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Elia stared at me for a moment, her expression slowly morphing from surprise to realization.
“You think I’m working for my father,” she said, not even bothering to hide the disdain in her voice.
I crossed my arms over my chest, glaring at her. “Aren’t you?” I bit out. “It would explain this entire change. What else am I supposed to think?”
Her mouth opened and then closed. “You fucking piece of shit,” she growled. “You knew how much that pin meant to me! You knew that it was the one thing that my brother…” Her voice caught, and my chest tightened uncomfortably when the tears glimmered in her eyes. “And you made up a fucking story about it. All for what? So that you could fuck me without a guilty conscience?”
“I told you the truth!” I fought to keep the anger out of my voice. “I gave the pin to your father. I don’t know how it got here. But it sure as hell wasn’t because of what you think, Elia. I didn’t lie to you.”
Suddenly the bruise on her face took on a more sinister meaning. What if it was punishment by her father? What if it was because she’d returned to her father with the job half done: a baby in her belly, but not a drop of my blood on her hands?
“Just say it, Aleksey! Say that you didn’t send it!”
“I did send it!” I shouted, feeling my ire rise once more. “I have never fucking lied to you, Elia!” Someone had planted this in my office, and I wanted to know who and why it had happened.
The Bogatyr is still out there,Uncle Misha’s voice whispered at the back of my head.He’s still working for Ludovico. He killed your father. And unfortunately for us all, you did the one thing Ludovico wanted you to do. You gave him exactly what he needed.
And then another realization dawned on me.
What if the Bogatyr wasn’t a man…
I stared at Elia, my heart hammering against my chest. Could she be the Bogatyr? It would all match up, wouldn’t it? What did I truly know of Elia Tarallo? If the Bogatyr had emerged around the same time that I went to New York, then how could I be certain that it was not Elia?
She’d mentioned how she and her brother would pretend that they were their own dons, to plan and strategize since they were children.
She was the one who had told me to lie to Uncle Misha. What if this was all justherelaborate plan?
“Who are you, Elia?” I whispered. “Who are youreally?”
“I could ask the same of you.” Her expression changed. “You are trying to distract me,” she accused. “Trying to blame this on someone else, aren’t you?”
Finally, she wrenched her hand free of mine, hurried back into the bedroom, and slammed the door shut behind her. I heard theclickas the door locked.
I tucked the pin into my coat pocket and strode to the door, pounding my fist against it. “Let me in!” I shouted. “This isn’t over, Elia!”
I might have killed her brother, but if Elia Tarallo was the Bogatyr that my uncle had warned me about, thenshehad killed my father. A viper in my bed, indeed.
I pounded on the door again. “Don’t make me break this door down!” I wasn’t beyond doing so.
“Leave me alone!”
She was crying behind the door. I could hear it in her voice. As much as I wanted to hate her in that moment, I couldn’t. I found myself torn between the need to comfort her and the need to shake her until she believed that I was telling her the truth.
Placing my forehead against the door, I drew in a breath. I was at a crossroads here. “Elia, please,” I said. “Let me in. We need to talk.”
“No!”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her, pulling away from the door and positioning myself against the wall across from it. “Eventually, you’re going to have to come out.”
And I was willing to wait as long as it took.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Elia
I wiped the tears from my cheeks, glaring at the door. Aleksey had gone silent on the other side, but I knew he was still out there. He wasn’t a man to give up so easily, and if he could figure out another way into this room, I knew he would, and he knew it too.
My head hurt. My heart hurt. I wanted to believe that he was telling me the truth, that somebody had planted the pin in his office. But I just couldn’t believe it. Father had been telling me the truth the entire time. There was no time for someone to have gone from New York to Chicago in the short time that I was there.
