2. Alexei #2
The first time Papa came back to visit, after the Orlovs were defeated, he came alone. I went to his bedroom to wake him on the first morning and found his bed empty. I scoured the entire house before finally bracing myself to go downstairs, even though part of me knew that was where he’d be.
I found him sitting on a lone chair, in the middle of the concrete room in which the Orlovs had once held him prisoner.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, anger and old fear making my voice shake. “You shouldn’t be in this place.”
When he looked at me, his face was as deeply lined as I’d ever seen it, his eyes faded and raw with pain, but there’d been peace in his expression too, or at least acceptance.
“D’yavol obitayet v tikhikh vodakh,” he’d said quietly. The devil lives in the still waters.
I understood immediately.
He’d needed a night alone with his ghosts. A chance to reckon with a past he had been incapable, at the time, of fighting.
In a strange way, I even envied him the ability to so easily lay those ghosts to rest.
But the truth is that I’d rather play host to the devil than disturb the still waters in which my ghosts reside.
Which is why it takes all of my composure now to follow my father’s measured footsteps to the heavy steel door that guards the stone stairway to hell.
That goddamn smell.
It hits me as soon as the door opens, a dank, stale miasma tinged with the sharp edge of blood and violence.
Maybe the latter is only my imagination.
The truth is that I lost so much of my own blood down here, then later spilled so much of others on Orlov’s orders, that, real or not, the stench of it remains indelibly entwined with the air.
I clench my fists, willing my gut to remain calm. Even seven years later, this place makes me sicker than a rookie facing his first corpse.
I follow my father’s stiff back through the dark corridor, refusing to look left or right.
My step falters only once: when I pass the room where Ofelia was kept.
The walls in there are still pockmarked by bullet holes from the night she was rescued, when we finally overturned the Orlovs.
Every bullet hole is a reminder of how close she came to dying. Of the scars she bears still, inside and out.
Breathing deeply, I force myself to pass the open door.
It’s over now. She survived.
I try to hold on to that.
Several moments later, we finally reach the vault.
It’s certainly impressive, I think dispassionately as we enter the codes with which we’ve replaced the original locks and the heavy iron door swings open.
The vault is an entire room, built to hold a fortune in pre-revolutionary treasures my father and Roman’s smuggled out of Russia in crates of Graf vodka.
Over the last few years, Roman’s family and mine have worked together to restore the treasures to the descendants of their former owners.
But many pieces remain unclaimed, their owners either long dead or untraceable.
The lights come on automatically, revealing shelf after shelf of exquisite jewelry and art. At the center of the room are glass cases holding two Fabergé eggs, the most valuable pieces in the entire collection, one belonging to Roman’s family, the other to mine.
Although now I suppose we’re one big, happy fucking family, I think grimly, staring at the jeweled creations.
And just like that, we’re back to Ofelia again.
“Here.” Papa’s voice is almost shockingly loud in the enclosed metal space. He reaches for a small box on one of the shelves. “It isn’t as valuable as some of the pieces. At least, not in monetary terms.”
He opens it, revealing a gossamer-thin webbed necklace interspersed with seed pearls.
Most of the pieces on the shelves have cards beneath them giving details of the original owner. This piece, however, sits on our family’s personal shelf.
I frown as he places it in my hands. “Where did it come from?” I don’t recall having ever seen my mother or Darya wear it.
“It belonged to my first daughter.” His expression is unusually pensive. “It was a christening gift from her maternal grandfather.”
I know my father’s first family died many years ago in Paris. They were murdered, burned alive by the same man who, many years later, orchestrated the Orlov coup.
But knowing it is one thing. Holding a necklace that was once worn by my dead half sister is another thing entirely.
“What was her name?”
It seems absurd that I don’t already know it. But my father, for all that he has mellowed in old age, remains a proud man who rarely speaks of anything unpleasant from his past. Neither Darya nor I knew anything of his first family until after the Orlovs were defeated.
“Irina.” His voice cracks slightly on the name. He turns away abruptly, clearing his throat.
I study the necklace and pretend not to notice.
When he speaks again, he has himself firmly under control. “Ofelia reminds me of her. Not so much physically. But . . . here.” He puts his closed fist over his heart, his old eyes momentarily fierce. “She has the same strength Irina did.”
Yes. She does.
The simultaneous realities converge again, and I am back in that fucking cell, my knife against Ofelia’s skin, her eyes blazing up at me with a strange ferocity, as if despite her torn gown and the watching men, we are the only two people in the room.
“Trust me,” I’d whispered in her ear.
Trust me—to take my blade to your skin.
Trust me—or you will die here, and it will all have been for nothing.
“Yes,” I say now, rubbing my thumb over the thin strands of the necklace. “Ofelia is strong in ways most people don’t ever see.”
I realize too late that my father is watching me with disquieting perception.
And whatever you might suspect, I think bitterly, doesn’t come close to the brutal reality.
Because if my father guessed at even a fraction of what happened between Ofelia and me, any empathy he might feel now would be gone faster than I could draw a gun.
Sergei Petrovsky might be old, but he’s as tough and proud as he ever was. He could never forgive me for putting hands on the beautiful girl he sees as a granddaughter.
I don’t blame him.
I don’t forgive myself for it either.
“What about you, syn moy?” he asks quietly. “You did not make Ofelia a gift on her twenty-first birthday. Perhaps you might like to make one now.”
Of course he noticed that. One of the most annoying things about my father is his uncanny ability to notice every small thing that others do not.
In this case though, he’s wrong. I did, in fact, bring a gift to Ofelia’s party.
But after the moment in the garden, I took it home again, afraid of what my gift might betray. Now my eye lingers on the small box, hidden far to the rear of my shelf in the family section, and once again, I’m of two minds.
No.
My conscience slams down on the question before it truly forms in my mind.
“I’ll pick something up in Paris,” I say lightly, gesturing to the door. “If you’re finished in here, I still need to pack. And I have some business to take care of before I fly.”
Papa’s faded blue eyes flash, there and gone, but not before I catch a glimpse of the hard, ruthless pakhan life forced him to become.
Sergei Petrovsky was once Sergei Naryshkin, son of a count who was imprisoned for loyalty to the fallen Romanov czar.
Born and raised in a Russian gulag, Sergei not only survived, but built a network he would later use to fulfill his father’s promise to be guardian of the Naryshkin treasures, the lost heirlooms of the pre-revolutionary Russian nobility.
He has lived long enough to see his closest friend, three of his children, and two wives murdered for that treasure.
Now, when he looks at me, seeing my missing eye and the scars on my face, I know that he sees all that has been lost. I know part of him feels responsible for what I have become.
But here’s what I know: all men have choices.
I made mine long ago, the night I told my sister to run and take Papa with her.
Not because of loyalty, honor, or some misguided sense of pride.
I became a killer because the Orlovs came into my house and tortured and murdered the people I love.
But I don’t blame them, just like I don’t blame my father or some stupid trinkets in a vault, no matter how valuable they might be.
Deep down, I know I was always a killer.
All I ever needed was someone to hand me the knife.
So I meet my father’s stare with my lone eye, evenly and steadily. And just as I glimpsed the steel in his soul, briefly, I allow him to see the darkness in mine.
The steel in his eyes fades to resignation as he turns for the door.
I give the square box a final look.
Then, driven by some impulse I truly don’t understand, I slip the box into my pocket.
Giving the vault one last look, I close the door on the past.