Chapter 25Ana
Ana
I knew my memories were going to be a motley crew of good and bad, that life comes with pain and what sticks the longest isn’t nearly as happy as it sad or embarrassing. I knew that getting my memories back would mean resurrecting a lot of stuff I’d rather bury.
We’re interrupted by the ding of the elevator door. The same orderly from before walks out, giving me a nod as he passes by with a stretcher. A human shape is hidden under a white cloth. One of the wheels squeaks as he turns the corner into the morgue .
Vasily and Dima both make the sign of the cross. It’s different from how I do it. They hold three fingers together with their ring and pinky fingers curled down, and they go right to left across their chests.
I wonder if I’ve noticed that before or if I’ve crossed myself hundreds of times in their churches and never paid enough attention to mimic everyone around me.
“We’re going to need this room,” the orderly says meaningfully, and we nod and gather what little we have.
“Where do we go from here?” Dima asks Vasily.
Vasily pauses, the slides he’s pulled from Dima’s Target bag hitting the ground in dual thuds. He may know every decision he’s ever made, but he’s as shell-shocked as I am.
I reach out to him, intent on telling him it’s okay if he doesn’t know, that we just have to get ourselves to safety before he figures out what’s next.
Before I can touch him, he shakes his head and shoves his big feet into the flimsy, casual, warm-weather shoes.
He gropes his pants, I know subconsciously hunting for his pills, and I’m secretly glad he can’t find them when he says, “I need to see my sister. Dima, give Ana your jacket. It’s cold outside. ”
The hour-long drive to Sedona is quiet. Everything that’s happened today must catch up with Vasily because he’s sound asleep by the time Dima tells us it’s safe for us to come out.
We had to fold down the back seats and lay with our bodies half in the trunk, covering ourselves with a blanket pilfered from the hospital.
Vasily took advantage of the situation and curled himself around me.
I want to be mad enough to push him away, but his arm is a nice pillow. His body is warm. I feel safe .
And the quiet is exactly what I need. I need it to think.
So many memories have just rushed back, but adding the minutes up, they’re an hour of an entire lifetime.
Few are meaningful. I remember the chocolate cake I vomited up after Dad told me his cancer was terminal, but I don’t remember his death.
I remember kissing a boy in a play rehearsal but not my first real kiss or the play itself.
I remember a classmate helping me turn off an alarm because my baby bump made it hard to reach across the stove but not holding newborn Artom for the first time.
The fifteen days I spent with Vasily are a blink. Him removing my blindfold, a perfectly flipped pancake, and ya tebya lyublyu.
Oh, and feeling like my heart had been ripped out on a sun-bleached rooftop in Sedona, which makes me wonder if that’s where we’re going. A tear leaks from my eye, slides over the bridge of my nose, and drips into my hair.
Memories of Dima are more plentiful. Easier. Few are any more substantial, but if there’s anyone I can trust right now, it’s Dima.
And not Tony. I’ve spent my entire life praying that, just once, my brother would prove himself worthy of my love, and he’s failed at every single pass. That he’s trying to kidnap my son is on par for him.
I’m somewhere between Flagstaff and Sedona while he, my son, and my cousin are in Phoenix.
“Hey Dima?” I whisper.
“Yeah, Lace?”
“Do you know Maria Benedetti?”
Silence. But if he’s trying to place the name, he’d make some sound. A thoughtful hum. A follow-up question. Cold silence is as good as an affirmative .
“I don’t care that she and Vasily had sex.” And I don’t care if I’m lying. Everyone else is lying to me; it’s my turn now.
“Okay, yeah. I know Maria. Not well, but... hell, I was going to say you can ask Kostya about her, but I guess not. I can’t believe how fucked this got.”
I count to three, tell myself to talk in a normal cadence. Vasily’s breathing heavily enough I don’t think I’ll wake him, but I don’t want to sound an alarm until I have to. But if Kostya and Maria are in cahoots, I may have to sound that alarm. “So I shouldn’t trust her?”
Dima gives me that thoughtful hum. “Mmm, I guess that depends on what you’re trusting her with.”
“Because she’s undercover ATF?”
“Yep.”
“I left Artom in her care so I could fly up here.”
“Oh. Oh. Okay yeah, she hates your brother. She’ll do her best with Artom.”
I go silent for a few more seconds, reminding myself that this is my thinking time. But I can’t stop myself. “Hey, Dima?”
I hear the laugh in his voice this time. “Yes, Lace.”
“What Vasily did to me, six years ago in Flagstaff, was it unforgivable?”
