by Megan Hart
Theresa made a low, strangled noise. “Did my father . . . kill her? Is that why he’s been paying you off all this time? To keep quiet because he killed her?”
Ilya felt as though he’d stumbled, but he was standing still. His fists tightened. He had to swallow fiercely against the swell of bile in his throat.
“My God, Theresa, no. He didn’t kill her, nobody killed her. They argued, and he left her alone. Whatever she did after that was all on her own.”
“How can we believe a word out of your mouth?” Ilya asked her through gritted teeth.
Galina looked at him without flinching. “Because it’s the truth. He didn’t kill her. But I did have him send me money so I would never tell anyone that he was the last person to see her. It would have implicated him.”
“And you, too,” Theresa said. “Anything you said would’ve gotten you into just as much trouble. He didn’t have to pay you off.”
“No, he didn’t. He did that because he loves me.” Galina shrugged, any trace of her earlier guilt gone and replaced with an almost fierce pride.
“I should turn you in to the police,” Alicia said.
Galina shrugged. “It won’t bring your sister back, and I had nothing to do with her accident. You can go to them, I’m sure, but the case was closed a long time ago, and they determined there was no foul play. It won’t make you feel better to go telling anyone.”
“It might make me feel better to have you go to prison,” Alicia said.
Galina laughed, then sighed. Still no look of shame, but Ilya wasn’t surprised by that. Whatever fleeting sense of responsibility his mother had felt would’ve been suppressed by her consistent selfishness.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, “I’ve already been.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“We had a nice little thing going, Barry and I. I took the pills. He sold them. Eventually, he recruited that girl to help him. I told him it was a bad idea,” Galina added with a weary wave of her hand.
All of them were hovering in a combination of exhaustion, rage, grief, and another entire collection of emotions Niko couldn’t begin to describe. The staff had been sent home. The doors locked. Ilya had broken out a bottle of champagne, but the rest of them had switched to coffee or nothing at all.
“He didn’t tell me, by the way, when she started skimming the money, either. I didn’t find out any of that until after she died, and by then he owed me thousands. So I kicked him out. And you,” she added, to Theresa. “But honestly, what else could I have done? Kept you? You weren’t mine.”
“You made that abundantly clear,” Theresa said in a cold voice.
Galina gave each of them a harried, defensive stare. “None of you can understand what it was like. Struggling the way I did. The money I made from those pills—drugs those patients didn’t need, by the way, so it’s not like I was taking something away from them. That money bought your sneakers and sent you to camp. It paid for the pizzas you ordered on a Saturday night. I did what I had to do. That’s all.”
Niko rubbed at his eyes. “And it caught up to you, huh?”
“I moved to South Carolina, and I’m not proud, but yes, I ran into some trouble.”
“You didn’t quit your job at the hospital down there. You were fired,” Ilya said. He looked like shit, and Niko couldn’t blame him.
“I quit. But I was named in part of a roundup. I got five years. It would’ve been more, but I gave up some other names. You do what you have to do,” Galina said.
“How could you have gone to prison without telling us?” Alicia asked.
Galina scowled. “I think that’s a question you all should answer for yourselves. How could I, indeed? How could I be essentially missing for years, not a damned word from any one of you. You never bothered to find out where I was, what I was doing. I could’ve been dead!”
“You weren’t dead. We got your Christmas cards,” Ilya said.
Niko wanted to give his brother a high five in that moment but refrained. It felt irreverent and wrong, especially in the face of Alicia’s obvious red-eyed grief. “How’d you manage that?”
“I sent them to a friend, who mailed them for me without a prison stamp. I didn’t want you to know, any of you. I didn’t want you to worry.”
Ilya’s lip curled. “Or you were ashamed?”
“Of course I was ashamed!” Galina shouted.
Silence. Painful, awkward, broken only by the sputter of the coffeepot on the counter behind Theresa. Ilya let out a strangled laugh, though his expression was humorless. Niko put an arm around Alicia, pulling her closer, offering what comfort he could. It wasn’t much. It might not have been enough, in fact, but he was grateful she let him.
“My driver’s license lapsed. I lost my medical license. I couldn’t work in my career any longer, and what else could I do? I got word my mother was dying. I came home, thinking at least I have a place to stay and people who will love me. My family. I should have known better.” Galina shook her head, then put her face in her hands and started to cry.
Niko had seen those sorts of tears too many times to be truly sympathetic, although his instinct was, and maybe would always be, to try to defuse the situation with her. This time he managed to keep his mouth shut. It was Ilya who stepped up and put a hand on her shoulder.
Galina looked up with a hopeful expression. “Ilya. Believe me, I’m so very sorry. I’m so proud of you and what you’ve accomplished here tonight. The last thing in the world I wanted was for tonight to be ruined.”
“Then you should’ve told us all of this a long time ago,” he said without a shred of sympathy in his tone. “When I get home tonight, I want you gone.”
More silence, and this time it was fierce. Beneath his arm, Alicia’s entire body tensed. Niko thought she might say something, but what could she do? Defend Galina?
Not a single one of them did.
