me go before I blacked out.”
She pauses, but I still don’t look at her.
“When I woke up, we were in a shipping container. It stunk of piss and shit. There were other people. Girls mostly. But Tamara was with me, and I didn’t care about anyone else. We found a corner and stayed there until Leonid found us.”
“Leonid found you?” I raise my eyes to meet hers, and she shrugs as if she’d bumped into him in Macy’s one day while he was running some errands.
“The others were dead.”
Shit!
“But you survived…”
I can’t even bear to think about how they must’ve felt. Two young girls, alone in a shipping container surrounded by corpses, scared to death of what would happen to them when they reached their destination.
“Leonid didn’t ask any questions. He took us home, bathed us, gave us clean clothes and food and a bed to sleep in. Then, a couple of days later, he told us that the bad men would never hurt anyone else.”
“He took care of them,” I whisper to myself.
Andrej said that he killed people who deserved it. Bad men. Men who hurt little girls like Ivana and Tamara.
“He trained us to work for him.” She steps out from behind the Christmas tree.
There is still no emotion in her expression, and perhaps it’s my imagination, but she looks lighter, as though sharing her story has shed a load from her shoulders.
The door opens then. Andrej enters, and her eyes sparkle, her whole body coming alive.
That’s when I understand why Ivana wanted to stop me from seeing him.
She is in love with Andrej Ivanov.