The silence is much longer this time. No one should ever ask someone else to decide that. That he takes so long to answer is a testament to his character and how much I can trust him. He’s a thug with a crooked nose and tacky gold chains in a black track suit, but he’s trying to help.
“I don’t have a good answer for you,” he says morosely.
“Because Vasily’s your best friend, so you don’t want to go against him?” And he’s right here, snoring away, but you never know .
“Nah, fuck him. He tried to kill me. When this is all settled, we’re going to have a serious fucking problem. But for now, he’s my pakhan.”
“Why can’t you answer my question, then?”
“Because I don’t know that I would have done anything differently in his shoes. And I’m not going to say life has been easy. Definitely not for you. But not for him either.”
“He’s the Bratva king. He lives in a giant penthouse apartment.”
“Yep. Lap of luxury, that guy. Not saying otherwise. But he’s been waiting to die since you left. No matter what he’s done, he’s been watching the clock tick down. You know he hasn’t seen Kseniya in three years? She has a baby, and he’s never seen her.”
“Too big for Flagstaff,” I huff.
“Too scared to leave an impression on her, just to die. Fucking coward.”
I’m not going to say Vasily heard that, but something happens in his subconscious. His arm tightens around me and his legs tuck up under mine.
“Tony sold my virginity to him to settle a debt, and instead, Vasily decided to keep me. But only for two weeks, right?”
“Fifteen days, yeah.”
“And then... and then what? If that was always the plan, then... I hate him for sending me back to Tony, I know this, but why if that was the plan all along?”
“I don’t ask questions. But I know you two were so obsessed with each other it was disgusting. Like, super revolting. Gross. I think you were planning to run off together like some fucking Romeo and Juliet nonsense.”
“How? He was your... brigadier? Is that right? ”
“His brother was avtoritet over Flagstaff. But the night before he sent you back to Tony, Artyom was murdered. As his second, Vasily replaced him. And at that point, his brother, his father, and his uncle had all died after taking over Flagstaff, so Vasily thought it was his turn, that he was going to die next. That was how he justified sending you back to Tony.”
Hmph. I attempt to squirm out of his arms if only to climb out of the trunk and up into the front seat with Dima, but Vasily’s hold is firm as ever. “That’s stupid,” I huff. “He’s stupid.”
“Yep.”
“How was that any better? My brother sold me to him.”
“That’s why I was in charge of watching out for you.”
I refuse to be satisfied with that. “I was pregnant!”
“Yeah, but Vasily didn’t know that.”
“I saw the videos; I know he was trying to get me pregnant,” I hiss.
Dima snorts at that. “Oh, ho, ho. So let me tell you about the soft opening for your restaurant, when you drank too much homemade medovukha when we were closing up, and by the time I was pouring you into the car, you were admitting all kinds of things.”
“No!” I gasp, horrified before he can even say what I confessed.
“You told me that the entire fucking time you were with Vasily, you lied and told him you were on birth control—”
“I did not!”
“— And you were the mastermind behind your sex tapes. You staged them to convince everyone that you weren’t worth buying for an arranged marriage.”
“No way!”
“Yes way. You tried to baby trap Vasily.”
He actually sings that .
Total jerk move.
“I am not a baby trapper!” But man, does that clear up some stuff.
“Not a successful one. Well, you haven’t succeeded yet. Now’s your chance.”
I dwell on that for the rest of the drive.
It sits in my mind as we reach the safe house in Sedona, where I’m introduced to Kseniya and Alex, both of whom I guess I was friendly with when I was in Flagstaff.
Kseniya’s as fiery as Alex is sweet, both of them are just as worried about me as what’s going on back home, and Kseniya smacks Vasily many times when she finds out I was the woman in his apartment the other day.
Vasily cries mercy, but I can see his eyes going damp as they talk.
I see how relieved he is that she’s okay and how happy he is that I’ve been reunited with her despite the fact that those memories haven’t come back.
I need to figure out a lot of stuff. It’s not just about me or even Artom or Vasily; I have a business back in Tampa.
There’s no way I thought I could pop back up in Vasily’s life with his son— whom I apparently tried to trap him with— and expect him to let me go right back to Tampa when the dust settled, but I know myself well enough to know I wouldn’t give up on something like that.
Not when I’d invested so much of myself into it and the community around it.
In fact, I feel some relief when Kseniya asks Vasily, “What’s your plan from here?” I feel like once I know that, I can decide better for myself.
He says, “That’s Ana’s decision,” and everyone turns to me.