His expression is grim as he leans in the doorway. “She came here to talk to Grigor, and she was hit by a car. Fortunately, it wasn’t going too fast. Her injuries are minor.”
I hurry towards him, and he steps aside. We head down the hallway together. “Was it an accident?”
“No. The men who hit her with their car got out and tried to drag her in, and the only reason she escaped is because she was carrying pepper spray, which slowed them down for a minute, and there happened to be a police car driving by. I think the only reason they didn’t hit her harder was because they wanted her relatively uninjured.”
“I need to see her! Get me my winter clothes, Sergei. Please.”
He stops and puts his hand on my shoulder, and his voice is gentler and more patient than it has been in days. “I can’t let you. It is too dangerous. This isn’t me being a controlling asshole, although I am that. If you go there, even if I go with you and take a whole squadron of men, we’re still at risk. And you’re not just putting yourself in danger. You’re putting her in danger, and every innocent bystander around us too. Cataha’s looking for us, and he won’t stop, and if he tracks us down there, innocent people will get caught in the crossfire.”
Tears of frustration well up. “Damn it. She doesn’t have any family. She needs a friend by her side. But I know I can’t go. You’re right. This just sucks.”
He nods, sympathy glinting in his eyes. “I have four of my men at the hospital, guarding her. You can talk to her by Skype. Come with me – I’ve got a laptop for you to use in the media room.”
“Are you making any progress in catching him?” I ask, hurrying after him.
He glances back at me. “No. As cautious as he is being, it could take months. But it won’t take forever. I’m doing the same thing he’s doing. I’ve got a network of spies out there, I’m offering enormous amounts of money to anyone who gives up his whereabouts, and sooner or later he’ll screw up.”
I have to be content with that, for now.
In the media room, Sergei’s security chief Andrei is standing by the desk, holding a laptop. He hands it to me, and I quickly settle down on a leather chair. Andrei and Sergei leave the room, a rare sign of trust from Sergei that thaws my anger at him a little bit.
Darya’s waiting for me, with a rueful look. I’m relieved to see that she looks just fine; her face isn’t bruised up at all. She tells me that the car hit her at waist level and knocked her over, and she has some bruising, but she’ll be going home from the hospital that evening.
“Could Grigor have tipped the men off?” I ask her. “I hate to even think it, but…”
“No, you’re right to be suspicious of everyone. I mean, I am too these days. It’s a survival mechanism.” Her blue eyes are an ocean of sadness and disillusionment. “But it couldn’t be him, because I didn’t tell him I was coming. I didn’t tell anyone, I just took the bus. I was going to surprise him.” She shakes her head. “I can’t ever be with him. It would be too dangerous for him. It’s just not meant to be.”
“Bullshit.”
She looks at me in shock. I don’t swear often, unless I’m cursing out Sergei.
“Don’t say that,” I say heatedly. “Don’t act as if you have no power over your own fate, because it’s a terrible feeling and it’s a vicious cycle. And you know what? It’s lazy. It’s an excuse. You think you’re powerless, so you don’t even try to change things. I did that for a long time when I was growing up, and I regret it. Obviously you care about him. I agree, given that he’s right down the street from Club Hollywood, that it would be too dangerous to see him again in Pevlovagrad, but he could see you in St. Petersburg.”
“You don’t think some people are just born unlucky?” Her laugh is laced with bitterness. “Come on, Willow. My father died of a heart attack, my mother died of cancer. My older brother drank himself to death. I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen. And traffickers tried to kidnap me twice, and tried to run me over today.”
No, I’m not letting her throw herself a pity party, because I know all too well how toxic it is to stew in your own misery. “You escaped traffickers twice, which few women do, and survived being hit by a car. You have me for a friend. Sergei put you in a great apartment in a beautiful city, and got you a fantastic job that you enjoy and that helps people. You’re young, you’re physically healthy, and you can make your own life into anything you want it to be. I’d call all of that lucky, wouldn’t you?”