She stood, slowly, stiffly. Her shoulders squared. Chin lifted.
“A thankless child is sharper than a fang,” she said, misquoting Shakespeare. “All of you. I may not have been the best mother—”
“No,” Ilya said. “No, you were never even close.”
Galina continued as though he hadn’t interrupted. “But I love you. All of you. Yes, Theresa, even you. And I wanted nothing more than to come home and have us all be a family again. I’m sorry that none of you can appreciate that.”
“Be gone when I get home,” Ilya said again.
“It’s still my house,” Galina whispered finally in a broken voice. She looked at Niko, her gaze pleading. She held out a hand, clearly expecting him to take her side. “Where on earth do you expect me to go?”
Niko was done placating and making excuses for her. “You’ll find a place. You always do.”
“Fine.” She gathered herself and gave them each another long, hard look before she let herself out the front door.
From the parking lot came the flash of lights and the sound of tires on the gravel. None of them said anything for a few seconds. Theresa turned on her heel and went into the kitchen, and after a second, Ilya followed her. Alicia turned to look up at Niko. She wasn’t crying, but it was clear she was barely hanging on.
“I want to go home. Please, take me home,” she said.
“Anything,” Niko promised. “Anything you need.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“We need to talk about this!”
Theresa frowned. “Don’t shout at me, Ilya.”
He held up the second bottle of champagne he’d been holding back for all of them to share after the other guests left, but Niko and Alicia had taken Galina out of there, and Barry, thank God, had gone and not come back. Ilya popped the cork, spraying foam, then splashed a glass full. Only one.
He lifted it. “Cheers. What a goddamned mess of a night.”
Her phone had buzzed four times in the past forty minutes, and she didn’t have to look to see that it was her father calling. She watched Ilya down the glass of champagne and
pour another, again without offering her some. It would’ve been a kind gesture, if it was because he remembered her preferences instead of blatantly trying to deny her something that had been meant to be shared in celebration. She thought about reaching for him but didn’t.
“You broke a promise to me, Ilya.”
He faced her with a sneer. “Yeah, I broke a promise. Make this my fault, okay? Sure. It has nothing to do with the fact that all this time you never once told me what had been going on with you. For months, Theresa, and you just kept all your secrets.”
“Because they were mine to keep!” she cried, advancing on him. “Would it have made a difference to you, in the beginning? If I had come to you and said that my dad had stolen my identity, run up debt, caused me financial ruin, that my entire life was in shambles because of it?”
“Maybe I—”
She laughed harshly. “Sure. You’d have sold your share of the quarry right away, right? To help me out? C’mon, Ilya, I came back into your life after twenty-some years gone. We were strangers with the barest thread of a relationship, and, yeah, I needed that deal. I needed the money, and I pushed you for it so that I could maybe try to get out from under that crushing debt.”
“You made me want you!” he shouted. His voice cracked. “All along, right, you just made me want you so I’d help you out. Because that’s what you do, right? You get men to take you to dinner or to bed. Why not get me to sell my business?”
“No. Oh my God. No . . .”
He threw the champagne glass into the industrial-size sink, where it shattered. Theresa’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. All she could do was take a step back in the face of his clear fury.
Ilya gripped the edges of the sink, shoulders hunched. He didn’t look at her. “All you’ve done is keep your secrets from me, Theresa. All this time when I thought you . . . that we . . . shit. Never mind. Forget it.”
“Ilya, I’m sorry. I never meant for it to go this way. My troubles with my dad were mine, and I was ashamed. I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened, because how could I have been so stupid to not see it for so long, to let it get so bad? I didn’t want to tell you because . . .”
“Because what?” He turned, leaning against the sink with his arms crossed. Mouth grim. Eyes narrowed.
“Because you had this idea of me as being smart and capable and someone you could maybe l-love.” She stumbled on the last word but put it out there. “I guess I didn’t want you to find out you were wrong.”
When she moved toward him, Ilya held up a hand. “You want to talk about trust, Theresa, and you’re right. I shouldn’t have invited your dad when I’d promised you I wouldn’t. But you should’ve told me the truth, and you didn’t because you didn’t trust me with it. So the way I see it is that I can’t stand to be with someone who keeps secrets from me, and you can’t share your secrets because you can’t trust me. We’re both screwed.”
“Ilya.”
He shook his head. “No, Theresa. That’s the way it is. I fell in love with a woman once who kept everything that was important hidden away from me, and you know what? It wrecked me.”
“That was a long time ago. Maybe you need to be able to get past that,” Theresa snapped. “Using Jenni as an excuse about why you can’t love me is pretty cheap.”
Ilya’s lip curled. “You never even gave me a chance, so don’t you talk to me about cheap excuses not to love someone.”
“But I do—” she began, hating the desperation in her voice and cutting off the words before they could escape and become real.
“You can’t even say it out loud, huh? What? I guess that’s a secret, too?”
When she tried to speak, he waved her away, dismissing her. It was more than Theresa could take, so she left.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Alicia had stopped crying an hour or so ago, but her eyes still ached and her throat itched. Beside her, Nikolai’s slow breathing soothed her, though not toward sleep. It was going to take her a long time before she’d be able to do that.
