Authors: Shannon McKenna
Aaro sighed. “Why should I?”
Oleg pondered him, expressionless. “My son,” he said. “If you have to ask, then the answer would be meaningless to you.”
“Yes,” Aaro said. “Yes, exactly. It was meaningless then. It still is.”
“My son,” Oleg said, in Ukrainian. “You are home at last. Let us put the past behind us. Take your place with me.”
Aaro chose his words carefully. “No, Father,” he said, in the same language. “I thank you, but I cannot. I have another des-tiny.”
Finally, it began. The feeling he had been bracing himself for, from the instant he laid eyes upon his father’s face. The familiar clutch of psi energy, fastening around his mind, slowly squeezing. To force agreement, compliance.
But the things he’d learned in the past few days, the ways in which he had changed and grown, made his response entirely different now. The vault doors in his mind were firmly closed, their contents guarded and secure. He was not frantic, angry, or desperate.
He was calm. Fixed and serene. As unmovable as a mountain.
His own power rose to counter his father’s. It was just as strong, and very similar, like a mirror image. They engaged mentally like arm wrestlers. The light shifted outside, the dust motes danced, as the two men sat in absolute silence and stillness, locked in concentration.
It occurred to him, as the time passed, that this connection was the most intimate and honest that he had ever felt with his father.
And it was combat. Ironic, sad. But true.
When the clash finally eased off, Oleg’s face was a grayish yellow, his forehead beaded with sweat. Aaro was exhasted, too, head thudding.
Oleg wiped his forehead with a handkerchief he took from his pocket. “I imagine you are pleased with yourself.”
“No,” Aaro said. “Just tired. And I miss my wife.”
“Ah, yes. About your wife.” Oleg smiled unpleasantly. “There is more than one way to persuade a wayward son to make the right decision. You want what is best for your wife, no? And your children?”
“I have no children,” Aaro said.
“You will,” Oleg said. “Tonya saw them. In a dream.”
“Tonya. Is she still . . .” He saw the answer to his question in his father’s eyes, and his voice stopped short.
“She died the day after you saw her,” Oleg said. “But you are changing the subject. We were discussing the safety and health of your wife, and your eventual children.”
Aaro looked him in the eye. “You might as well kill me now, while I’m lying in this bed,” he said. “Now is your chance. My reflexes are slow. My guard is down. Finish me, if that’s what you want.”
His father’s eyes burned with impotent rage. “I will do what I must. I always have.”
“And lose all hope of grandchildren? Touch my wife, and your line ends here,” Aaro said quietly. “And so does your life.”
“Ah,” Oleg grunted. “Finally, you are talking like a man.”
“I’m glad something meets with your approval.”
Oleg got heavily to his feet. “I grow weary of this conversation,” he said. “You are as tiresome as you ever were, Sasha. What do you want, if not my fortune, my empire, and all the kingdoms of the world?”
“I want your people to bring me some clothes, and some shoes,” Aaro said. “I want a car to take me to my wife. I want the two of us, and any children we may have, left in peace.”
Oleg snorted, derisive. “You are ambitious, Sasha.”
“I get that from you.”
“Yes, I suppose you do.” Oleg’s voice was fretful. He paused in the doorway, and turned. “These are my terms,” he said. “I want—”
“No terms,” Aaro said. “I owe you nothing.”
“Shut up, boy. I saved your life, and your woman’s life five days ago. Your children, when you have them. I want to see them.”
Aaro chewed on that, but could not swallow it. True, he would not be alive but for his father’s actions, and neither would Nina.
But with all the long, strange history between him and his father, the true size of the debt was hard to calculate. “We will see,” he hedged.
“What does that mean?” Oleg snapped.
“I would not be the only parent. And my wife is very protective, and impossible to coerce. We will see. I can’t promise more than that.”
Oleg made an impatient sound. He rapped the door with his cane. It opened instantly. One of his men peered through. “Yes, Vor?”
“My son is leaving us,” Oleg said peevishly. “He cannot soil his lily-white hands to work for his father, being too noble and pure of heart. Bring him some fucking clothes. And call him a car.”
He got up, and stumped out, slamming the door behind him.
Things moved fast, after Oleg stormed out. One of his father’s men, a guy with a jaw like an anvil, soon came in with an armful of clothes; a black sweatshirt, jeans, athletic shoes. They hadn’t bothered with socks or underwear, but he wasn’t fussy. The trick was getting the clothes onto his body. Bending over to put a pant leg onto his ankle hurt so much, he lost consciousness, the first time he tried.
He finally worked out a system, laying the pants out on the bed and slowly wiggling into them while lying flat on his back.
He was soaked with sweat, his heart bumping dizzily by the time he got them over his ass. They were loose. He’d gotten thinner.
Just as well. A tight waistband over a bullet hole would really rot.
He worked his bare feet into the shoes, pulled the sloppy sweatshirt over his torso, and that was it. Preparations complete.
Considerable blood had soaked through his bandage, but that was his problem and his alone now. By turning his back on Oleg, he’d abdicated all help and comfort. He was used to being without help or comfort, but it was more daunting than usual, with a bleeding hole in one’s guts.
He pushed open the door. Anvil Jaw waited outside. The man started down the hall, jerking his chin for Aaro to follow.
He couldn’t keep up, but he tried, holding himself up against the wall, pressing his hand against the bandage as if his guts were about to fall out of the hole. Doctors and nurses watched him shuffle by, sweat dropping off the end of his nose. They looked troubled, but no one stopped him or spoke to him. No medical professional in his or her right mind would release a guy in his current shape from a medical facility. But when Oleg Arbatov spoke, no one contradicted him. Except his son.
