Chapter 3Ana
Ana
When Sasha told me Vasily Baranov would be flying in from Los Angeles, I asked him how I knew Vasily.
He told me he’s my husband, although there wasn’t a lot of confidence in his voice.
I asked if he knew when we got married, and he didn’t know.
I asked how well he knew Vasily, thinking it was a loose, professional acquaintance, perhaps even by reputation only, but he said they were childhood friends.
I feel like people usually know when their childhood friends get married, but maybe they don’t. I don’t even know if I have childhood friends.
I have a husband, though.
I asked Sasha if he had a picture of my husband, of Vasily, of Vasily Baranov— and I’m apparently Mrs. Baranov, which doesn’t sound right at all— but he didn’t.
He did say, “He’s very handsome, though.
Please don’t tell him I said that, or I’ll never hear the end of it.
Don’t tell Gigi either. He’ll get all self-conscious. ”
I smiled then, and the one comfort I’ve had in this whole thing is the fact that the first man who helped me in that shuttle, the one I thought of as the Marlboro Man, is Sasha’s husband, and Sasha grew up with my husband. It feels like fate.
Sasha is blocking the peephole when he knocks late in the night. I don’t think it’s intentional, but I can’t see Vasily Baranov until he can see me.
And he is giant.
Not quite so tall as Sasha, who’s solidly six and a half feet tall but slender.
The two of them make a daunting pair, both dressed in dark suits, Sasha sleek and dark-featured while Vasily is broad with pale skin and hair so light I wonder if it’s bleached.
His brows are barely brown, though. And his eyes are. ..
I want to say they’re a blue more vibrant than I’ve ever seen before, but I suppose I’ve seen them many, many times.
“Ana,” he says softly, his voice lighter than I would have imagined from so dense a man. He speaks it on a breath, as though it’s come unbidden from him.
“Is that my name? Sasha said—”
“You never told me her name,” Sasha says, a mild reprimand.
Vasily acknowledges this faux pas with only a terse nod.
Ana. I let it sit in my mind for a few seconds, trying it out. It doesn’t fit. I’ve held onto this hope that once I heard my name, Ana Baranov, everything would start to click. But it doesn’t make any better sense than Barbara or Veronica did.
And he’s no more familiar to me than Sasha or Gio or anyone else .
“A-are you my husband?” I stammer, realizing that I’m still holding the door like a shield over my body.
I haven’t allowed him to enter this tiny space as empty of character as I am, but it’s still mine more than anything else in the world is.
But then, he hasn’t done anything to enter.
He just stands there, his hands in his pockets and his eyes burrowing into me.
There’s another terse nod from him, and I swear those eyes intensify on me.
I can’t look away from him. I feel like he’s pulled the very air from my lungs.
I have this strange urge to melt into him, to just slam my weight into him with enough force that he has no choice but to wrap his arms around me and take my burden on, to hold me as I fall apart within him and vanish from the world.
Instead, I sink back into the shadow of my room.
I’m tired, and I just want to hide in anything that will hide me, and actually, this room was doing a pretty good job of that.
Before the knock on my door, I’d been comfortably curled up in the dark silence of the barren room and the ever-hiss of the central air conditioning.
“Did you . . . bring me clothes?” I whisper.
Vasily and Sasha exchange a glance, and then Vasily tips his head to the side, I guess to look behind the door at my body.
“She’s in scrubs,” Sasha explains. “We thought she’d be fine in those until you got here.”
Another nod, which I feel like has far more weight than most people’s nods, and then Vasily snaps a finger.
A slightly smaller but no less intimidating man with short brown hair and a deep scar on his neck steps forward.
I have no idea who he is— of course— and his smile looks banal enough, but I dislike him.
It’s the first time I’ve felt so strongly and so sure of my feelings.
A sick feeling settles in my gut over the fact that this man is clearly a friend or assistant to my husband, who didn’t summon nearly as much of a response from me.
I’d hoped everything would start to come back once I saw my husband, but now I’m starting to question why I was on the opposite side of the country from him to begin with. He didn’t even bring clothing for me.
The corners of my eyes prickle. I wasn’t found with a wedding ring. He has an air of wealth despite having scars comparable to the other men, so I’m guessing my ring was stolen, but I wish I had something of my own. An object. Some sort of an anchor right now to assure me that this is reality.
I spread my fingers and swipe my thumb and my first finger along my collarbones at the thought. Grasping like it’s a nervous habit of mine, but it brings me no more joy than anything else.
Finally, at that motion, Vasily frowns. Slight irritation, some confusion, and then he reaches out for me, like it’s natural for him to touch me.
I let him draw his own finger along the path mine traced. It’s hardly anything, a light brush over the divot there, but my breath catches. I find peace in it, but it also shoots a tremor through me, and I flinch as water springs in those prickling eyes.
Vasily recoils, and I want to ask him to come back, to put his hand on me again, to make me feel like a real human for just another second, but I can’t.
Not when he nods like he understands. He doesn’t, but I don’t either. How can I explain how his touch fills me with profound sorrow, like I’ve already lost him, while also making me crave more? What sense does that make?
“You lost your necklace,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper .
“Don’t apologize. Fuck.” His facade cracks further, and he scrubs the back of his neck as he takes another step back, this time to pace.
He’s stressed and struggling to hold himself together.
His beloved wife was just kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring.
She was rescued, but she doesn’t recognize him, she recoils at his touch, and she lost what was possibly a priceless heirloom.