He hadn’t said much, but now he stirred to press his lips to her hair. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.” She’d already told him she’d found the tin of pills in the crawl space and how Theresa’s reaction to the sight of it had made so much sense once Galina had spilled the truth. Alicia closed her eyes and let herself nestle into the curve of his shoulder. “I keep thinking how I knew something was wrong with her. I knew that she’d been getting into things over her head. I had no idea . . .”
“You couldn’t have. None of us did.”
She pushed up on her hand to look at his face. “Are you okay?”
“Because I found out that instead of quitting her job at the hospital, I found out my mother was fired and sent to prison in South Carolina for stealing narcotics? And that she learned to cook in the prison kitchen, not in a diner?” He rubbed his fingertips up and down her arm. “I’m about as okay as you can expect. To be honest, I can’t say I’m that surprised. It wasn’t anything I ever suspected, but it all makes sense.”
“What do we do from here?” Alicia asked.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want . . .” Frustrated and angry now rather than grieving, she got out of bed to pace. “I want them both to be punished for what they did.”
Nikolai sat up to rest against the headboard. “Take it to the police?”
“What will they do about it?” She sagged, and when he reached for her hand, she let him take it and draw her to the bed. She sat. “Nothing. Do I want to stir it all up again for my parents?”
“Only you can answer that.” He pulled her close so she could cuddle against him. “But whatever you want to do, I’m on board.”
Alicia sighed, then kissed him. “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” he answered. “I’m here for you. I know she’s my mother, but if you think you need to pursue this . . .”
“I don’t know. Galina said Barry was the one who gave Jenni the pills, and that makes sense. But they never declared anything about her death being suspicious, and she says Barry wasn’t with her when she died.”
“Do you believe her?”
Alicia clenched her fists, fruitlessly angry. “I don’t want to. I want there to be some reason, a goddamned reason that my sister is dead, and not just that she made some bad choices and fell off the ledge, all on her own. I want to blame someone for it, Nikolai! I want . . . justice.”
More tears came, when she thought they’d all gone dry. She punched one fist into the opposite palm, but it gave her no satisfaction. She swiped furiously at her eyes, wanting to clear her vision.
His face was there when she did. The face of the man she loved. Their paths to each other had been full of complications, yet here they were. Together.
“I’ll never get it, will I?” she asked him.
Nikolai took her hand to kiss the back of it. “No. Probably not.”
“Do I have to just let it go?” she asked him quietly.
“I don’t know,” Nikolai said. “Do you think you can?”
She had no answer for that. Some days she’d wanted to scream and fight the universe and demand it bring her sister back; some days she’d quietly yearned and mourned and wished that Jenni hadn’t died. Except she had, and nothing would ever change that or bring her back.
“I don’t know,” Alicia said.
It was the best answer she could find within herself to give.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Barry Malone was one pathetic son of a bitch. The moment he’d opened the door to see Ilya standing on the other side, he’d burst into blubbering, terrified gasps and pleas, begging Ilya not to kill him.
“I’m not a murderer, Barry.”
Ilya pushed past Theresa’s father and through the doorway into the dank apartment. It smelled like cat piss and sour milk. Light came in through the broken blinds in stripes like bars on a prison cell. The kitchen looked clean enough, but it didn’t
take a detective to spot the garbage pail overflowing with beer cans and empty wine bottles. The guy couldn’t even be bothered to recycle.
“No, no, of course not. I just meant, please don’t hurt me.” Barry closed the door behind them and followed so close on Ilya’s heels that his toe kicked Ilya’s boot when he stopped and turned. Barry put his hands up at once, flinching.
“Like you hurt Jenni?” Ilya shoved his hands in his pockets, his fists aching to connect with Barry’s face.
“I didn’t. I never! What did your bitch of a mother tell you? Because she’s a goddamned liar.”
Barry shook his head, his expression smoothing. He swiped angrily at his red-rimmed eyes and straightened his shoulders. His finger stabbed the air, swiping so close to Ilya’s face he felt the swish of air as it passed his nose. On instinct, Ilya grabbed Barry’s wrist, twisting the older man’s arm until he felt he could break it with the tiniest bit of extra pressure.
Breathing hard, Barry let out a cry of despair. “Stop! Jesus, I said stop.”
Ilya didn’t let him go. He wanted to break this asshole’s arm. He wanted to do more than that. Instead, he released Barry with a shove so the old man stumbled a few steps away.
“My mother said you were the last person to see Jenni alive. She also said you didn’t hurt her,” Ilya added in a shaking voice, “but we both know the truth. My mother is a liar. So if she says you didn’t do anything to Jenni, maybe I don’t believe her. Maybe I think you were the last one to see her, and maybe I think you fucking hurt her, and I’m here to find out what exactly happened. And then I’m going to maybe beat the shit out of you. Or drag your sorry piece-of-shit ass down to the police station and turn you in. Or both.”
Barry coughed, long and hard, as though Ilya’s accusations had surprised him. “I didn’t hurt her. I swear to God. Not that night.”
