“What happened?” Jon did not know which way to turn. He only knew that he wanted to take Alina and get out of the Ukraine as fast as possible.
“This is my cousin. She killed man who keeping her here. Vee must going before the others find out.” Jon nodded agreeably.
“Let’s catch a train to Budapest,” he suggested. Alina laughed.
Epilogue
Six Months Later
“Vee need buy house,” Alina told him. Jon gritted his teeth in exasperation.
“Oh, I am well aware of our pressing need for space, but I would much rather put your parents in a retirement complex. There are some great places out there. I’ve been looking into it. A lot.”
Alina smiled wickedly.
“You can’t getting rid of my parents so easy,” she told him. Jon sighed and looked toward the heavens for help.
“I will never understand the old-world family connection,” he told her. After the chaos in Europe, Jon had immediately arranged for Alina’s parents and Svetlana to come to America under assumed names.
“Jon, I liked you better when you were just a techy geek without a life,” Jordan had gasped when Jon had asked him to produce fake identification for his fiancée’s family. Nevertheless, Jordan had managed to come through, and Svetlana, Vira, and Boris had come to stay at Jon and Alina’s condo. Jon had initially thought the move to be temporary until he could set them up in their own place but as the months passed, it became apparent that Alina enjoyed having her family near. Despite their constant lack of privacy, Jon felt it was a small sacrifice to make. If it meant that Alina was home safe with him, he would have entertained her entire village in the apartment.
“After the wedding, I will find us a twenty-five-bedroom house,” he joked. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I vant you to making peace vith your brother.”
Jon blinked at the demand. He had not seen nor spoken to Chris since the night Alina had disappeared. Chris had tried to phone a few times in the beginning but had given up when he realized that Jon had finally taken a stand. Jon found it surprising that Alina would want him to do such a thing as she was such an advocate for him standing up for himself.
“Where is this coming from?” he demanded. Alina shrugged.
“Your family is your family,” she said simply. “You do not choosing them and many times, they are pain in ass, yes. But he is your brother. And we get married. He need to stand vith you.”
“I have Tristan and Jordan standing up with me,” Jon argued. Alina shook her flaxen hair.
“You needing your brother. Please call to him.”
In the end, Alina had won, and Jon passive aggressively mentioned to Tristan that he was thinking about Chris. That day, Chris called as Jon knew he would.
“Hey, Chris,” Jon said coldly.
“Hey! You’re finally talking to me, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” There was an awkward pause.
“You know, I shouldn’t be talking to you, Jon. You had no right to punch me. Especially in front of my kids!”
“You are such a drama queen,” Jon snapped back. “Your kids were nowhere around. Anyway, it would be good for them to see what happens when you push people too far.”
“You’re right. I deserved that. I deserved a lot more than that.” Jon was stunned. He had been gearing up for a verbal sparring match so he could hang up the phone and tell Alina he had tried. He had not been expecting his brother to concede he had been wrong.
“Jon, when we were kids, everyone used to bug me because you are so much smarter than I am. I couldn’t put a sentence together properly until I was in Grade Five.” Again, Jon was stunned by the confession.
“I guess from childhood, I just started teasing you because I was insecure and it just grew into resentment. It escalated, and I didn’t realize just how big of an asshole I had become until the night that Alina was gone. I should have never talked about her that way. You were going through a rough time, and instead of being a good support system like Tris and Jordy and even my wife, I acted like a bitch.”
“No, the bitches acted better than you,” Jon commented. “Did Elyse tell you to say all this?”
“In part but only because I can’t put a proper sentence together,” Chris answered. Both men laughed.
“I find it hard to believe that you were always jealous of me,” he told Chris. “You were always so athletic and popular.”
“Yep. So popular, I’ve been married three times.”
Again they chuckled. When Jon hung up the phone, he felt like he had seen a side of his brother which he had never known. He turned to Alina and smiled.
“Thank you,” he told her. “I’ll buy you that house now.”
Alina nodded, kissing him tenderly on the lips.
“You are going to needing buy house,” she told him. “But no for my parents. You are going to be father. I am pregnant vith twins.”
Bound for Life
A Dark Romance
Veronica Cross
Bound for Life
Copyright 2017 by Veronica Cross
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to a person, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Warning: Due to mature subject matter, such as explicit sexual situations and coarse language, this story is not suitable for anyone under the age of 18. All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older, and all acts of a sexual nature are consensual.
Chapter One: The Widow
Juliana rolled over under her white duvet. For a moment, just after waking and right before she opened her eyes, she felt at peace. She felt optimistic. Like the moment in a horror film when the protagonist doesn’t realize she’s in a horror film. When she thinks she’s in a romantic comedy and things are just warming up. But when her brown eyes fluttered open, as it always did, reality came rushing back.