She manages a sad smile. “You’re a good friend, Willow. I hope someday we can live in the same city. After Cataha’s dead.” She says that last bit with pure venom in her voice.
“Promise me you’ll call Grigor and explain everything.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Aren’t you a naggy-pants?”
“I’m the naggy-pants who isn’t hanging up until you promise.”
Her gaze drops. “What if I tell him and he wants nothing to do with me?”
“Then he’s done you a favor by letting you know, and you’re free to date someone else someday.”
I hear raised voices in the hallway, and I could swear one of them is Slavik. He’s back! And he’s fighting with Sergei about something. Big surprise. Do these men ever have a peaceful moment?
“Darya, I’m going to let you go. If you promise to call Grigor! Do it!”
“I promise,” she says, and I sign off.
I hurry to the doorway, and stop. The only way to find out what Sergei’s really up to is to eavesdrop, because he still shuts me out of entire areas of his life.
“Sergei, you want my advice?” It is Slavik.
“Romance advice, from you?” Sergei barks out a harsh laugh. “The man who has, in his entire life, only ever had sex with prostitutes?”
“Hey, they have a lot of practice.” Slavik’s protest is good-natured. “So it’s good sex.”
“Thanks. I don’t need your help.”
“That’s not what the servants are telling me. Yes, your butler has a big mouth. He says she’s not even talking to you. You want her to trust you? Tell her the truth.”
I suck in a gasp of outrage.
Sergei is still lying to me?
Sergei’s voice is so sharp it could slice through diamonds. “I have told her the truth!”
“But you haven’t told her everything.”
“She knows I haven’t told her everything.”
“The thing that you’re keeping from her…the truth about her parents…it’s the thing that could set her free.”
The truth about my parents? What could possibly be worse than knowing that my father was in his thirties when he married my fifteen-year-old mother, that he pimped out little children?
I storm into the room. I know that Sergei will be angry at me for eavesdropping, and I am beyond caring.
I can feel blood rushing to my face; I’m flushed with rage. My heart is hammering against my rib cage, and adrenaline burns through my veins. “What the hell are you supposed to tell me?” I shout.
“And there’s your chance,” Slavik tells Sergei. Slavik is still recovering from his beating. His head’s been shaved, and I can see a healing line of stitches. His face is splattered with green and yellow bruises. He’s leaning on a cane.
Sergei swings on Slavik. “What the fuck? You knew she was there!”
He doesn’t even try to deny it. “Yes, I did. I saw her shadow.”
Sergei’s face flushes red, and he raises his fist. I fly forward, crying out, putting myself between him and Sergei. He accidentally strikes me on the side of the head, and I cry out and fall to my knees, pain pulsing in my right temple.
Instantly, he’s on his knees by my side. “Oh God. Holy shit. Are you all right? I’m so sorry, Willow!”
My ears are ringing. “You punch like a bitch. I’ll have to teach you how to hit,” I mumble. It’s something he said to me once, and hearing it, he manages a grim laugh.
Slavik is on his walkie-talkie. “I called for the doctor,”
he tells Sergei.
“I’ll deal with you later,” Sergei snaps. “Fucking asshole.”
“Looking forward to it,” Slavik says, and he strides off cheerfully, leaning on his cane.
Sergei helps me stand up and walks me to his bedroom.
Apparently, Sergei keeps a doctor on staff, because a white-coated man hurries through the door right after Sergei helps me to sit down on his bed.
After he examines me and makes sure I don’t have a concussion, he surprises me by looking Sergei right in the eye and demanding, “Did you hit her?”
Sergei’s eyes blaze with anger. “What did you just say to me?”
“Did you hit her? I won’t tolerate that. I have daughters. I will not work for a man who hits women.”
I’m overwhelmed with emotion. I’ve wanted so badly for just one damn person in the entire district to show that they have morals and a spine.
Before Sergei can say something horrible, I jump in. “He was trying to punch his friend, and frankly, that’s the kind of thing these meatheads do all the time. Apparently it’s what passes for social interaction with this group. It really was an accident.”
