JETMIR
CHAPTER FOUR
Three Years Later
The sun rose over the horizon and shone through the wall of windows in my South Beach penthouse in Miami. Of course, it wasn’t in my name, since that would alert the Santos family. I bought it in Anya’s name; she just didn’t know about it.
After all, she was my wife. I had to be close to her and keep an eye on her.
I leaned back in the leather chair in my office and lit up a cigarette, a habit I picked up after my wife left me and ran back to her family. Yes, my actions might have contributed to it, but we should have worked through it. Marriage was supposed to be for life and I was going to fix everything.
Didn’t Anya know I would have done anything for her?
Even if that meant clawing someone’s eyeballs out to get her brother’s vision back. If she would have only stayed, it would have been done already. But she ran back to her family. She claimed to hate me, convinced I would only commit another atrocity to give Gabriel his vision back.
Sure, I was going to, but if she preferred a different method, so be it. I would find a legitimate, proper way to replace his eyes.
“Fuck,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose.
If my own family knew the extent I was willing to go for Anya, they’d be shocked too.
Hell, sometimes I was shocked by it.
I moved forward in my chair, but the thought of her followed me.
Anya.
Even now, saying her name was enough to bring pieces of that first day I saw her in the woods rushing back.
Not the whole day.
They were just flashes of memory.
Silver-blonde hair catching the sunlight.
Those impossible blue eyes.
That chuckle. God, the way it rang, like a siren's call for my soul.
It had caught me completely off guard that afternoon in Connecticut. I could still recall every single detail—the soft, almost musical sound drifting through the air as she hummed and read her Kindle while swinging back and forth on a lone swing and completely unaware that I was watching her.
I stared at the blank sheet of paper in front of me, recalling that day that changed my life and me.
I had gone to St. Jean d’Arc’s campus looking for Gabriel Santos. I'd flown back from Albania with one purpose: teach the bastard a lesson about keeping his eyes off my adoptive sister, Amara. Anya had been nothing more than a means to an end.
At least, that had been the plan.
Then I saw her. Son of a bitch.
It was like I’d been struck and not a single brain cell remained intact. Her pictures hadn't prepared me for the real thing.
Nothing could have.
I could still remember the way my breath caught when she appeared outside the dorm. The way I'd actually tapped my chest, convinced jet lag had finally gotten the better of me.
And then she had walked straight into me.
Where did you appear from?
I almost smiled.
She hadn't even really looked at me.
She'd simply frowned, rubbed her forehead, and kept going, that damned e-reader still in her hand.
And I stood there watching her walk away, forever changed.
A woman I'd intended to use to get under her brother's skin had just dismissed me without a second thought.
Apparently, my ego had survived worse.
My common sense hadn't.
Because I followed her.
I didn't know where she was going. I hadn't known why I cared. I only remembered the strange pull of watching her disappear between the trees, completely absorbed in whatever she was reading.
I could still remember the feeling of it—the absurdity of me, following a woman through the woods because she couldn't be bothered to look up from her fucking Kindle.
I shook my head and reached for the pen.
What the hell was wrong with me?
Even then, I knew something had shifted.
I just hadn't understood what.
She eventually stopped at a clearing and settled onto a swing. I remembered staying back, hidden in the trees, watching her.
Waiting.
For someone to show up.
For some explanation that would make following her seem less insane.
Nobody came.
She just kept reading.
And I stayed.
Hours passed, and somehow I didn't leave.
I remembered being jealous of that stupid device because it had her attention and I wanted it.
That should have been my first warning.
Instead, I told myself I was curious.
Curious about the girl who was nothing like the family she'd been born into. Curious about the girl whose laugh had lodged itself in my head. Curious about why I couldn't seem to walk away.
I looked down at the blank page.
The truth was much simpler.
I'd gone looking for Anya Santos because she was Gabriel's weakness.
Somewhere between the dormitory and those woods, she'd become mine.
I chuckled, the sound hollow in the silence of the penthouse. It bounced off glass and steel before disappearing somewhere near the windows overlooking the Pacific.
The ocean didn't care what I had lost. Neither did the world.
My wife refused to see me or even talk to me over the phone. And now, here we were, reduced to this final, clinical act of erasure.
She and her family wanted a divorce. Actually, not a simple divorce. They wanted an annulment. To erase me from her life like we had never existed.
Over. My. Dead. Body.
The documents lay neatly centered on my desk, almost ceremonial in their precision. Thick, expensive paper. Immaculate formatting. The kind designed not just to end something, but to pretend it had never existed in the first place.
The Santos family never did anything halfway.
Every signature line throughout the document was tabbed with obsessive care, every clause tightened until there was no ambiguity left to argue with. They had crossed every t, dotted every i, sealed every possible escape route with ruthless efficiency.
Annulment.
It was a rewriting of our relationship.
If these papers went through, it would be as if we had never happened at all.
Again, over my cold, dead body. We did exist and I wouldn’t allow anyone to erase us.
My gaze lingered on the final signature line of the court documents for a long moment, marveling how something so small could mean so much.
I’d been writing letters every day that we’d been apart, telling her how sorry I was, how much I missed her, how much I loved her, while she’d been gathering papers and documents to erase us.
A sardonic breath left me.
What a fucking irony!
But if she thought I’d allow for our love to be diminished or erased, she didn’t know me at all.
I was a determined man, just ask the fucking Triad who I was eliminating one member at a time for daring to set off the explosive in Anya’s vicinity.
If they’d done it just to me… whatever. I’d cough it up to everyday business.
Shoving all thoughts of the Triad aside, I picked up a pen and started writing, gripping that ballpoint like my life depended on it.
My forever one and only Mrs. Volkov-Tijuana,
I don’t know if you will ever read this. I don’t know if you would want to. But I find myself writing to you anyway, as though somewhere beyond the distance, there is still a place where my voice can reach you.
This will be the last letter I write to you. Three years of silence, of trying to apologize and make things right, have taken their toll.
I have replayed our history and marriage in my mind more times than I can count. Every conversation, every kiss, every argument, and every instance in which I failed you.
There are things I wish I had done differently, but I won’t apologize for falling for you, for going after you, or for loving you.
From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were the one for me. Through all that has happened and been said, I’ve never stopped loving you. I never will.
We were always meant to be.
I still see us as we were meant to be—building a life together, growing old in a home filled with noise, surrounded by children and grandchildren.
You might never read this letter, but know that everything I am about to do comes back to my love for you. I want us to have that life we dreamed about.
Until my dying breath, it’ll always be you.
If I fail, and this truly is the end of us, then it means I no longer walk this earth. I need you to know that loving you shaped me. It made me a better man.
When I lost you, it broke me, but it also made me determined to win you back. It’s who I am. A stubborn asshole to the end.
So if this letter ever finds you, know this… living without you is hell. But living in this world and witnessing you move on is far worse.
I simply cannot let that happen, because deep down, I know you and I are meant to be.
With all that I have been and all that I still am, I remain yours. Forever.
Jetmir
I put the pen down and read it one more time before setting my plan into motion.