18. Finn
FINN
I straddle my motorcycle in the parking lot and debate going back to the apartment and confronting Tamara.
I know she lied to me about wanting to sleep. I know she has no intention of getting a doctor to run some tests tomorrow. Same as I know she’s been sick every day since she came to stay with me.
I can even kind of understand why she would lie about it.
She’s out of her comfort zone. She’s had the only life she has known since she was eight years old pulled out from under her, and she doesn’t trust me enough to let me in and share the burden of whatever is going on with her right now.
I truly believe the only person she would share it with is Ivana, and her sister has been missing for as long as I’ve known Tamara.
But marching back up to my apartment and calling her out on lying to me isn’t the answer either. She’ll close up like a fucking oyster guarding its pearl, and I’ll destroy the progress I’ve made so far with gaining her trust.
Fuck! I punch the inside of my helmet with my fist before pulling it on and fastening the strap under my chin.
She came to me when she had nowhere else to go and knowing that she feels safe with me makes my chest swell with pride, affection, love…
all of the above. I understand her reasons for keeping her emotions locked away, and I have no desire to break down those walls.
Her life, her terms. But this is different.
All I want to do is help her, and I can’t do that if she’s too scared to tell me what’s wrong.
I kickstart the engine and merge with the city traffic.
I’ll go to the docks because she asked me to and because I know how important it is to her to find her sister, but there’s something else I need to do first.
At the intersection, I indicate left and head in the opposite direction of the port.
This time, when I arrive at the women’s refuge, I park up on the curbside, secure my bike, and knock on the front door.
Gianna isn’t surprised to see me. “At least you didn’t try to scare our residents half to death this time.”
She opens the door wide, leads me through to the kitchen and fills two mugs with coffee. “Cream and sugar?” She has already added both to her drink.
“Please.” I arrived needing caffeine and sugar in my veins, but the room is calming, as though whale music is playing at a subaudible frequency, and all who enter get the same relaxation treatment.
We sit at the small pine table, and Gianna opens the conversation while I sip my coffee.
“I won’t ask you where she is, but you’re here about Tamara again, aren’t you?”
I smile. “Is that one of your regular services, mind reading?”
“Nothing that sinister. You came here asking about Tamara before she walked out of her home with nothing, and now you’re wearing the kind of expression I see a lot on our residents. Fear mingled with guilt over burdening someone else with your problems.”
“Wow. You’re good.”
“Thank you.” Her smile lights up her face, and I picture the two little girls I saw with Leonid Ivanov at the golf resort poolside. Happy is the word that springs to mind. “Aren’t we all just here giving it our best shot with whatever skills we have?”
I like this woman.
“She’s sick.” No point dancing around the reason why I’m here.
“I don’t mean she’s dying, I mean, she keeps being sick.
It started the morning after she came to my apartment, and she thinks I don’t know that it keeps happening.
I’ve asked her to see a doctor, but she insists she doesn’t need to because she’s fine. ”
The words spill out and I don’t even care that I’ve told Leonid Ivanov’s wife that his enforcer is staying with me. I get the sense that she’s on my side.
She’s on our side.
Gianna watches me from behind her mug that she holds awkwardly with the handle facing me and her fingers wrapped around the warmth.
“Sounds like Tamara. She and her sister have spent their whole lives proving that they’re worthy of being here. The only time I’ve ever known Tamara to drop her guard is when Ivana almost died in Russia last Christmas.”
I swallow hard. “I didn’t know that.”
Ivana is the most important person in Tamara’s life, and she didn’t tell me that she almost died. The trust that I’d convinced myself I was starting to build between us shrivels and turns to dust with this revelation.
“The surgeons said that Ivana is unlikely to regain the fitness levels she had before her injuries. Which feels like a death sentence… to them both. Ivana is battling to prove her worthiness to Leonid because being an enforcer is all she knows. I’ve offered her work here at the refuge in the hope that it will take her mind off her recovery, but she doesn’t want to be here, and I accept that. This is my dream, not hers.”
“And Tamara?”
“Tamara is in denial. She believes that she can carry her sister, and Leonid will never notice that she’s doing the work of two enforcers rather than one.”
“Until she burns out.” My coffee is cooling too quickly, and it feels like glue in my throat, blocking my airways. “Why didn’t they discuss their fears with Leonid?”
Suddenly, I feel like a sardine trying to gatecrash a meeting of sharks when I know absolutely zero about what’s really going on.
I’ve been so blinded by my feelings for Tamara that I painted this image of myself in my own head of Prince Charming riding in on his glorious white steed to rescue the beautiful princess from the evil villain.
What part of that belongs in the real fucking world?
“Did Tamara tell you how they came to live with Leonid?”
“Aye. She told me they’d been trafficked from Russia, and he rescued them from a shipping container.” I clench my fists and my jaw so tightly I could crack bone.
“He already saved them once. They’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to repay him and telling themselves they’ll never do enough. They’ll never be enough. In their eyes, Ivana’s injuries mean they’re letting him down.”
The anger building inside me is all directed at Leonid. He is the only one who could change this mindset, and yet he allowed Tamara to walk out of his life without a single weapon knowing that his enemies would automatically use her to reach him.
“Why didn’t he stop Tamara from walking away?”
Gianna tilts her head to one side like I just presented her with a mathematical problem to which I already know the answer.
“He isn’t their master even though that’s how they worship him.
He thinks of himself as their big brother, so he did what a big brother would do to protect her: he gave her an ultimatum.
It was a risk. He hoped that she would see his point of view and trust him to bring Ivana home. ”
“By taking away her weapons?”
Gianna’s eyes flash a warning as two women enter the kitchen, spot us talking at the table, and falter.