She turned toward her husband’s side of the bed and ran her hand over the undisturbed pillow and down between the cold sheets. She sighed. A silver frame stared at her from the nightstand. Her eyes lingered on her wedding photo. A happy couple smiled back at her, holding hands. She barely recognized herself. The woman in the photo seemed so bright, so full of life, so invincible with her husband beside her. She stared at Ben. He was smiling. He looked so in love and so… so heartbreakingly oblivious to what the future actually held for him.
Last year, they’d celebrated their second wedding anniversary and were still living in bliss. Juliana always laughed when friends asked her if the honeymoon period had worn off yet. It hadn’t, and she couldn’t imagine their amazing life together changing anytime soon.
At least once a week, Ben came home with a small bouquet of flowers. Juliana would always act surprised as she kissed him and placed the flowers in the vase she had waiting on the counter. They would both laugh and admire the flowers, talking about how beautiful they were.
“You’d never guess they were the last bunch the gas station had,” Ben would joke. Or sometimes he’d say he had stolen them from the neighbor’s yard. Although he reused them regularly, the jokes never got old.
He loved her deeply. Sometimes when Ben came home from work, he pulled her into his arms and hummed a little something, swaying her gently back and forth or swirling her around the room with an impromptu dance. Sometimes he would pick her up and carry her off to the bedroom… or to the couch, or to the dining room table, or just steps from the fresh flowers on the kitchen counter and kiss her slowly and gently, or earne
stly and passionately. Juliana would close her eyes, spread her legs, and invite his hands to explore her body as hers did the same to his.
Juliana reached over and gently placed the happy couple in the silver frame face down, careful not to scratch the wood finish of the nightstand. She didn’t want to see these people staring at her, reminding her that her reality was now so different.
No one tells you what losing a husband is really like. Maybe those who have lost theirs can’t put it into words because it hurts too much, or maybe they can’t articulate it because it’s impossible to capture the immenseness of the pain. Maybe they want to protect everyone else from the true feeling, the hopelessness and the despair of it all, so they try not to get into detail.
At first, it’s a little like getting dumped or like being walked out on. Suddenly he’s gone. There’s only a slight explanation. Something that doesn’t seem to make sense; something that doesn’t add up because you don’t want to believe it. You blame yourself, of course, no matter what the circumstances were. Maybe if you had done something differently, suggested dinner out at a restaurant that night or maybe just a movie in, if you had taken one car instead of the other, or… the possibilities are endless. You can play “what if” for hours, days, even weeks; but quickly, it becomes apparent that one thing is for sure: he’s never coming back.
Breakups are painful because some tiny part of you believes you’ll be together again. Whether he left for another woman or just for different circumstances, you somehow think there’s a chance he may come back, and as each day passes you know he’s still out there, choosing not to return, the pain drives deeper through your chest.
When you’ve lost your husband to death, though, it’s different. You’re certain he is never coming back. You’re not left wondering why he left or if he will come back, but you’re still haunted… more powerfully than a breakup ever could. All the words that went unsaid. All the plans you never got to follow through on. The life you were suddenly forced to leave unlived. It all adds up to a unique kind of despair and longing that only a select percentage of people will experience in their youth.
That was the unfortunate fate of the beautiful couple in the wedding photo on the nightstand. Some days, Juliana’s life with Ben feels as if it were all a dream like she had never known him or been married at all. Some days she felt as though they were together yesterday, and that tomorrow she would wake up from this terrible nightmare and everything would be back to normal.
Part of her still didn’t believe it. Part of her couldn’t comprehend that he hadn’t made it out of the fire that consumed most of their home. Even though she saw it with her own eyes, it still did not feel real.
The fire had grown faster than she ever could have imagined. She had left the kitchen for what had felt like less than a minute. She just ran upstairs to get her phone. But then she got distracted, looked at a magazine or something… she didn’t remember, and it didn’t matter now. By the time she heard the smoke detector going off and she sprinted back downstairs, the chicken she left cooking on the stove turned the kitchen into an inferno.
The experts said that the cookbook she was using was too close to the burner and with the help of a spilled oil the flames jumped to it. They built up a bit of momentum until they were tall enough to catch the wooden cabinets. From there, the fire spread unchecked through most of the first floor.
The first thought Juliana had when she ran downstairs and was confronted with the fire that was taking over the first floor was that she had no business being in the kitchen in the first place. She could barely boil water. For some reason, though, that day she just wanted to do something special for Ben. He would have been so surprised if she had managed to have even some sort of simple dinner ready for him when he came home from work.
The thought stopped her in her tracks. Then, fear took her over. Her heart was beating out of her chest, and she couldn’t breathe. She was frozen at the bottom of the stairs at the edge of the kitchen. She watched as the fire crept into the living room. The realtor had stressed how great an open concept floor plan would be, but now Juliana wasn’t so sure.
