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Chapter 20
“Where are we?” Mila asked, getting out of the car. She looked up at the brick townhouse I’d parked us in front of on Back Bay East. It was one of the prettiest neighborhoods in the city; its charm was famous throughout Massachusetts.
Mila walked around the car and stopped next to me on the sidewalk. We looked up at the three-story façade. I made my way up the stairs to the entrance door and waited for Mila to follow me. In silence, I pulled out the keys to the front door and opened it wide. She stepped in, and I followed her. A few steps into the old Victorian hallway, she stopped and looked all around her. The pictures on the wall caught her attention, untouched from when my mother and father had decorated this home with family portraits.
Frowning, she leaned in to take a closer look at my family’s 1990 Christmas picture. I was a young boy, grinning into the camera as I held up a hamster with a ribbon around its neck.
“This...” Mila mumbled, leaning even closer. “This is your home, isn’t it?”
As if it was his cue, Thor came around the corner from the living room and started rubbing himself against Mila’s leg. She petted him a few times then turned to face me.
“This is your home, isn’t it?” she repeated her question, a hint of anger in her voice.
She was smart. She didn’t need to ask a million questions before coming to the realization that something was up. Another reason why I loved her. She might be too trusting with the ones she loved, which until now had included me, but that was an admirable and pure attribute and had nothing to do with stupidity.
I wanted to say something. I frantically searched for words in my racing mind, but my lips just wouldn’t move. Instead, my feet did. I stepped closer to her. I looked at the pictures with her, then gathered the courage to finally do what I owed her.
“It is,” I said, my voice soft and apologetic.
“And that,” she said and pointed at my police academy graduation picture, my dad with an arm around me and a smile on his face as if I’d just been elected president of the United States. “And that would be you, wouldn’t it, Officer?” She stepped closer to read the name on the name tag, but it was too small to read. So she strode over to the entryway console table, picked up one of the letters, and read the addressee.
“Officer...Carter, is it?”
I had played this scene out in my mind a million times, and in every scenario, I always had more explanations and apologies leading up to the main confession. This wasn’t going well.
“Please, Mila, just give me a moment to explain.”
“Explain what, Noah?” she snapped at me. “That you lied to me about who you were? But why? To get to my brother?” Tears were forming in her eyes. “How?” she asked, throwing the letter back on the console. “How were you so goddamn good at lying to me?”
“I didn’t lie about everything,” I said, trying to make my way to her, but she stepped back, so I stopped in the hallway before she could run out the door.
“No...you didn’t! I can confidently say that those orgasms were real.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said, my voice rising with desperation. “I really love—”
“If you dare say those words, I will scream and run out that door!”
The first tears ran down her cheeks. It hurt seeing her like this. I felt like I was going to die from all the freaking guilt. I lifted both of my arms as if reassuring a startled deer I meant no harm.
“I won’t say them. But can I at least try to explain? Then you can still walk out that door. That’s all I’m asking—no, begging— for, just a few minutes of your time.”
Mila wiped a tear away and crossed her arms. But she didn’t leave, so I took it as a yes.
Taking in a staggered breath, I lowered my arms. “I was asked by my station’s chief to take on this mission in return for the funds we desperately need for the station. It’s in bad shape, Mila, it really is. I didn’t know much about Andrei or you when I took the job, only that he’s—”
This was not going in the right direction. What was I supposed to tell her now? That her brother was a ruthless killer? But what else should I tell her? I was sick of the lies.
“Is what, Noah? A high-profile assassin?”
I stumbled backward a step. “You know?”
Sadness and desperation replaced the anger in her face as her gaze dropped to the floor. Then she sniffled, letting her tears run freely down her cheeks.
“At first, I didn’t. I was just a kid when my mother ran off. We were still in Russia when that happened. I was just a little girl, Andrei barely a teenager. It was all my father’s fault. He forced us to move to the US. Not for a better life like any family would dream of, like we dreamed of, but to become a low-level drug dealer for the Russian mob in New York.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Did your files not tell you?”
