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Emmy
We ended up leaving the bar after Nikolai and Callahan intervened after the third round of shots. They were concerned about us getting too wasted with Armstrong still posing a threat.
Though it was a buzzkill, it was an understandable buzzkill. I said a heartfelt goodbye to Delaney who was going to spend the rest of the weekend at her parents’ house recovering from all the drama by drowning her sorrows in her mom’s chocolate chip cookies. I felt a pinch of guilt at not telling her about the Armstrong stuff, but again, it felt unlikely that he would be a danger to her, and she’d already had enough on her plate with all this Orlov bullshit.
I spent the rest of the evening at Hannah and Nikolai’s apartment processing everything with Hannah. We sprawled on her comfortable couch as we teetered back and forth between disbelief to anger to terror, the brief revelry we’d experienced at the bar quickly forgotten as the gravity of the night’s discoveries weighed on us.
“Should we confront Mom?” Hannah finally asked the question that had been sitting in my brain for most of the evening.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure how I feel about her right now. I’m so angry she never told us, but considering who this Armstrong guy is, I almost can’t blame her for burying the information and praying it would never come out.”
Hannah nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I agree. How do you think they even met?”
“I have no idea. It’s hard to imagine Mom and him running in the same circles,” I said, thinking of my mild-mannered mother who’d spent the majority of her adult life working at a hole-in-the-wall diner. It was hard to imagine someone like her crossing paths with someone like him.
Hannah tipped her head back and closed her eyes, as if trying to block out the new reality we were all living in. “I can’t believe this. How do things somehow keep getting crazier? I thought with Yuri gone, everything would finally settle down.”
I had no answers for her. She was right. It seemed like every time we cleared one hurdle, we were thrown three more that threw us all on our asses. Obviously, this newest piece of information had me the most disoriented. It challenged the entire foundation of my life. It created creeping doubts about my family where none had ever existed.
“Hannah, do you feel…differently about me now?” I blurted out.
I knew the answer to the question before it even left my mouth, but a tiny corner of my mind was harboring a small, persistent fear that Hannah would think of me differently now that I wasn’t her full sister.
Hannah’s head snapped in my direction, her mouth dropping at my question. “Emmy, no. You’re my sister, no matter what. Even if we found out Mom wasn’t your mom and there wasn’t a drop of blood between us, you’d still be my sister. I’ll always love you.”
She reached over and pulled me into a very zealous hug in order to emphasize her words. I wanted to pretend it was overkill, but it wasn’t. I needed it. As she practically suffocated me with her reassurance, the little bit of doubt swirling around in my mind was radically extinguished.
“Me too,” I murmured into her shoulder, returning her hug with equal fervor in case she was harboring any of her own doubts.
She pulled back, her indigo eyes glowing with concern and compassion and determination. “We’ll figure this out. The guys will take care of Armstrong, we’ll sort out all this shit with Mom and then we’ll finally be able to have some peace and quiet for a while, where the only drama is getting too drunk or failing a class or some other typical college-type shit.”
A lump formed in my throat and blinked my watery eyes, gratitude for my sister nearly overwhelming me. “Yeah,” I said hoarsely. “I could do with some of that kind of drama.”
“We all could. It’s been a long couple of years.”
“You can say that again,” grumbled Nikolai as he walked into the room with Ivan behind him.
I hopped off the couch to go to him, but stopped short, still unsure if I was mad at him for not telling me about Armstrong. The tensing of his jaw told me he noticed.
I was genuinely surprised to see him. As much as the idea of torture made me cringe, I knew that Ivan was more than prepared to spend time tormenting Orlov, especially since they found out he may have information on…Armstrong. I couldn’t even mentally refer to him as my father.
“Aren’t you back a little early?” I scanned him quickly, half-expecting to see Orlov’s entrails hanging off of him. He looked surprisingly clean, though his knuckles looked bloody and torn.
Ivan ran a rough hand down his beautiful, exhausted face. “We’ve had to change things up a bit regarding Orlov. He was working for Armstrong, and we need him until this operation is finished because he’s been involved in Armstrong’s planning.”
I shook my head, hit with another piece of information I was failing to compute. “Wait, Orlov works for Armstrong? I thought he worked for Yuri?”
At this point, I needed a flow chart to keep up with the working relationships between our enemies.
“He did,” Nikolai asserted, now frowning alongside me and Hannah.
Ivan nodded his head in confirmation. “He did, but when he was with Yuri, they connected with Armstrong. After we got rid of Yuri and Orlov was on the run, he convinced Armstrong he already knew Emmy and could keep tabs on her without getting noticed. Orlov used Armstrong’s influence and money to set everything up.”
We were all silent, still trying to digest the new situation. Again. “Was Orlov kidnapping Emmy and taking her out of the country for Armstrong?” Hannah asked.
Ivan’s jaw clenched. “No, he was just using Armstrong because he wanted Emmy for himself. He was double crossing Armstrong when we caught him.”
Ivan stared at me for a long moment, then marched over and pulled me against his body, as if Orlov might burst into the room and try to kidnap me again.
