by Olivia Gates
And today of all days, it did feel as if it would be impossible to just walk away from their families.
Debating how to handle or time making this disclosure, she walked into the great room that overlooked the Atlantic and found Ivan looking out to the horizon, in one of the rare times she’d found him alone since they’d come here.
Ivan had invited everyone to stay in his Hamptons estate, where they’d have the wedding. He’d been constantly waving his magic wand to give everyone an experience that would never be equaled, mixing the holiday season celebrations with what he called “wedding overtures.”
When she objected that this was all a far cry from the simple couple of hours she’d expected for the wedding ceremony, he just kissed her and demanded she appreciate his “restraint”, reminding her what it was like when he was extravagant.
His brothers would be arriving a day before the ceremony, and she couldn’t wait to see the rest of that unique brotherhood who’d shared Ivan’s tragic origins, and who had not only triumphed over unimaginable hardships, but also, like him, had gone on to conquer the world in their own fields of virtuosity.
Feeling a wave of love crash on her harder than those on the beach below, she slid her arms around him from the back. To her amazement, he was surprised. Ivan had always been primed, feeling the slightest movement from afar, even before it happened. He’d certainly never been oblivious to her approach, seemed to feel it when it was only an intention in her mind. That he’d been now meant he’d been too consumed by something.
Her heart started hammering with worry. But he was turning to her, plucking her up and into a kiss that, as usual, overwhelmed her.
When he finally let her feet touch the ground again, her hands roved over his rock-hard body, still uneasy. “You okay?”
“I am now.” He gave her another mind-melting kiss. “There’s a lot more to take in than even I thought.”
She knew what he meant. His family. “Is that why you were off in another realm? Why you’re so tense?”
“I was lost in thought, yes. But I’m tense because I’m not making love to you. That is making me downright dangerous. You do remember I put my libido in a deep freeze for years, and now I’m constantly burning. So this—” he brought her hands to his body, sliding them down his chest to his erection, each inch the consistency of steel “—is because of you.”
She pouted. “Whose idea was it to not make love to me?”
He huffed in self-deprecation. “I do get stupid ideas. Always concerning you. I thought I could last a week with all the preparations and the family and friends around to distract me. Especially since their presence isn’t conducive to our kind of explosive encounters. I also thought the torment of abstinence will serve a purpose, make sure I’d give you a wedding night to remember for the next few lifetimes.”
“I’ll remember each night with you longer than that.”
At her hotly aroused statement, he devoured her again.
He was kissing her within an inch of her sanity when her parents walked in. Groaning, they separated, even as her parents started retreating in embarrassment.
But since she did have to try on dresses, and pick one of the dozen Ivan had provided her, she decided to postpone what she’d sought him for, said she was the one who had to go. Her parents accompanied her.
As they walked out, she again felt her parents’ subdued melancholy and lingering unease.
Like her, they hadn’t truly gotten over Alex’s death. And though she had reassured them she knew what she was doing, marrying a man whose rivals called him Ivan the Terrible, who had enough power to tackle a world leader, it was evident they were still worried. She also suspected that even though she’d expanded on the story he’d provided about her and Alex’s accident, they still felt something was off about it and about his role in the whole thing.
But since the truth would only hurt them more, she couldn’t allay their suspicions. Not now, not ever.
* * *
A couple of hours later, after she’d drowned in fairy-tale gowns and picked the one that made her feel least guilty to wear only months after she’d lost Alex, everyone gathered for another of Ivan’s exquisitely catered dinners.
Much later, after the younger generation and their kids went to bed, only she, Ivan and their parents remained.
Ivan took the men to the pool table, and she found herself alone with her mother and his.
As each sat sipping her choice of herbal tea, his mother turned from watching the men and looked back at Anastasia.
“You know, Ana, ever since I first saw Ivan there’s been this...overwhelming feeling that comes over me whenever I look at him. And it’s not because he’s the most powerful and important man I’ll ever meet in my life. There’s just something about him.”
Gritting her teeth, Anastasia said, “Yeah, it’s called charisma and influence. He makes everyone feel this way.”
Aunt Glenda sat up closer, her eyes so earnest. “It’s not that, though I do recognize this about him. There’s just this...huge side to him I feel he’s hiding.”
“Yes, exactly.” That was Anastasia’s mother, sitting up on her other side, making her feel they were squeezing her in the middle with their curiosity and concern. “It’s like there’s another person beneath it all. Are you aware of that? Do you know who he really is under this...facade?”
“It’s not like I’m worried that he doesn’t love you as completely as you love him—” Aunt Glenda stopped, seemed to be getting more distressed the more she tried to explain. “It’s just... I wonder about what he’s hiding. I know it’s crazy, but what I feel...” She looked back at him and fell silent.
So recognition was haunting her, despite the transfiguring changes he’d undergone, through ordeals, maturation and intention. And she was disturbed, groping for explanations, something to make her feel secure again in the safe, suburban life she’d built, and paid for with his life.