“Well, all right then.” He looks at me sidelong, then leaves.
“That was amazing,” I say to Sergei. “It was worth it having you hit me just to have that happen.”
His expression shows that he doesn’t understand at all. “Have what happen?”
“To see that someone here can’t be bribed or threatened. It’s horrible, Sergei, how everything and everyone has a price. It makes me hate it here. It makes me want to hate humanity. It takes away all my faith. So to finally see someone brave enough to stand up for what’s right here…that means a lot.”
He looks disconcerted. “I don’t want to see you hate people, Willow. That’s not you. You always see the good in everyone.”
“Not so much anymore.” I settle back into the soft, puffy pillows and look up at him. He sits down next to me and reaches out and tries to touch my face, but I furiously swat his hand away.
I’m rigid with tension, and I grind my words out so there is no mistaking my seriousness. “What was Slavik talking about? What do you know about my parents? Tell me. I cannot stand living with secrets and lies anymore, Sergei.” I punch him in the arm, hard. It doesn’t hurt him, of course, but I want his full attention. “Tell me, or you will literally have to kill me to keep me here.”
He looks as if he’s about to argue, but then he catches the expression on my face. I’m not screwing around.
He takes a deep, long breath, and he’s staring at me but seeing something else too. Looking into the past. It seems as if whatever he’s about to say is so bad that he has to steel himself before he can speak.
Finally, he talks, and his gaze is full of pity.
“You’re not a Toporov, Willow. Not really.”
Chapter Thirteen
A wave of shock rolls over me.
My mouth opens and closes as I struggle to speak.
“Are you saying th-th-that I was adopted?” My voice cracks, and I have to push the words out.
He nods, a pained look stretching across his handsome features. “Something like that. Not legally. More like purchased.”
His words are a bombshell hurled into my reality, exploding, shattering it. “That’s crazy.” I sit up, shaking my head in denial, my brown locks sliding into my face. Sergei reaches out to brush them back behind my ear, and this time I let him. “I mean…no. I look just like my mother. Everyone always said so.”
“Yes. That’s true. Your father chose you because you looked like your mother.”
My father chose me. Vasily Toporov chose me.
I feel as if I’m slowly sinking into quicksand, but I force my mouth to move, to say things.
“Go on.”
His gaze slides away from mine. “Your mother wanted a baby. When it didn’t happen, they did tests. It turned out your father was sterile. So you were adopted.”
I struggle to reconcile that information. “If…if that’s true…why didn’t you just tell me sooner? I mean, plenty of people are adopted. I wish my mother had told me – but I understand why she might not have wanted to say anything. And it’s not the end of the world.”
He grimaces, looking really uncomfortable now. I’ve never seen this look on his face before. He’s still not meeting my eyes.
There’s more that he’s not telling me, I can see. “What were the circumstances of my adoption?”
“That’s the part I’d prefer not to discuss.”
“Sergei!” I scream at him. “Damn it to hell, stop messing with me!”
His gaze snaps back to meet mine. “I’m not trying to!” he shouts back. “All right. Your birth mother was a prostitute.”
I wince at that. “Okay. And my real father?”
“Unknown.”
“All right.” I feel light-headed. I’m turning this new version of my life over in my mind. “My mother wasn’t my mother.”
“But she loved you,” Sergei rushes in. “I know that about her, because I spied on your family for almost a decade. There’s very little about your family that I don’t know, Willow. From everything I’ve heard, Tatiana loved you with her whole heart.”
My heart hurts at the thought. My mother did love me. Well, the woman I called mother, anyway. She lived her life for me. She lived her life to make sure that I was the perfect little girl, to keep me safe from the wrath that burned just underneath my father’s skin. We were going to go on the run together right after I graduated from college. We’d been planning it for years.
She would have risked my father’s fury to save me from his terrible plans. She would have died for me.
“I don’t judge my birth mother for being a prostitute,” I say, struggling for breath. The thought of a woman so desperate that she had to sell her own child fills me with sorrow.