If I forget that that’s me— which is oh, so easy to do— my heart will overflow with sympathy for the guy.
“We need that necklace,” he says, his voice suddenly taking command, seamlessly usurping Sasha. “You find that fucking necklace.”
“What’s it look like? I’ll have the boys go through inventory and put some feelers out. We’ll find it.”
“It’s a cross. Four centimeters by two centimeters.
Diamond encrusted. It’s...” He shakes his head as numbers spin in my thoughts.
I don’t know centimeters well, but I feel like this thing is big.
And diamond encrusted? Could be worth a fortune.
“We had an appraisal done of it some years back. I’ll see if we can get specifics. ”
The way he looks to the other man tells me that’s the guy who will get those specifics.
But then Vasily focuses on me, and there’s a softness to him when he says, “We’ll get it back. I promise.”
“Thank you. I... I don’t remember it, but I think I’d like.
.. I think I...” I turn away to collect myself, praying— truly praying, because if that necklace is a cross and it means that much to me that he’s going to fuss over it, I think I must speak to God— that I’ll be the woman he married and this will all be a horrible flicker in our lives .
The door is suddenly pushed, forcing me to step back, giving me no choice but to let this man, this giant, my husband into my space.
It doesn’t matter if I want him to hold me or not.
It doesn’t matter if my entire body shatters or not.
His arms are around me, and he’s holding me close, and his heart is beating against my throat and it matches me.
This, if nothing else in the entire world, feels right in a way that will surely kill me, but I fear not death.
“I’m sorry,” Vasily says with a soft shushing sound. “I’m sorry I let you cry.”
I sniffle and laugh weakly. “It’s okay. This is probably weird for you, too, isn’t it?”
Instead of an answer, he kisses the top of my head and says, “Let’s go home, Ana.”
I don’t know what home is, but I’d like that.
There’s a comfort to the plane that I haven’t experienced since waking up into this new me. Vasily is next to me, his hand on me, the touch casual and possessive in the most soothing way. He owns me, and that’s safety. That’s security. That’s the assurance that I’ll be cared of through this.
Kostya, the man who stood behind him, is here, too.
I still don’t like him, but that could just be what the relationship is between a man’s assistant and his wife.
I’m sure we butt heads a lot, and he can’t do anything about it, because he doesn’t want to be fired from his job, so he makes a nuisance of himself to me.
I may be horrible. Vasily may have softened a bit, but he’s still cool and professional. This could be him doing his best, and this could be a me that won’t last. I could get my memories back and be a nightmare.
I don’t think that’s true, but none of my other guesses about myself have turned out to be correct. When I was vomiting all over diamond plate and Gio’s shoe, I certainly didn’t think my husband owned a private jet.
The flight attendants and pilots are all dressed in simple uniforms, boat neck shirts and light jackets, and they all have a version of my tattoo on their jackets. We are all kindred in a way, even if not by blood, and that makes me feel safe.
But only I have a B in the marking.
Everything is silent in the cabin and I’ve got Vasily’s hand in mine because that’s what feels the most right to me. I tap the ring on his thumb, with the insignia that matches all the ones on the staff. “What does this mean?”
He frowns at it in a way that I would take to mean he actually dislikes the symbol that’s emblazoned everywhere around us. But then he says, “Baranov. It means Baranov.”
“It’s a V.”
“It’s a ram.”
I look at it again. “Oh, it’s an Aries symbol. Like the ram.”
“Da. The ram. Baranov is the ram.”
When Sasha first spoke to me, it was in another language.
I didn’t understand it, but Vasily is not an American name either.
And my own name, Ana, spoken with an ah sound, that’s not necessarily an American name either.
Not typically, I don’t think. And even though my husband speaks English and doesn’t sound any different from Sasha or anyone else at that place, he just said da instead of yes. “Are you Russian? ”
“Da,” he says again, only to correct to, “Yes,” but I liked how it sounded the first time better.
“Am I Russian?”
He chuckles at that, and it’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh.
I like it. I get this feeling I haven’t heard it a lot, or maybe just not recently, but I like it.
Then he lifts our enmeshed hands and brushes his soft lips against the back of my fingers.
“No. You are American. Italian, but American-born. You should sleep, Ana. It’s been a long day. ”
He’s right. And I do. I close my eyes and fall right to sleep, lulled by the engines and the vibrations of the hull.
We’re still in the air when I wake up, though, and Vasily and Kostya are having a conversation in Russian, not a single word familiar to my ears, except I swear I hear my name repeatedly.
I keep my eyes closed, not wanting to interrupt them or make Vasily think he needs to stop talking or switch to English to cater to me.
I listen to the cadence of their voices, wondering if the anger I hear is true or if it’s the tone of their native tongue.
No, they’re definitely arguing— about me.
Kostya doesn’t like me. He’s probably saying that Vasily should have left me to rot in Consummate’s headquarters.
But I’m Vasily’s wife. Yes, Vasily has been colder to me than I’d hoped for, particularly now of all times, but he’s my husband.
He married me. He loves me enough to have pledged his life to me.
I curl closer to Vasily, slinging my arm across his lap and nuzzling against his chest, breathing in something sweet like berries but also hinting at mossy firewood. It’s an intriguing scent, definitely one I enjoy, and that must be a good sign, right?
He squirms under my touch and nudges me away with a careful but firm hand .
Maybe I’m wrong about everything. Because what man would push his wife away? Not just his wife either, but a woman he’s nearly lost forever?
And I just want to cry.