The young man knocked politely on the door. A few moments later, it opened. A woman in pink scrubs stood in the doorway. She looked at the young man, then glanced at Elena in surprise. “A visitor?”
“For Raisa.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded and stepped back from the door. Elena took it as her cue to enter. She stepped over the threshold, eyeing the nurse. The shock on her face had turned to something much more like anger, and Elena got the feeling that she wasn’t welcome here. It wasn’t enough to deter her from seeing her mother, but it left her uncomfortable. Did her mother feel this way all the time, as she felt now, like a nuisance? Was she suffering here, feeling like she wasn’t wanted?
Elena let out a breath slowly through her nose in an attempt to ground herself, then stepped into the small living room down the entryway hall from the front door. The room was hardly larger than her closet, and there was a musty smell in it, like the windows had never been opened. A small television was on, airing a gameshow episode, and there, seated on the couch in front of it, was a frail woman whom Elena barely recognized. Her skin was wizened and thin, almost transparent. Once thick hair had thinned and whitened over time. Bony hands capped knobby knees, mostly hidden by plain pajama pants. But the arch of her nose? The rigidity in her posture? Elena recognized it. Her mother was still in there somewhere, trapped in the skin of someone who looked thirty years older than she should have appeared.
She didn’t look at Elena as Elena entered the room.
“Mom?” Elena asked, barely finding the courage to speak. “Mom? It’s me.”
No response. Her mother’s gaze remained glued to the screen.
“Mom?” Elena tried again. Her voice cracked. “It’s me… Elena. Your daughter.”
Nothing.
Elena looked over her shoulder at the nurse in the pink scrubs, who stood with her arms crossed just a short distance down the hall. The young man who’d escorted Elena to the room seemed to have gone.
“What’s wrong with her?” Elena asked, her voice wavering. “MS is a physical disease, isn’t it? Why… why does she look so old? Why isn’t she responding?”
“There are several other diseases that Raisa has been diagnosed with since coming to stay here with us,” the nurse replied. “Comorbidity is common in MS. It’s just how it is.”
There was a snide tone in the nurse’s voice that struck Elena’s ears in the wrong way, and Elena clicked on to what was happening at once. She’d told enough lies in her life to recognize when one was being told to her—especially if the liar wasn’t particularly good at it. Elena turned to look at her mother again, who was only now moving her head to look in Elena’s direction. The slow, stiff way she moved was almost corpse-like. Someone was doing this to her. It wasn’t natural—the tailspin was too fast, and her symptoms too extreme.
She’s a living corpse. Father left her here to die, and she’s decaying while she’s still alive…
“Mom?” Elena asked again now that she had her mother’s attention. “Mom, it’s me, Elena.”
“Who?” Her mother’s voice wasn’t the same one she remembered—it was a husk of what it had been, a raspy, withered thing that no longer bore any of its former beauty.
“Your daughter,” Elena stressed. “Do you remember me? Please, you have to remember.”
“Who?” This time, it was spoken with distress. Her mother’s sunken eyes darkened with fear, and she pushed herself into the back corner of the couch as though recoiling. “Who are you?”
“I’m sorry that we left you here all alone for so long,” Elena said, a sob catching in her throat as she tried to speak clearly. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I didn’t know you were here. I didn’t know you were alive. I would have come to see you if I’d known. I swear.”
“Who are you?” The warble in her mother’s voice tore Elena’s heart in two. It spoke of distress, confusion, and terror. Something was wrong here, Elena knew in her heart—the care she was receiving wasn’t right. There was no way she would have decayed like this if she’d been receiving proper treatment. It wasn’t right.
Had her father been paying them to let her die? Elena didn’t want to think it, but the thought wormed its way into her mind and refused to be wrested free.
“You’re going to have to go,” the nurse in the pink scrubs said. She stepped forward, then around Elena, backing her down the hall toward the front door. “You’re upsetting Raisa, and she’s delicate enough as it is. You need to leave.”
“I’m her daughter,” Elena uttered, dumbfounded. “All I want is to see her.”
“And if you’d wanted that, you would have come years ago. Now, get out.” The nurse broadened her stance, blocking off the path to her mother. Elena blinked away the last of her tears, then shook her head and left. If she tried to fight, she’d be detained by security. She couldn’t let that happen.
If she caused a fuss and the staff notified her father that there had been a disturbance in her mother’s room, what would he think? Would he track her down and take her out of the picture, just like he had his wife?
Would she never see her mother again?
Elena had never hurt like this before. All her life, she’d lived defensively, certain that only the members of her family could be trusted. As much as she despised her father for what he’d done, it looked like he was right about one thing, at least.
Without the walls around her heart, she was weak. If she wanted to stay at the Sokolov mansion, see her mission through, and stick around long enough to find a way to save her mother, she’d have to close herself off again. Falling for Roman had torn her open. She couldn’t afford the vulnerability that feelings for him forced upon her.
Right now, she had to be stronger than ever… even if that meant closing herself off to Roman for good.
Elena brushed tears away from her cheeks as she headed down the hall in the direction of the reinforced doors. Unlike the men and women in this facility, she still had her freedom… at least for now. She needed to make sure she kept it.