I can’t sit still. I sit up straight, scattering the pillows, and swing my legs over the side of the bed.
“What choice do many of these women have, living in tiny, impoverished villages, with no job prospects?” I’m staring down at the floor while I say that, but I’m picturing women, their lips blue with cold, digging up grass to boil for soup. Crying children with distended bellies, curled up under thin blankets. “They can starve or sell themselves. I understand. She probably thought she was sending me off to a better life.”
Sergei doesn’t say anything, and the silence stretches between us like elastic, drawn too taut and ready to snap. I look up at him, and when he catches my gaze, he winces.
“What?” I demand.
He gives the slightest shake of his head. “Just this once, I wish that I could lie to you,” he says. “Because the truth will hurt you. And it’s not necessary. All you need to know is that you were given up for adoption and you had a mother who loved you more than her own life.”
I feel tears shimmering in my eyes and I blink them away. Crying would be an insult to Tatiana Toporov, the woman who raised me and loved me. “Do you think I’m not strong enough for the truth?”
“I know you’re stronger than anyone I’ve ever met.”
I feel warmth fold through me. When he says things like that, I believe him. His belief is the architect that builds me into a castle of stone.
“So tell me.”
“When your father was on one of his business trips in Czechoslovakia, looking for little girls for his whorehouse, a woman approached him with a child for sale. You. You were one year old. You were a beautiful little girl, and you looked a lot like his wife, so he purchased you, but not to be raped. He gave you to his wife to raise as her own.”
That hits me like a punch in the stomach.
I think I’m going to vomit.
Now I know why he hid the truth from me all this time.
Adoption I could handle. It stung, knowing that my family had kept it a secret from me my whole life, but I could spin the story in my head into a beautiful sacrifice by a l
oving, impoverished mother. Was already spinning it.
Now Sergei has torn the fragile web of lies apart with just a few words.
My real mother gave birth to me and then sold me off to be raped. When I was a baby. What kind of degraded fiend does that?
Am I crying? I think I am. I think I feel tears. I raise shaking hands to my face, but my cheeks are dry, my eyes are dry. I’m just shaking all over.
Sergei takes my hands and folds his hands over them. Normally when he does that, I feel as if I’ve been wrapped up in a blanket of infinite love and warmth. Right now, I’m numb. I can’t even feel his touch.
An inner blizzard is forming, and I start to shake as it chills my soul. I don’t understand what makes some people like that. Some people are born so dark, so evil, that it’s truly as if they were spawned by the devil and sent to Earth to torment humans.
And my birth mother was one of those people.
Sergei sees the look on my face. “Willow, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.” He curses.
“No.” I whisper the words. “You should have. You should have told me sooner.”
He nods, a haunted look twisting his face. “Do you want to know her real name?” he asks gently.
That makes me shudder. “Not particularly. Maybe someday. Maybe never. She doesn’t even feel real to me. She feels like a monster from a horror story.”
Then it hits me. “Czechoslovakia? Lukas is Czech. And the second he saw me…it was like he recognized me.”
“Yes. Lukas is your half brother. You look a lot like your birth mother, and that is why he thought you were her, returned for him.”
Is he fucking kidding me?
Rage explodes inside me, and I slap his face so hard my hand stings. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I scream. “I had a right to know! He’s my brother, and you kept that from me? That is my family! What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Because then I would have had to do what I just did!” Sergei cries out, and his eyes are twin mirror pools of despair. I’ve never seen him like this before. Not a hint of hardness, just devastating remorse. “I’d have had to take away your real mother and replace her with that pool of human sewage who would sell her own baby into sexual slavery. My own mother did the same thing to me and my brother, and to know that, it kills my soul and my faith in humanity. She sold us to be raped. She knew what would happen to us. I didn’t want you to have a mother like that. It’s poison. Knowing that the person who created you wants to destroy you…it’s like a denial of your right to exist. I just… You deserve better than that.”
Thirty Days of Hate Page 10
