CHAPTER EIGHT
Kael — Found
I felt her before I saw her, which should have warned me, except I’d let myself believe — foolishly, for exactly as long as it takes a woman like her to put four pieces of information in a row — that I still had time.
She was standing outside the storage unit I keep two miles from her apartment, the one with four years of surveillance photos and shipping manifests and a corkboard that would make me look, to any reasonable person, like a man building toward something violent instead of something protective.
I don’t know how she found it. I would spend the better part of the following week not sleeping over exactly that question, and the answer, when I finally got it, would tell me more about her than four years of watching ever had.
“You’re the man from the grocery store,” she said. Not a question. She’d clearly rehearsed this, and it still came out unsteady, which told me how much it was costing her to stand there at all.
I could have lied. God knows I’ve had four years of practice lying to her by omission, which is its own kind of skill, honed until it barely registers as dishonesty anymore.
I looked at her — really looked, for the first time with no glass or distance or dark between us, this woman I had built an entire second life around without her permission — and found I didn’t have it in me tonight.
“Yes,” I said.
Something in her face did something complicated. Relief, maybe, at finally having a fact confirmed after weeks of doubting her own instincts. Then fury, arriving right behind it, fast enough that I understood the relief had only been a doorway for the anger to walk through.
“How long.”
“Four years.”
She didn’t flinch, which surprised me more than it should have. “Four years. You’ve been — what, exactly? Following me? Watching me sleep? What is this?”
“Protecting you.” It sounded thin even as I said it, a phrase worn down from overuse in my own head, and I watched it land on her exactly as thin as it sounded.
“From what? From who?” Her voice cracked on the second question, not from fear, I realized — from exhaustion, two weeks of being handled by men who all claimed to know something about her life that she didn’t.
“Elias Vane told me my mother didn’t die in a car accident.
He said she took something from him. He said you know more about it than I do, and you’ve apparently decided that not telling me was somehow protecting me, and I need you to explain, right now, why a stranger who has been stalking me for four years thinks he has more of a right to my own history than I do. ”
Every word of it was fair. That was the part I hadn’t prepared for — not her anger, which I’d braced for a hundred times in a hundred imagined versions of this conversation, but the fact that she was right, cleanly and completely right, in a way that left me nowhere to stand.
“Your mother’s name was Aliya Kessler,” I said.
“Before that, it was Aliya Marchetti, and before that it was a name that doesn’t matter anymore because the people who knew it are mostly dead.
She worked bookkeeping for a man named Dimitri Sorokin, who ran money through Meridian Assurance for people who would very much prefer that money stay untraceable.
Fourteen years ago, she found something in those books that she wasn’t supposed to find, and instead of walking away, she copied it.
All of it. Every account, every name, every dirty transaction going back a decade. ”
Nadia had gone very still, the way people do when they’re bracing for something they already suspect is going to break them.
“She used it as insurance,” I went on. “Got herself and you out, got a new name, got nine years of a normal life for you before Sorokin’s people finally found her.
The car accident wasn’t an accident. And what she took with her — the drive, the files, everything she used to buy your safety — has been missing ever since.
Sorokin thinks you have it. Vane works for whoever inherited Sorokin’s operation when he died, and they’ve spent four years trying to determine the same thing. ”
“And you.” Her voice had dropped to something quiet and dangerous. “Where do you fit in this.”
I’d rehearsed a hundred answers to that question too, over four years, and every single one of them deserted me standing in front of her in the cold outside a storage unit full of my own obsession.
“Dimitri Sorokin,” I said, “was my father.”