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Fiddling with her napkin, she averts her eyes. “I thought it would be good to, you know…”
“Good to do what?” I ask gently.
“To get to know you better.” She shrugs. “There are many things about you I don’t know.”
She sounds almost guilty and definitely apprehensive. She tries to hide her reaction, but she’s not a natural liar. There’s something more to delving into my history than she’s letting on. Even so, getting to know me hints at making an investment in our relationship, which I like.
Scratching my jaw, I consider what to tell her. I don’t normally talk about my parents, but she deserves the truth.
I finish the last bite on my plate, knowing I’ll lose my appetite once I delve into the past, and set the plate aside. “I grew up on Vasilevsky Island, but there’s no point in going there. There’s nothing left of where I used to live.”
She frowns. “Why? Was your building demolished?”
“No.” Strain locks my jaw.
Her brown eyes soften. “You don’t have to talk about it. I didn’t mean to pry. I just wanted—”
“No,” I say again. “You’re right. You’ll never have the opportunity to meet my parents like I did with your mother. It’s good that you’re asking.”
She waits quietly.
“There was a gas leak in our building,” I continue. “The whole top floor blew to pieces.”
“Alex.” Gasping, she lays her hand on my arm. “Were they…?”
“Yes.”
Empathy fills her tone. “I’m so sorry.”
“Eleven people were killed. I was at school when it happened.”
A man from my father’s unit relayed the news to me in the headmaster’s office. With a stony face and factual words, he told me I was going to live in an orphanage. In just a few seconds, he condemned me to one of the cruelest systems in my country, one that was notorious for preying on the children it was supposed to protect.
I may have been more interested in comic books than in asking my father about his day, but at fifteen years of age, I knew enough to understand my fate. The bodies of children who’d been in the system turned up only too often. Every time my father opened a new case, my mother would light a candle. I could tell how many kids had died by the number of evenings a candle burned in the windowsill.
“I can’t even imagine how hard that must’ve been for you,” Katerina says, squeezing my arm.
“There was nothing left of my home. I couldn’t go back to pack a bag. They took me straight to a halfway house, a dump on the smelly side of the Neva River’s banks. The first night, I ran away.”
She makes a small sound of distress. “You ran away?”
“What else could I do?” I don’t give her the colorful details of the future that would’ve awaited me as a so-called system child.
Staring at me in shock, she asks, “All alone?”
“I was fifteen, man enough to brave the streets and earn a living.”
She trails her fingertips over my forearm. “How?”
Her intention is to provide comfort, but my body heats at the innocent touch. Even the subject isn’t enough to turn me off when she puts her hands on me. “I was lucky enough to secure a job as a delivery boy in a pharmaceutical company. The job can be dangerous. Delivery boys are often attacked, and the pharmaceuticals they transport stolen for the black market. Not many people have the stomach for it. I was good at defending myself, and the head of the division took notice. He favored me with extra work. It allowed me to save enough money to enter a business school at the age of nineteen. When I graduated, I landed a job in an oil company.”
“What happened then?”
Many years of bitter determination and back-breaking work. Taking my mug, I watch her from over the rim as I drink my coffee. “What do you want to know?”
“How did you end up as a powerful business magnate who speaks several languages?”
I smile. “Do you think because of my background I can’t be an educated man?”
A flush darkens her cheeks. “That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s all right.” I finish my coffee. “You’re not the only one who’s asked me that question. I worked my way up and made a few good investments. I parlayed those funds into searching for oil in an area of Siberia that my employer had dismissed but that I thought held a lot of promise. I was right. I struck gold, discovering a large oil reserve. That allowed me to start my own oil company and then branch out from there.”
She regards me with fascinated interest. “What about learning to speak all those foreign languages? Did you also go to language schools?”
“I’ve always enjoyed reading, and I pick up languages quickly. A crash course usually does the trick.”