Aunt Glenda looked back at her, putting down her cup, looking frustrated, even agitated. “God, I wish I could explain it. I wish I knew what I was feeling.”
Every word had been falling on Anastasia like a scythe, slashing every fiber of restraint.
The last words severed the final tether, and she snapped.
Heaving up to her feet, she shouted, “What you’re feeling is recognition, Aunt Glenda. Recognition of the son you sold to slavers, in return for a way out of Russia and a new life in the States. Slavers who tortured, degraded and exploited him in unimaginable ways!”
* * *
Ivan had picked up the feeling that something was going wrong across the room. He’d excused himself from his companions at once and had started rushing there even before he realized what was going on.
But it all happened before he could stop it. Anastasia was on her feet, screaming, everything—everything—pouring out of her.
He was running now, feeling both their fathers in his wake, cold sweat starting to bead on his forehead, knowing that whatever he did now, it was too late.
Anastasia sounded as if she was tearing apart her vocal chords. “How dare you sit there pretending you’re a normal person? A woman and a mother? A human being even? That you have any kind of feelings? You sold your son! Your firstborn! The genius boy who loved you completely and trusted you implicitly!”
Ivan finally reached Anastasia, put himself between her and the others, taking her by the shoulders, tried to make her look at him, to silence her. “Stop. Anastasia, stop. Come with me, please.”
But she only pushed against him, twisting in his hold, around his bulk, seeking to reconnect her wrath with its targets, eyes feverish between both his parents now, shaking so hard it was like she was having a seizure. Her voice had become a butchered wail, again making him realize what she now knew of his past hurt her even more than it had
ever hurt him.
“Didn’t you ever think of the devastation he felt when he realized you betrayed and bartered him? Didn’t you ever feel sorry all these years that you sent your own son to hell, to buy yourselves this easy, petty life? Didn’t you ever imagine the kind of horrors he faced, the agony and desperation he endured?” She lurched out of his hold completely, no longer Anastasia, but a rage-filled entity as she shrieked her condemnations. “And after everything you did to him—after he overcame it all and became the best man on earth—he never wanted revenge, only never wanted to see you again. That’s why he lost seven more years of his life, when he could have been with me. He only found me again through tragedy. And for me, he not only let himself be exposed to you, he did what I thought impossible. He was kind to you. He forgave you. When you’re monsters! Monsters who don’t even deserve to live!”
Ivan had dragged her in his arms as she screamed, but had been unable to stop her tirade. He now subdued her efforts to fight him away, pressing her head into his chest, murmuring pleas for her to stop. He had to stem the tide of wrath and misery that was undoing her right before his eyes.
But she’d already expended every last spark of energy, now sagged against him, too drained to even tremble anymore.
It was only after he made sure this paroxysm was over, and he’d carried her to the nearest couch, soothed and revived her as much as he could, that he finally remembered the presence of the others.
Turning his gaze, he found them all frozen in their exact positions. His parents looked as if their hearts had been ripped out, their faces blank in that shocked denial before the injury registered and the collapse occurred.
“K-Konstantin? Kostya?”
His mother sounded as if someone was choking her as she said his name, and the nickname she’d used to call him with.
Giving Anastasia one last kiss, begging her again not to move, to let him handle this, he rose to his feet.
There was no escaping it anymore. Here was the confrontation he’d lived almost three decades dreading.
Coming to stand before his parents, he nodded. “It’s me.”
Looking as if they thought they were losing their minds, they reached out their hands to him, as if to make sure he was real.
“That’s—that’s the explanation for wh-what our hearts have been telling us about you...”
“We thought you were lost to us all these years ago...”
His beyond shell-shocked parents talked over each other, then stopped.
Then his father’s face crumpled as he staggered back as if under a bone-crushing blow. He would have fallen on the ground if Ivan hadn’t caught him and lowered him onto an armchair.
The moment he straightened, his mother was clawing at him, crying, then bawling such ugly, violent sobs he felt as if she was being torn apart inside.
Ivan had dealt with death, with danger and violence of the most extreme magnitudes. But against tears, especially Anastasia’s and now his mother’s, he was totally powerless.
Looking around, as if seeking help, he found Anastasia staring at him limply. Her parents had sat down, looked as if they’d turned to stone. No help was coming from any of them.
Forcing himself to contain his mother, he led her to sit in the armchair next to his father, who was weeping, too, silent tears that were somehow even more distressing to Ivan.
Knowing this had to end, once and for all, he went down on his haunches before them. “My view of this isn’t as harsh as Anastasia. She’s angry on my behalf, far more than I’ve ever been on my own. I understood you made a terrible decision, to save Katerina and Fedora and Ivanna and Dimitri, not only yourselves. And maybe you didn’t realize what would happen, what they’d do to me. But as I told you before, I survived, and then some. And now I have Anastasia, and I love her and I am happy with her, beyond comprehension. I know it won’t be easy, living with this now that the past is exhumed, but—”
His father lurched forward, his hand trembling to Ivan’s face, his eyes blood-red. “We believed that you died.”
