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I look up at him. “Really?”
“This is where I want to be. And I usually get what I want.” He says it simply. As if his words aren’t turning my world inside out. As if my entire future isn’t being reshaped in this moment.
I gulp and plow into what I really want to say to him. “By the way, you cut me off earlier. Before we… well…”
“Suddenly shy, are we?”
“Okay. Before we sexually ravaged one another, I was telling you that I’m sorry.” I swallow down the guilt threatening to rise up. I don’t want anything to ruin this post-coital bliss, but I need to take advantage of the fact that he’s actually listening to me. “I got so mad about you paying off my dad. I guess I…I don’t know. I felt like you didn’t trust me to make the right choice. I got mad and stormed out, and now, Benjamin is missing.”
“That isn’t your fault,” he says firmly.
“Yeah, but in a way—”
Suddenly, he’s hovering over me. He grips my chin, forcing my eyes to his. “What happened to Benjamin started long before you showed up. It isn’t your fault, Piper.” He pauses, then sighs and glances away. “It’s my fault.”
I want to believe him. Desperately. I want to get rid of the guilt gnawing at my insides. But this is new, coming from him. “What are you talking about?”
He sits back on his heels. “I guess I should tell you something. Since we’re being honest.”
I think of the baby growing inside me.We’re not being fully honest.
“I know who killed Emily.”
Every thought drops out of my head. “What?”
“The night Benjamin was taken. I was… I was distracted. Noelle gave me a note her FBI boyfriend had stolen. It was about Emily’s murder. It turns out, Emily knew who Rodion’s real dad was: Sergey.”
I gasp. “Did Sergey know?”
Timofey nods. “Sergey knew, but Rodion didn’t. Which is why Sergey killed Emily. So she wouldn’t tell him.”
For a second, the information slips past me. Then I double back, eyes widening with understanding. “Sergey killed Emily?”
Timofey’s nostrils flare. His knuckles turn white as he fists his hands on his thighs. “Yes.”
I reach out for him, offering cold comfort in the face of everything. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. He never liked Emily.”
“Still… She was important to you. As your dad, I’d expect him to—”
“He wasn’t my dad,” he grits out. Then his expression softens. “Though maybe I should count myself lucky we weren’t biologically related. It didn’t turn out too well for Rodion.”
“Wait. Rodion is dead, right? You killed—” As the words are leaving my mouth, I realize my mistake. The assumption I jumped to back at Noelle’s apartment was wrong. “Sergey killed his own son?”
“He shot him in the head. All so no one could question my leadership.”
The things Timofey kept saying are now making sense. How he wasn’t acting like a don would; how he should have had me killed, had Gram and Ashley killed. Things that were taught to him by a man who murdered his own family.
Timofey isn’t the monster I thought he was.
Sergey is.
He hangs his head, and I recognize exactly what he’s feeling. I know it well. I curl my hand around his stubbled chin. “You have nothing to feel guilty about, Timofey.”
“That’s my line,” he whispers in a haunted voice.
“It looks like we’re both going to need to repeat it a lot.”