13
Roman
Elena swept out the front doors and crossed the walkway so briskly that Roman knew something was wrong. He’d watched her body language on the way into the building in much the same way he so often watched Viktor’s—posture and gait revealed more than words often could, and reading body language had saved Roman’s life not just since he’d been working for the Sokolovs, but during his military days, as well. Right now, Elena’s body language told him that whatever she’d seen had jarred her, and the tension running through her body indicated she was barely keeping herself together.
He popped the locks before she arrived at the vehicle, and she opened the door herself and sank down onto the seat. When the door was closed, he activated the locks and remained where they were parked. “What happened?”
“Can you please just drive?” she asked. “I just… I don’t want to be here right now.”
“Were you able to see your mother?” he pressed.
“Are you wearing earplugs?” Elena demanded.
Roman barely held back a retort of his own. Her walls were back up, he realized belatedly, and lashing out was how she protected herself. Now that he’d seen into who she was behind her defenses, he knew better than to be insulted by her tone of voice. This was her armor—he had to be skilled enough to strip it from her piece by piece.
She growled, “We. Need. To. Go.”
He leaned toward her, asking next, “Did someone in there hurt you?”
“God.” She scrubbed at her eyes. “No one hurt me, okay? It was a happy, fun time full of rainbows and sunshine, and the staff all burst into an Oscar-nominated musical number about the joys of family reunions. Now, can you please just drive? You’re my chaufferone, not my therapist.”
The term of endearment meant little when it came fired with such hostility. Roman held steady, though, not letting her get under his skin. He’d just have to give her time. “I’ll drive,”
he relented, “but I want to help you get over whatever it is you’re feeling. You don’t have to hurt alone.”
“You are so… ugh!” Elena let her head hit the headrest. She dropped her hands from her face, and Roman saw that her eyes were red and puffy from crying. “Roman?”
“Yes?”
“Listen. Maybe the last little while has given you the wrong impression about me.” She lifted her head and looked at him directly through the rearview mirror. He watched her, silent. Even when she cried, she was beautiful… if only she’d let go of the bitterness in her heart, she would be radiant. “We’ve had some fun together, but only because you’ve been sticking your nose in my business every other second. When you won’t leave me alone, it’s kind of hard to have nothing to do with you, you know?”
Roman said nothing. Silence, he felt, was more valuable than words.
“You,” Elena said, the venom in her words growing more potent, “are an underling. A driver. You’re not even a Sokolov. You’re a stray dog that Viktor took in because you had nowhere else to go. You have no worth. You have no value. If it came down to it, Viktor would let you go in a heartbeat. He had no real use for you. All he does is pity you.”
“You’re upset,” Roman said, doing his best to keep his voice stripped of emotion. “Something happened in there, and you’re lashing out. It’s okay to be upset—what isn’t okay is to lash out at those trying to help you.”
Elena glared at him. He watched through the rearview mirror as her bottom lip trembled. Then, out of nowhere, she burst into tears. Warbling sobs rolled in her throat and broke through her lips. Her defenses were done—now it was up to him to make sure she understood that he would act as her shield.
“You’re so stupid!” she sobbed through her tears. “I-I can’t believe you’re this dumb. Can you please just drive, Roman? Please? I don’t want to be here anymore!”
Roman shifted out of park and into drive, and rolled away from the walkway. They progressed back down the long driveway toward the street.
“I’m here for you, Elena,” he told her as he drove. “I don’t know what happened, and it’s your prerogative to keep whatever happened to yourself, but I want you to know that, if you want to talk, I’m here to listen. You aren’t alone.”
Elena sobbed harder than before. She covered her face with her hands and curled up, resting her elbows on her knees while she remained seated. Every time she sobbed, her body trembled. The pain she was suffering from was real, so strong it was physical, and, for a moment, he wondered if she’d gone into the nursing home to find she was too late, and that her mother had already passed.
“H-how am I not alone?” she managed to demand through her sobbing. “I went in there a-and… and you don’t know what I saw!”
“I would if you’d tell me,” he answered too quickly.
“You jerk!” She sat up straight again, tears rushing down her face. “You’re so insensitive. Even my father has more sense than you, and you know what? Today, I found out he’s a monster!”
Roman fell silent. He came to a stop at the end of the driveway and yielded to traffic before merging. “You’re just learning this now?” he couldn’t help asking. “Your father was the man who killed Boris and kidnapped you. You defected because of him, Elena.”
“He… he was a good man to me, and that was what mattered!” Elena shot back. “He took care of me. He made sure I had everything I wanted. He was my father. But…”
“But?”
She glared at him. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks. “But what he did to my mother—the woman he claimed he loved—is inexcusable. How could he treat his own family like that? I don’t understand it...”
Roman focused on the road, but glanced at her from time to time from the rearview mirror. “Some men are bad men. There is no reason for what they do. Those are the men who are most likely to deceive—who will make you believe they’re something they’re not. Manipulation is a fearsome skill, Elena.”
