Page 20 of Lethal Obsession

“It has to be me.” I step forward, gripping her shoulders. “I need to become a killer, just like you need to become invisible. These are our lives now, Darya. If we want to survive, if we don’t want to lose everything Papa worked for, this is the only way. I stay here and make peace with the Orlovs. You go and save Papa. You must.”

“No!” Shaking her head, she touches my face. “They won’t believe you. They’ll torture you—”

“Worse than they already have?” My laugh comes out more harshly than I intend. “Pain I can take, Darya. Watching them torture you and Papa is far worse. You’ve been flirting with the guard on the gate for months. They’ll believe it was him who bribed the other guards, just like we planned.”

She looks down at Papa, who is watching us in silence. “You don’t agree with this, Papa. You can’t.”

But seeing the pain in his eyes, her face falls.

“You worked this out together.” She looks between us in shock. “You were just waiting until I was safely out to tell me. You always planned to stay.”

I nod, trying not to think about her out there alone, on the run with my invalid father, hunted by the Orlovs. “I’m sorry, Darya. But we knew you’d never agree otherwise. And this is the only way. Papa will die if we stay here. It’s only a matter of time until they decide to rape you, for fun if not for answers. The only surprise is that they haven’t done it already. If we run together, the three of us will be caught before the day is out. But this way, you have a real chance. The Orlovs won’t hunt you as hard if they still have me to answer their questions . . .”

I take a large mouthful of cognac to drive out the memories, the burn of the alcohol pulling me back into the room.

This is one of the reasons I find it so hard to be anywhere near family. The memories are almost harder than living through the actual events.

Almost.

I’ve never regretted my decision to stay. But nor can I change what I became in the hard years that followed. My father might not like the man those years created, but he’s seen enough hardship himself to know better than to question it.

“I have good news.” I smile at him now, in an effort to drive away the darkness. “I’ll be joining you in Paris.”

“Ah.” The look he gives me is sharp enough to peel paint from the walls. “I suppose I should be grateful I don’t have to make lies to your sister.”

A younger version of me might have leaped to my own defense. But I learned the power of silence a long time ago, so I meet my father’s penetrating eyes with the same opaque stare with which I learned to meet Vilnus Orlov’s.

Unfortunately, my father is rather less easy to deceive.

“Should we expect your visit to be brief,” he says dryly in Russian, “or is a more extended vacation required?”

“Uncertain.” I sip my cognac.

“Will we travel together?”

“Unwise.” I meet his eyes blandly. “I’ll book a later flight.”

To his credit, Papa doesn’t ask anything further. We sit for a time, sipping our drinks.

“I want to make a gift,” he says eventually, this time in English. “For Ofelia. This performance, it is a big occasion for her.”

Don’t say her name. Just hearing it is enough to set my every nerve on edge.

I keep my expression carefully neutral. “What did you have in mind?”

He tilts his head toward the door. “Will you come downstairs with me? I would like to show you what I am thinking of.”

Downstairs.

Such an innocuous word for such a dark fucking place.

But I don’t show my father my loathing. He lost just as much in that basement as I did. The Orlov coup took place when my father was lying comatose in a hospital, after a stroke everyone thought would kill him. Instead, he survived long enough for the Orlovs to work out that they couldn’t get into the vault in our basement without him. After he came back to consciousness they kept him strapped to a bed, facing a window through which he was forced to watch his wife and children tortured.

Since my father held only one of the two keys needed to open the vault, and didn’t know the whereabouts of the second, the torture was in vain. Unfortunately, the Orlovs never believed that. Not even when my father remained silent after being forced to watch my mother raped and tortured to death.

The first time Papa came back to visit, after the Orlovs were defeated, he came alone. I went to his bedroom to wake him on the first morning and found his bed empty. I scoured the entire house before finally bracing myself to go downstairs, even though part of me knew that was where he’d be.

I found him sitting on a lone chair, in the middle of the concrete room in which the Orlovs had once held him prisoner.