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“That’s what I thought, too. I thought wrong.”
She sighs and slumps back, though her fingers keep twitching like she wishes I’d let her give me comfort. “Dmitri, right now, perhaps you need to focus on the home front.”
“What are you asking me to do? Patch things up with Wren? Make it all hunky-fucking-dory?” I scowl darkly. “She wants nothing to do with me after tonight.”
“She just found out,” Bee tries. “Give her time. She needs to process and grieve. It’s not an easy thing to wrap your head around the fact that the man you love is responsible for killing your sister.”
I cringe away from her. “Love. What the hell are you talking about?”
She squints at me through the darkness. “Don’t play dumb, Dmitri. It doesn’t suit you. Wren clearly has feelings for you.”
“Feelings are one thing; love is another. And even if she did have feelings for me, learning that I murdered her sister and brother-in-law in cold blood will have certainly taken care of that.”
“Not if you do damage control!” she cries out. “Not if you?—”
“Enough, Bee,” I spit. “I’m done talking about this. It is what it is and there’s no going back now.”
I swing my legs off the sofa and get to my feet, then walk over to the bar and pour myself a strong drink. Bourbon. It was always Otets’s drink of choice after a failure or a particularly harrowing day. Seems like the time is right to make it my drink of choice as well.
“Wren was a distraction that I should never have indulged in.” I take a long sip, relishing the burn, the sting in my gut. “I should never have allowed myself to blur the lines between us.”
“She’s carrying your son!”
“And that remains her purpose for the time being. Her only purpose.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I assure you I do.”
“Dmitri!” Bee exclaims. “I understand that this has been an absolute shitstorm of a day, but you’re giving up. And you only ever give up when you’re afraid to get hurt.”
I whirl around to glare at her. “You realize that the wedding is in a week, right? I don’t have the time to convince Wren to forgive me. Maybe it’s better that I don't have her forgiveness. It makes things simpler. Black and white. No more shades of gray.”
“Right,” Bee scoffs snottily. “Because it’ll be much easier to keep her at arm’s length that way, huh?” I knock back what remains of the bourbon and pour myself another glass. I have every intention of finishing the bottle before the hour is up. “For God’s sake, Dmitri, you can’t just let her slip away!”
The burn of alcohol is only marginally comforting. Even beyond the immediate distraction and the growing fog it provides, I still feel those fucking feelings lurking. Shadows in the dark. All the worse because I can’t hit them back.
“She was never supposed to be part of the equation,” I rasp. Bee stomps over to the bar and grabs the bottle of bourbon as I’m reaching for my third refill. “Goddammit, Bee, hand it the fuck over n?—”
“She’s perfect for you!” Bee yells, dangling the bottle out of reach. “I would go so far as to say she was perfect for you in a way that Elena never was.”
I make a grab for the bottle, but she pulls it further away from me. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I do. I was there, Dmitri. Elena was a wonderful girl, but she lived to please you. She was a street urchin and you were the handsome prince who swept her off her feet. She idolized you in a way that wasn’t healthy for any relationship.”
“Hand over the damn bottle, Bee,” I order through gritted teeth. “I’m not in the mood for this shit.”
She ignores me. “Did you know that she hated Russian food?”
I stop short. “That’s not true.”
Bee nods fervently. “It is true. Remember the salo you used to import? Yeah, she’d throw it out the minute you left home. And the pirozhki you spent hours making, just for her? She used to pack them up the next day and take them to the Southside to distribute to the homeless. I know! I used to go with her some days.”
Her eyes are bright and her cheeks are inflamed enough to radiate even in the gloom.
“She didn’t like going to your charity galas, either. She’d have much rather stayed in the apartment and painted. She put on the pretty dresses and the dazzling smiles because it was important to you. Oh—and as for babies, she did want to have a child; she just didn’t want to have one with you because she was terrified—and I mean terrified—of the lifestyle you lived. In her mind, you saved her and she was determined to devote her life to you in return. That wasn’t fair to her or to you, Dmitri. How can any healthy marriage be so one-sided?”
She’s full of shit. Spewing lies. She has to be, because none of this shit she’s saying makes any goddamn sense.