“I…” Elena trailed off. She no longer sounded angry, only defeated. “I wish he wouldn’t have done what he did to her, locking her away in a place like that while my sister and I were away. I thought I knew him better than that.”
“Then use the anger in your heart to solidify your stance against him.” Roman wished he could brush the tears from her cheeks and wipe the smudges from beneath her eyes. “You already know that your father took another man’s life… and now you’ve seen that his evil is not neatly contained. A man like that doesn’t only lash out against his enemies. Take this moment and hold it close. Always remember it. The ones we trust the most are sometimes the least deserving of our loyalty.”
A look crossed through Elena’s tear-glossed eyes, like a cloud parting to reveal the sun. Then she turned her head away, focusing her gaze on the window. Roman let her be. He didn’t need an answer. If silence was what she wanted, he would give it to her.
“Where are we going?” Elena asked after a long while.
Roman found it in himself to smile. She sounded better. Having a cry had taken the edge off, and now it was his duty to make sure she was comforted the rest of the way. “Home; I’m only taking the long way to give you time to… recover some, from what you saw.”
“To the Sokolov estate?” Elena brushed at a stray tear on her cheek. “I don’t… I don’t want Alexandra or Viktor to see me like this. I don’t want to have this conversation with them. It was hard enough talking to you, and you’re… you.”
“They won’t see you,” Roman promised. “No one will see you. You won’t be bothered.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m taking you home, to my room.” Roman looked at her one last time through the rearview mirror, marveling at how strong she was. “No one will bother you there. And for as long as it takes—as long as you want—you’ll have sanctuary there.”
“With you?” Elena asked, something a lot like longing poorly masked in her voice.
“With me.” Roman smiled. “Always with me. I meant what I told you before—you don’t have to be alone. No matter what, I’ll keep you safe.”
14
Elena
Soft morning light streamed through Roman’s bedroom window. Elena opened her eyes to the rays and let them warm her through the blankets. Bleary-eyed, she blinked away the last remnants of sleep, then stretched and sat up in bed. Yesterday had been hard—harder than she cared to admit—but Roman had seen her through it. Even if he was an underling to Viktor, he had a good heart, and it was clear that he cared for her. He’d wiped away her tears, cleaned the smudged make-up from her face, and made love to her until her mind had been clear and she’d been able to sleep.
A good man like that was rare. If only he’d worked for her family, she found herself thinking, maybe she could have avoided all this mess and seen the truth sooner.
She glanced at Roman where he lay, observing the peace on his face as he slept. During the day, he was a brick wall—immovable, unemotional, and sturdy as anything. But when they were alone in the privacy of his bedroom? And when he slept? She saw the man he was deep down, and she knew his loyalty wasn’t just for show. Roman was the kind of man who would care for her even after she’d stopped caring about herself. When hard times hit—like they had yesterday—and she shut down, he was there to put her back together.
Elena allowed herself to smile as she looked down at him. She reached out and traced her fingers along his cheek, keeping her touch so gentle that it was barely there. Yesterday, she’d discovered that the father she’d once thought could do no wrong was a monster… but she’d also learned that a man not bound to her by blood, and one she’d considered an enemy, no less, had a heart big enough for both himself and her.
She couldn’t go through with the assassination. Her father wasn’t the man she’d thought he was, and his goals no longer suited her. Elena decided to place her loyalty where loyalty was due—in the man who’d been there for her even when she’d lashed out
at him. He believed in her enough to endure her abuse and stick by her through her worst days. He was the one who deserved her best—not her father.
But she would not forget those who had been deceived in a similar way. Her poor mother, trapped and in such poor physical and psychological health, needed care, too. Elena would make sure she was cared for, even if her father wouldn’t.
She stretched and craned her neck from side to side, then swung her legs over the side of the bed and was about to stand when something outside the bedroom window caught her eye. A man stood casually on the grounds of the estate, his hands in his pockets, facing the street. The hairs on the back of Elena’s neck stood on end, and she stood slowly from the bedside, folding her arms across her bare chest. It wasn’t unusual to see men coming in and out of the mansion at any given time, but this man? She recognized him from his frame alone, even with his back turned on her.
It was Mikhail—one of the Popov enforcers. Elena had no doubt that he was waiting there for her.
She looked back at the bed, hoping to find Roman still asleep. As long as he didn’t wake up, she could dress, slip out of his room, and go to see what the hell Mikhail was doing here, of all places. Wasn’t he concerned about being caught?
On bare feet, Elena padded across the room. She found the jeans and panties Roman had stripped from her the night before and wiggled into them, then searched for her bra. It wasn’t near her other jettisoned clothing, it wasn’t on Roman’s side of the bed… so where was it? She dropped to her knees and peered under the bed, but it wasn’t there, either. Where the hell had it gone?
Elena rose and was set to continue her search when she stopped dead. Roman was sitting up in bed, her bra suspended by its strap from his outstretched finger. He hitched a brow. “Are you looking for this?”
Shit.
“Yes,” Elena said, doing her best to come across as casual. “Where did you find it?”
The Sokolov Brothers: The Complete Series Page 18