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“So she what? Did something to get it back?”
“She did. She took another lover—a prominent government official, someone who couldn’t be dispatched without serious consequences—and told my father she was leaving. I don’t think she meant it—it was supposed to be the equivalent of a red flag waved at a bull. But that’s the thing about enraged bulls: They can gore you.” My voice roughens. “And that’s precisely what my father did.”
Chloe’s hands lock together in her lap, her knuckles turning white as I continue. “Valery was away for his service in the army and Konstantin was in Dubai for business, but Alina was home for winter holidays, having just finished her first semester at Columbia. She’s the one who called me that night when our parents’ last fight began.” My throat tightens, the memories so suffocating I’m not sure I’ll be able to say the next part. Yet I go on somehow, my voice reflecting only a fraction of the pain tearing me up inside. “By the time I got there, the living room was like a scene out of a horror movie, with blood splattered all over the gleaming wood floors and white furniture. Alina must’ve tried to intervene, to protect our mother, because she was knocked out by the wall, one of her forearms slashed open where she’d tried to stop his knife. And our mother—” I stop, then continue gutturally. “She was barely recognizable as human. He’d beaten her to a pulp before slashing her to pieces. To this day, it’s one of the most violent deaths I’ve ever seen.”
Chloe’s face is ashen, visible tremors running through her slender body, and I want to stop, to end this tale before the horror in her eyes morphs into terror and revulsion, but I promised her the truth, so I divorce myself from the words I’m saying and the suffocating agony they bring.
“He was crouched over her body, knife still in hand as I came toward him. He’d lost control, he told me. It’d been an accident, he said. I knew better, though. Pavel and Lyudmila were scheduled to be there that evening, but they weren’t. He’d sent them away for the night. Them and Alina—except my sister had forgotten something and unexpectedly came back.”
“So he—” Chloe’s voice cracks. “He’d planned it? It wasn’t the coke?”
“It was. He was sky high, his pupils blown wide. But he’d known full well what he was going to do while in that state—a clean-up crew had been notified earlier that evening to be on standby. I know that because…” I drag in air, my throat burning from the acid rising into my esophagus. “Because I called them afterward. After he came at me with the knife.”
Chloe’s sharp intake of air is audible. “He was going to kill you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. He knew I didn’t believe him, knew I wouldn’t let her murder slide. So when he came at me, his pupils the size of dimes, I acted on instinct.” Looking into my wife’s stricken face, I say hoarsely, “We fought, and when I got a hold of the knife, I did what he had Pavel train me to do. I gutted him from groin to gullet.”
46
Chloe
He propels himself to his feet then and strides over to the window, where he stands with his back to me, his powerful shoulders tight with tension, his big body as still and hard as if it were one of the mountains outside.
I stare at him for a few beats, absorbing what he’s told me, and then I force my frozen limbs to move. “Alina…”
“She regained consciousness in the last few moments of our fight,” he says, staring straight ahead as I come to stand next to him. His jaw looks as if it’s been turned into granite, his sensuous lips flattened into a harsh line. “I didn’t realize it, didn’t hear her scream for me to stop—not until after it was done.”
“So she…?”
“Saw me kill him, yes. She watched me slice him open.”
I drag in a strained breath, reliving those awful moments when I saw him wield the knife. It was against my assailant, my mom’s killer who’d been about to rape me and take my life, yet I still feel sick at the memory. What must it have been like for Alina, who’d been barely eighteen the night she saw her parents die so brutally, one at her father’s hand and the other at her brother’s?
More importantly, what must it have been like for Nikolai?
What kind of damage has that night inflicted on his psyche?
My hand shakes as I touch his sleeve, drawing his gaze toward me. His beautifully carved face is carefully blank, displaying nothing of his feelings. But I can sense the well of anguish behind his opaque mask, can feel the paralyzing torment of his guilt and shame.