“Sorry,” one says. “We didn’t mean to interrupt. We’re going to the vegetable garden.”
“You’re not interrupting, Claire,” Gianna says softly.
The two women barely look at me as they pass through the kitchen and close the back door behind them.
Once we’re alone again, Gianna returns her attention to me and lowers her voice. “He has an organization to run, just like your boss. Tamara’s recklessness was becoming a liability, so he did what he had to do.”
I nod. I can’t argue with that. “Has he been looking for Ivana?”
“What do you think?” She smiles. “He is tearing the city apart to find her. And now Tamara… I’ve never seen him like this before.”
The small consolation this brings me is short-lived. None of this alters the fact that Tamara is sick.
“Do you love her?” Gianna asks out of the blue.
The question catches me off-guard, landing directly in my chest and stealing the breath from my lungs. It’s the easiest question in the world to answer, and yet the most difficult to find the correct words for how I feel.
“I… I’ve only known her for a short while, but I can’t imagine a world without her in it. I want to keep her safe and set her free all at the same time, and I have no idea where that leaves me, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll follow her around the world if she asks me to. Or I’ll stay right here.”
I peer at Gianna to find her watching me closely, her fingernails tapping the side of her mug. “Do you know why she left everything she has ever known to come to you?”
I blink. I’m not sure if the question is hypothetical or if she expects an answer from me.
“Because,” Gianna continues, “Tamara may not be ready to acknowledge it yet, but you feel like home.”
My face flushes with the heat pumping around my body. This woman sitting in front of me knows Tamara better than I do, and if she’s right about this…
“And I don’t think she is sick.” Gianna is still talking while my heart holds onto the blazing glimmer of hope she just offered me that Tamara and I just might have a future together. “I think she’s pregnant.”
Time stands still.
Okay, maybe time keeps ticking, but it does so without me, because I’m frozen in that moment with the word hanging in the air between us just waiting to change the world when it bursts.
“Finn…?”
Gianna reaches for my hand across the table, and I flinch when her skin touches mine. I pull my hand away and stare at her till she comes back into focus.
“Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to drop that on you without warning.”
“No, it’s fine, I…”
“You didn’t consider that as an option.” She shrugs. “I get it. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, and you know your life will never be the same again, and you wonder how on earth you’re ever going to deal with it. It happened to me and Leonid too.”
I look at her, and I see Leonid with his two little daughters.
“Twins. Doesn’t get much scarier than that,” she says.
Yet here she is calmly discussing me and Tamara in the women’s refuge that she built and runs with her sister-in-law, while her husband is Pakhan to a ruthless Bratva organization. Scared isn’t a word I would use to describe Gianna Ivanov.
“I…” My brain-mouth coordination is all out of whack, and I can’t find the words to articulate what’s going through my head right now.
“It’s okay to be scared, Finn.” Gianna’s tone is gentle. “But you’ll figure it out.”
“I’m not scared.” Finally, something sparks inside, and I catch a hold of what it is I was searching for. “For me, anyway. I’m scared for Tamara. Whatever I’m feeling right now, pales into oblivion compared to how she must feel.”
I push my chair backwards, scraping the legs across the rustic terracotta tiles.
“I need to find her.”
Gianna stands too. Circling the table, she hugs me briefly and peers up into my eyes. “I know you’ll look after her, Finn. She knows it too, but it’s alien to her, unconditional love. Be patient.”
“I will.”
I navigate the traffic back to my apartment like I’m on a racing track.
My heart is beating a strange tune that I can’t focus on right now.
All I can think about is what must be going through Tamara’s head.
Agreeing to get a doctor’s appointment tomorrow was an excuse to shut me up and get me out of the apartment, which means that she either wanted space to think or she’s planning on running away.
If she leaves, she’ll make sure that I never find her, and I have no doubts that she’ll outsmart me all the way, because we haven’t even come close to finding Ivana. But I can’t let her do that without at least speaking to her first.
I’m responsible for getting her pregnant. I should’ve used protection, but instead I made the ages-old mistake of thinking with my fucking dick instead of my head.
This is down to me. I fucked up her life, and I’m going to put it right even if it means watching her walk away.
“Tamara?” I call out when I let myself into my apartment.
The silence is heavy. I know she isn’t here, even before I barge into the bedroom and find the comforter spread neatly across the bed. The weapons are gone, but the burner phone is on the nightstand where I left it this morning, and fear crawls into my chest and makes itself comfortable.
She doesn’t want to speak to me, and she isn’t coming back.
The new clothes I bought for her are still in the closet; all that’s missing is the skirt and T-shirt she was wearing when she arrived, her leather jacket, and her boots.
“Fuck!”
I leave the room and spot the door to the guest bathroom ajar.
My heart tries to escape my chest as I push the door open, praying that I’ll find Tamara in here.
I can handle tears. I can handle her taking her anger out on me; I’m the one to blame, and it’s the least I deserve.
But a cold empty bathroom puts the fear of God into me like striking me down with a deadly sword.
I squeeze my eyes shut when she isn’t here and try to think about where she might’ve gone. Back to Leonid? She’s too proud to admit she was wrong and go crawling back, and I still don’t know if she is close enough to Gianna or Cartier to go to them for advice.
No. There’s only one person Tamara needs right now.
Her sister.
I turn around to walk back out of the bathroom when I spot a tiny scrap of clear packaging on the floor by the trashcan.
Instinct makes me pick it up and press the pedal with my foot to open the lid, and that’s when I spot the neatly folded tissue in the bottom of the can. I take it out, unwrap it carefully with trembling fingers, and stare at the word in the middle of the plastic stick.
PREGNANT.