By the time she thought to look for an exit from the house, the flames had already cut her off. They blocked both the front and the back doors, and their heat was turning into a prison.
Juliana was always useless in emergency situations. That was Ben’s strength. He always knew what to do. She checked her watch. He should be home from work soon; maybe she would just wait for him.
Everything was happening too fast. She was hot. So hot that she was having trouble seeing. The back of her throat stung with every breath she took. Her legs felt weak, so she slumped down onto the stairs to gather herself. The house started to fill with black smoke, and it was getting harder for her to see. Juliana wasn’t sure how long she was sitting there, waiting for Ben, when she heard her name.
“Ben?” She called back, frantically looking through the flames for the source of her husband’s voice.
“Juliana!” he called again, and this time she was able to locate him.
Juliana could barely see him through the cloud of smoke, but he was there. He was flanked by firemen who were spraying their hose into the house. They had broken down the door. Juliana briefly mourned the beautiful entryway that was now a hole and a pile of broken, burnt wood. A few firemen were holding Ben back at the hole as he fought to get in.
“Ben…” suddenly, she was calm. He was there to save her; everything would be alright. All she had to do was get to him. She thought for a moment, then realized that if she just jumped through the flames quickly, she could make it to him at the front door. It didn’t hurt when you put a candle out with your hands; it would be just like that. In movies, people were always jumping into and running through burning houses and coming out safely on the other side.
She took a deep breath and ran. The last thing she saw before her world went black was Ben breaking free from the fireman holding him back and rushing in to meet her. His entire form was engulfed in flames.
The next thing she knew, she was opening her eyes on the front lawn, at the foot of the stairs of her front stoop. The noise of the churning flames, sirens, and chaos was all gone. She stood and walked back inside. The flames were out, and the house was cool. It was in ruins, of course, and still smelled like someone had hosted a bonfire in their living room. The evidence showed that something terrible had definitely happened here. Despite what she saw around her, and the realization that she had witnessed her husband perish just hours ago, Juliana felt strangely at peace. She sat down on the stairs, where she had been during the ordeal, and took in the scene.
She watched the cleanup team try to salvage what was left of the house. The fire had destroyed the kitchen, of course, and most of the furniture in the adjacent living room. Somehow the TV had survived, which made her smile. Ben loved that thing.
She got up and looked around. Ben was gone, but he was everywhere. He was in the paint color they picked out and his charred sneakers that he left on the stairs. He was in the lump of twisted metal and ash that was the sofa they picked out when they got their first place together. He surrounded her. More than that, though, she felt him. She knew it was a little odd, but she felt it with certainty. Something told her that he was with her. She knew that it was more than just his memory; it was his spirit, his soul, or some other part of him that was still very much alive in this house.
She knew he was in her presence, but now in a different way. He wasn’t with her the way he had been for the past few years, but she could definitely feel him. He was still here, she knew. And she had to wait for him. She knew he would do the same for her.
At that moment, as she walked around their tattered home, her new purpose in life became clear. It was obvious to her, and she understood immediately. With a soft smile on her face, she accepted her new task. Her husband was still inside these walls, and she had to find him. She had to reconnect with him.
It was as if he c
ould emerge from behind the bathroom door or come strolling around the corner at any moment. And she needed to, no, more than that, she wanted to be there for him. Because of that, she couldn’t leave the house. She had to remain constantly vigilant. After all, she didn’t want to miss him. What if there were only a finite amount of appearances he could make on this side of the world? She couldn’t risk missing one.
In order to achieve her goal, she decided she needed complete isolation. This part was easy. She hadn’t spoken to anyone since the accident. At first, it was because she couldn’t face Ben’s family, or her own family for that matter when she had been the one responsible for his death. Her carelessness and incompetence had directly resulted in the loss of a life that was more precious than her own, which was a lot to live with already; she could only imagine what their families must think. She didn’t have it in her to find out. So she kept her distance.
It became easier to isolate herself when she realized that there was no one who could relate to her. No one who could possibly understand that the magnitude of her devastation was only quelled by the firm belief that Ben would return. She wasn’t completely irrational; she knew that he couldn’t rise from the dead. He would never come back completely. At least not in the way she had known him. But there were other ways. People would always talk about signs from the other side, how a grandfather would flicker the lights for his grandchild to let her know he had made it to the other side alright and that she would be okay. Juliana had a feeling that instances like these were only the beginning of what was possible. The people who had experienced a brush with the other side could have seen more, but they had given up too soon or hadn’t dedicated themselves completely to the quest for contact. She could not allow herself to be one of these people. She and Ben could be together again. They’d even joked about it once; if one of them passed before the other did, whoever went first would haunt the hell out of the other. She knew he would be back for her.
The Campus Jock: A College Bad Boy Romance Page 53