Ivan’s jaw clenched. “It was always a possibility to die there.”
His father shook his head vigorously. “No, no, we were told you died in a car accident before you even reached the academy you were supposed to join, what we fully believed was a legitimate institution.”
Ivan stared at him. Did he mean...?
“We never suspected anything of what Ana said. We thought we lost you to a senseless accident like we lost Alex!”
His mother again snatched at anything she could hold of him, ended up grabbing his jacket, his shirt, his hair. “You thought we abandoned you? Sold you? Bozhe moy...”
She burst into another jag of demolishing weeping as she pitched forward to kiss his hand and bathe it in her tears.
As he tried to drag his hand away, his heart stuttering in his chest, his father grabbed his other hand.
“It was years before we could get over our grief and guilt for sending you somewhere without us. Just that we weren’t there for you, that we thought you died alone, almost drove us both mad. It was only having to care for our other children that forced us to continue to function. If we’d known anything about the true nature of that place, if we even suspected for a second you wouldn’t get the best treatment, wouldn’t be achieved and happy there, that we wouldn’t see you again soon, we would have rather died than send you there.”
Ivan stared at the parents he’d once loved with everything in him, whom he’d missed and felt their loss like that of a vital organ.
And he knew one thing.
They were telling the truth.
Ten
Ivan had felt his whole belief system being rewritten once before. When everything told him that his parents had abandoned him in the worst way possible.
Now everything said they hadn’t. Every cell in his body screamed it, had been screaming it since he’d looked into their eyes again.
The knowledge was absolute, incontrovertible.
This time no amount of circumstantial evidence would convince him differently.
And it was like an earthquake was unleashed inside him, sending everything crashing, the pillars he’d built his life around collapsing, pulverizing each other and everything else.
He vaguely realized the pain he was feeling was only the beginning of a process that would reform his memories, his psyche. There was no escaping letting the process take its course, no ameliorating the pangs of this excruciating rebirth.
He could only do one thing.
Kneeling before his parents, his hands shook as he took a hand from each, his heart squeezing as he felt how fragile they’d become. This wasn’t only a sign of aging, it was the unremitting effects of loss.
His loss. He knew it.
He let them know he did. “I believe you. And I will never be able to beg your forgiveness enough for believing any differently of you. My only excuse is that it was horrific, not only being in that hellhole, but being without you. I guess at first I needed to believe you sacrificed me so I could let you go, and let hope and life itself go, so I’d escape my prison. Later I needed to believe it so it would harden me, so I could survive.”
His parents collapsed over him, deluging him in the agony of their tears, disbelief, relief...and love.
Feeling as helpless as he had when he’d arrived too late to save Alex, unable to rewind the past and erase the damage, he hugged them with all he was.
“Forgive me for suspecting you, for depriving us of all these years we could have been together since my escape.”
They both wept and shook and hugged him back until he felt their long-fractured hearts splintering again. He had to stop the vicious circle of pain and regret, had to start them on the path of healing.
Pulling back, he forced a smile on his nu
mb lips. “But I know you’ll forgive me, even if I don’t deserve to be forgiven. I know because I’m blessed like that. I committed the same crime with Anastasia. I deprived her of seven years when I could have loved and worshipped her, because of my hang-ups and misjudgments. And she not only forgave me, she saved me and promised to love me forever.”
He looked back at her, found her sitting up rigidly, her face gripped in a storm of emotions. Dominating all was love. For him. And for his parents. And such relief. But it was the total lack of recrimination, the absolute alliance and understanding that she gave him unconditionally that gave him the ability to forgive himself, so he could give his all to her, to his parents.
Knowing she wouldn’t intrude on these moments with his parents without an invitation, he reached out an arm to her, begging her nearness, letting her know there was no breath he wanted to take without her.
She staggered up to her feet and hurtled toward him unsteadily, throwing herself at him. It was like catching life itself when he wrapped her in his arms. She was more than that to him. She was the reason for, and the orchestrator of, his rebirth.
Then she was reaching out to include his parents in their embrace. Her apologies were as pained and profuse as much as their dismissal and their thanks. They insisted it was because she loved Ivan so much that she couldn’t bear thinking he’d go unavenged that this all had come to light, and been resolved.
Surrounding them all in his protection and love, Ivan looked at his parents. “I need you to put it all behind us, to only look forward. Anastasia taught me this, too.”
His mother burst into another jag of sobs. “I can never forget or live with what happened to you.”
He pulled her tighter into his embrace, soothing her renewed anguish. “Whatever I went through, it all worked out for the absolute best. And it’s not because I became so much stronger or because I’m now wealthy and powerful, it’s because of this.” He gave the most precious people in his life, the reasons for it, another squeeze, making them all shudder in relief. “Finding Anastasia, loving her, having her love, and reuniting with both of you—these miracles far surpass my ordeals, erases them. I even think it’s only fair to have paid that price in advance, for your priceless blessing. So just love me like I love you, and let me make you all happy again.”
