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I yank my hand away, a different vision filling my head, one of a rainy night in an alleyway, a man scrambling backward under a neon sign, a gun in my hand pointed at him.
Please.Please, no!
The report of a gun, the sight of blood. His blood, a shot that missed. Him trying to flee, my knife in his back, his shoulder, his throat.
More blood. More bullets.
Death. A vow broken, a vow kept, and more than one life lost that night.
I clench my fists at my sides, turning into the hot spray of water, but that night isn’t the only one that swims into my mind’s eye. There’s another one, too, in a Russian mountain chalet, a man who screamed as Viktor and Liam and I took him apart, piece by piece. A man I helped to carve, forher. For the woman he’d wronged.
There is too much blood on my hands for them to ever touch her.
I don’t deserve pleasure. I don’t deserve the happy ending.
She does.
SASHA
I’M HOME.
That’s the first thing I think as the Towncar makes its way up the long, tree-lined drive toward Viktor and Caterina’s mansion. I’ve always found it beautiful—the white stone, the heavy wooden doors, the landscaping around the front of the house leading to a cobblestone pathway, and an expansive courtyard. Behind it is an even more grand property—gardens, a pool hidden away in more forest-y landscaping like a grotto tucked away from the world, and not far from there, the small stone cottage that long ago in another time was a groundskeepers home, and now is where Max stays when he’s here. Before I came here, that used to be basically all of the time, but in recent months he’s been going more often between Boston and New York.
He says it’s because he’s Viktor’s go-between with the Irish Kings. Viktor, according to what I hear from both Max and Caterina, is usually too busy to attend to every small business detail that needs to be handled with the McGregor brothers. And Levin Volkov, Viktor’s right hand, is too busy these days running Viktor’s new enterprises—particularly his training program for spies and assassins—to be the go-between that he used to be. So Max, as someone Viktor trusts, has taken up that duty in order to be useful and to pay Viktor back for his protection.
Protection from what, I don’t know exactly. Max has secrets that he doesn’t tell me, though that bloodstained night in Russia bonded us, in my mind, closer than secrets ever could. But there are things he doesn’t know about me, as well, details I’ve held back. Things I don’t want him to be able to imagine.
It feels narcissistic to think that he’s been spending more time in Boston because of me, to avoid the two of us getting closer. After all, it’s been a year—as my therapist says, if he wanted me, if something was going to happen, wouldn’t it have already?
I know I didn’t imagine the way I’ve seen him look at me, though. When I first came here, still traumatized and shell-shocked from my abuse at the warehouse, Max looked at me with what I can only describe as pity. I can’t ever forget the first time I saw him at the Andreyev dinner table, a few days after I’d been brought to Viktor’s home, sitting on Viktor’s left as I helped bring in the dishes for dinner—before I was the nanny. Before I was Caterina’s friend.
I hadn’t known he was a priest then. I hadn’t known anything about the gorgeous, dark-haired man sitting at the long wooden dining table, except that when he glanced at me, for a moment, his bright hazel eyes sparkled, and I felt something I’d never felt before. A tingling over my skin, a rush in my blood—and then Viktor introduced me, said my name…Sasha Federova,in that deep voice of his, and I saw Maximilian Agosti’s expression change to pity.
I hated that. I didn’t want the gorgeous man at Viktor’s table to pity me. I didn’t wantanyone’spity. But then he’d said,“It’s nice to meet you, Sasha Federova.I hope we’ll see each other again,” in a deep, cultured voice with a rich Italian accent, and his face had softened. He’d held my gaze for a moment, and there wasn’t pity there any longer.
I asked Olga, then Viktor’s housekeeper, about him later. She’d clucked her tongue and laughed and told me not to get any ideas, that he’d once been a priest and was still as buttoned-up as one when it came to women. “Plenty of the girls keeping house here for the Andreyevs have tried,” she’d said with a chuckle.“He doesn’t spare an eye for any of them. Best not to get any ideas.”
But Ididcatch Max’s eye, again and again. When I started helping Caterina with the children instead of dusting mantels and serving dinner, I saw more of him than before. He was like a part of the family, almost. If I hadn’t known he wasn’t related to Viktor in any way, I would have thought he was a nephew or a cousin living there. He fit in that easily.Iwanted to fit in somewhere like that, as if I’d always belonged. I’d never known how that felt.
Now I do. Caterina and Viktor’s house no longer feels like somewhere I’m staying. It feels like my home. Caterina has gone from the suspicious wife of my owner-turned-employer to someone very like an older sister or aunt to me—something I never had. Viktor, who I’ve long since forgiven despite my therapist’s misgivings, treats me so kindly and paternally that I see him as a father figure or an uncle. Anika, Yelena, Viktoria, and Dimitri are as loved as if they were related to me. Against all odds, I’ve found a family in the Andreyev home.
And through it all, Max has been there. I know I haven’t imagined that those pitying eyes turned to understanding ones, and later to ones that held a spark of something neither of us has ever acted on—I because I don’t have the nerve, and he because of vows he once made that he seems determined to keep. That much I know. But I saw something else in those eyes too, one dark Russian night when he came for me, to save me all over again. To take me home.
I saw a man who would kill for me. A man with blood on his hands and fierceness in those eyes—a look I’ve never seen since, except in my dreams.
Andgod, how many times I’ve dreamed about it.
I get out of the car, walking quickly up the cobblestone path to the door, trying not to think about whether or not Max is home in the guesthouse right now or if he’s still back at the church. I hear the laughter of children and the crying of a baby from inside the house, and I focus on that instead, on the family and the home that I’m eager to come back to.
“Sasha!” Caterina calls out my name in surprise as soon as I walk into the living room. I’m instantly tackled by a pair of arms wrapping around my legs as Yelena, once the youngest and now the middle child of the family, throws herself against me. “Sa-sha!” she cries out with sing-song joy, and my heart lifts instantly.
It doesn’t matter how I got here or what happened before. Thisismy home. I don’t want any other, no matter how many times my therapist encourages me to get an apartment of my own, to commute here and work standard nanny hours, to detach myself. That wouldn’t make me happier.
It wouldn’t make the nightmares go away, or change the fears I have, the things that set me off. It would, I’m sure, make it all so much worse. Against all odds, I feel safe here.
“You’re supposed to have the day off,” Caterina chides as she walks towards me, Viktoria in her arms. Dimitri is on a play mat in the center of the room, cooing at a toy. “Go shopping, see a movie, grab overpriced sushi in the city. Have a few drinks on a rooftop, since you had the driver. You know—havefun.”
There’s a slight note of longing in her voice, which I can completely understand. Caterina isn’t all that much older than me—not quite twenty-five, and she’s married with two step-children and two babies of her own…twins, which is that much more overwhelming. From what she’s told me, she was never really a party girl—her position as the eldest daughter of the most powerful man in the New York Italian mafia made sure of that—but she has even less time to enjoy herself than she did then. She’s a mother and the wife of the New York Bratvapakhan, and that’s plenty of responsibility for one person all on its own.
