Chapter 42 - Anatoli
There was never a time in my life when I thought I could be so selfless. I had been on my own for so long that I only ever had to look out for myself. But no longer. There was no way I could give Masha up, but to keep her by my side would be asking her to sacrifice too much.
The one thing still threatening to tear us apart was her family, and I couldn’t exactly get rid of them. I didn’t even want to anymore, because it would have caused her too much pain.
“Are you kidding me?”
I turned to see her glaring at me, as furious as if we hadn’t just crawled out of bed together, totally in sync at last. It looked like she was ready to break the headboard off the bed and use it like a baseball bat to beat me to a pulp.
“There’s no way I’m letting you end this,” she said, her eyes dark with anger.
For a split second, I was confused. Wouldn’t that be what she wanted? I reached for her and shook my head when she stepped back, just about breathing fire. “I’m not ending us,” I said. “Nothing’s coming between us ever again. I’m ending the feud.”
She let me pull her close then, wrapping her arms around me, her heart thudding in her chest. I leaned back, glaring down at her. “I fucking love you, Masha.”
Her jaw dropped, and she blinked rapidly several times. I waited for her to say something, namely that she felt the same about me, but she only eased herself down onto the bed and stared at the closed curtains in our dank little room.
“How are you going to do it?” she asked, as if I hadn’t spilled my guts all over the floor in front of her.
“I’m going to make a deal,” I said. “I have something I think your cousin Mat will be very interested in.”
She rolled her eyes. “They’ll just shoot you and take me back,” she said.
I snickered. “While you are the thing I hold most dear in this world,” I said. “I wasn’t speaking about you.”
She pelted me with more questions, but time was of the essence now.
Instead of messaging Yury about coming to move Masha’s sister’s car, I had him get the plane ready.
It might have been quicker to speak to Daniil or even the big boss, Aleks, but I wasn’t feeling too friendly toward those two at the moment.
And Mat was based in my old stomping grounds, his wife a tech genius. I’d only deal with them.
No amount of cajoling could get me to spend the night and start for Silicon Valley in the morning.
I’d had a concussion before, along with bruised ribs and a bashed-in face.
This had to end, so we didn’t have to jump at every kid’s prank.
And if they believed Masha was still with me against her will, there was no telling what they’d do, including going after my family in Russia.
They were pains in my ass, but they’d accepted Masha with open arms, and she seemed to like them, craziness and all. She wouldn’t want them to be under siege, either.
We arrived in San Jose in the wee hours of the morning, and Masha suggested we go to her old apartment to get some rest until it was a civilized hour to drive to Mat’s house.
“Nope,” I said, hustling her into a hurriedly acquired rental car. “If you don’t think they’re watching your old apartment, I’m going to think you’re losing your edge. And sorry, but your family hadn’t been acting too civilized, so Mat can haul his ass out of bed.”
She gnawed on her lip the whole way, alternating between reaching for my hand and thinking better of it.
Her loyalty was one of the things I admired most about her, among so many other things, and I felt like I finally had some of it.
But was it enough? She was clearly worried that this wouldn’t work, but was it because she didn’t want to be a young widow, or because she didn’t think she had the strength to go against her most beloved cousin face-to-face?
A block before we arrived, we switched seats, and as she drove up to Mat’s gatehouse, I ducked down in the back at her insistence.
“Your plan won’t work if you’re dead before you get to talk to him,” she argued when I balked. Enough said.
She parked near the door and warned me to hang back until she spoke to him, then marched up to the door with all the bravery I expected of my fierce wife. The guard at the gatehouse must have radioed ahead, because Mat threw open the door before she could knock.
“Damn it, Masha, we’ve been worried sick. I was getting on a plane tomorrow to help search for you.” He grabbed her shoulders, looking her over. “How did you get away? And where’s that bastard, Ovinko?”
Without a backward glance, she shoved him back inside.
A few minutes passed, and I only heard a few shouts from Mat.
Then she appeared in the doorway again and waved me over.
Inside, Mat stood, tense and furious, but didn’t aim a gun at my head when I crossed the threshold.
He looked highly dangerous despite the fact that he wore a robe over blue striped pajama pants.
“You’ve got five minutes,” he snarled. “Please believe you won’t make it out of here alive if you take one single step out of line.”
Masha swatted him in the arm, but he never took his steely gaze off me. “Mat, you promised you’d listen.”
“Now that you’re safe, I don’t have to do a damn thing,” he said pugnaciously.
“You do if you ever want to see me again. You said you’d give him ten minutes.”
As he looked at her, he realized she was deadly serious, and I could tell it was killing him.
I almost felt sorry for him. He motioned for me to go ahead of him into an office, and I calmly took a seat.
Masha perched on the arm of the chair, hovering protectively in case anyone should get trigger-happy.
I reached for her hand and squeezed it, making Mat just about pop a vein in his forehead.
I took a deep breath and began describing my baby, the software I’d been honing and perfecting for the better part of a year.
It was so damn amazing at collecting information that it would have made me a billionaire if I hadn’t gone so far, and now anyone who used it ended up breaking all sorts of federal laws.
But people like Mat Fokin didn’t care about such things.
It was so amazing in its surveillance capability that there was nothing else like it. When I finished explaining all its bells and whistles, Mat gave me a hard stare, ready to shoot me all over again.
“Bullshit,” he said.
“Have your wife look it over,” I said. “It’s on my laptop in the car.”
After a little back and forth, because he didn’t want me within a thousand yards of CJ, as she probably rightly hated my guts, he sent someone to fetch my computer. When CJ finally came down, she looked me over as if I were a venomous spider, but took the laptop and fired it up.
Masha opened her mouth to speak, but I squeezed her hand. She gave me an exasperated look, but I wouldn’t have her beg on my behalf. I was going to fix this for her and give her back her family.
After a tense half an hour, CJ snapped my computer shut and rolled her neck. “It does seem pretty great, but of course I’d need to do more testing.” She had a lot better poker face than the last time I saw her.
“What’s the catch?” Mat said. “And why should we trust you?”
“I only want you not to renounce Masha as a traitor. She’s never once gone against you. Trust is earned, so I suppose you’ll just have to wait and see about me.”
Masha huffed and stood up. “You shouldn’t be upset with me anyway, or Anatoli,” she said.
“And you should trust him because he’s giving you this incredible tool that you could very well use against him.
All because he—” she stopped, glanced back at me.
I nodded. She turned to CJ. “He loves me, CJ. The way Mat loves you.”
CJ made a horrified face, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Enough,” Mat said. “It’s freaking four in the morning. CJ will look at the program when she has time.”
“Take all the time you need,” I said, standing and nodding for her to keep my laptop.
“Another reason to trust him,” Masha said. I shrugged. Not really. There was nothing on it except the program. I wasn’t stupid and still didn’t trust Mat as far as I could throw his ass.
Mat made some noises about Masha staying behind while I got the hell out, but I didn’t have to put my foot down about that because Masha did it fine on her own.
As unhappy as he looked about it, I made it out to the car without getting the back of my head blown off, and Masha fed directions to her apartment into the GPS.
We were safe for the moment, but if things blew up, I would fight for her and just hope the fallout didn’t destroy what we had together.
She let her head fall back on the seat, her eyes closed, still gnawing on her lip, still anxious. The outcome of this meant everything to her. She had told them that I loved her, not that she loved me. Would she still stay with me if her family actually made her choose?