And it was yet to be seen if Aaro would survive to tell the tale.
Outside, the air was warm, humid. A car waited in the round-about. Anvil Jaw opened the back door for him.
Another challenge. Getting into the backseat. He angled himself in, trying not to bend, or make any whimpering, undignified noises.
The guy slammed the door after him, got into the driver’s seat, and waited for his cue, like some sort of formal ritual.
“Take me to my wife,” Aaro said. The car surged forward.
He couldn’t tell how long the trip was. He drifted in and out of consciousness for a lot of it. He had no idea where he was coming from, or where the guy was taking him. The pain was very bad, fogging his mind. He couldn’t concentrate on the road signs, or identify exits, or recognize landmarks or towns. He had no clue if the man was really driving him to Nina or not. He could be taking Aaro to a landfill, to put a bullet in his brain stem, bury him under a ton of garbage.
One thing was certain. He was in no condition to defend himself. He’d spent all his mental energy in that psychic bout with Oleg. If Anvil Jaw had been ordered to execute him, he would die. So why concern himself? It was more relaxing to just lie back and think of Nina.
They left the freeways behind, and got on a flat, straight road now, with the kind of scrubby vegetation that only grew on sandy soil, near beaches. The car slowed, and then stopped.
Aaro looked out, at a gray, shingled beach house, perched on short stilts. Dunes lay beyond it. Marsh grasses waved on one side. Potato fields were green and bushy on the other side of the road, behind him. A mailbox was attached to a crooked pole next to the wooden walkway that led over the tufts of sandgrass to the front door.
Anvil Jaw opened the back door, and waited, for the painful minutes that it took Aaro to extricate himself. He lunged for the mailbox post for support. Anvil Jaw didn’t look at him as he got into the car and drove away. The message was clear. He no longer existed.
And yet, he lived. He stared at the house. He wanted to laugh, but just the thought made his guts hurt. So ironic. He, Aaro, so uptight, it practically gave him an ulcer to check his guns at the
404
airport security checks, stood here, no weapon, no wallet, no money, no ID, no cell phone. No clue where he was. No underwear. Balls flying free. If this house was deserted, he would never make it to another one for help. He would die here, looking up at the sky. All he could do was hope that there was a friend in that house who would catch him when he fell.
He launched himself from the mailbox post, and went for it.
Edie Parrish stared out the window at the beach. The faraway figure was barely visible in the distance. “She’s been out there for seven hours,” she fretted. “She didn’t eat anything today, or yesterday, either. Lily will kill me if I don’t take good care of her. I should go out and—”
“No,” Kev McCloud said. “Leave her.” He stroked his wife’s slender back. “She just has to get through it. Figure out how to keep existing.”
Edie’s face tightened. “He could have let her see him. What would it cost him, to let her be at his bedside at the end? A little compassion.”
Kev pulled her into his arms. “Arbatov doesn’t know about compassion. I always wondered why Aaro was so tense.”
They swayed, in the kitchen of the house Bruno had found through a vacation rental agency. The two of them had volun-teered to stay with Nina during her fight to be with Aaro, since Lily and Bruno were bound to the incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, in which their small but fierce son Marco lived while his lungs matured.
Kev’s head jerked up. His eyes had that bright, hyper-alert glint. “Did you hear that?”
She shook her head.
“Stay here.” Kev drew the pistol from the back of his jeans.
But Edie, not being all that great at doing what she was told, followed him, so she was there when the front door opened, and a guy she barely recognized fell through it, right into Kev’s arms.
She rushed to help. Together they lowered him to the floor.
Aaro. Dear God, he looked different. Rendered down to stark essentials. Cheekbones carved in so deep, the angle of his jaw so sharp. His hair had been shorn to thick stubble.
His fingers were sticky with fresh blood, she was horrified to realize. “Aaro? Are you shot? Jesus, you’re bleeding!”
“It’s an old wound,” he said, his voice faint. “I’m leaking through the bandage, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.”
She laughed at him. “Lunatic! Don’t worry about it? Hah!”
“Nina,” Aaro croaked. “Where is Nina?”
“She’s here,” Kev said. “Outside, on the beach. We’ll get her.”
Aaro shook his head. “I’ll go out and meet her.”
“You’re not going anywhere!” Kev snapped. “You belong in a hospital! Don’t even think about moving!”
But Aaro was struggling up. “I am going out to meet her. Or crawl out on my own, and bleed all over your fucking floor while I’m at it.”
Edie had seen that look often enough on her own man’s face to know there was no point in arguing with him. They met each other’s eyes over Aaro’s head. He was being irrational, but they didn’t want him to have a big freak-out. If it was some big, important, symbolic thing for him, so be it. The medics could retrieve him from the beach.
They hoisted him up, and hauled him outside, through the door, across the deck, down the walkway over the dune. There, on the sand and grass, he finally consented to sink to the ground.
Deathly pale.
“I’m calling an ambulance now,” Kev said, and hurried inside.
Aaro searched desperately with his eyes. “Nina?”
Tears were fogging up her eyes. She patted his stubbled cheek. “I’ll go get her for you,” she said. “Don’t move. Really.
Not one muscle.”
She ran out onto the sand toward Nina’s distant figure, waving her arms frantically over her head.
*
It hurt to breathe, but air kept on knifing in and rasping back out of her chest. Her ribs had been cracked in that final show-down.
Nina stared at the waves. It was twilight, and the evening star hung in the sky, solitary, achingly brilliant under an ethereal sliver of moon. Beautiful, but she couldn’t feel it. The part of her that loved beauty was buried in the rubble. She couldn’t eat, with her stomach crushed under all that broken masonry. Couldn’t sleep. Could barely speak. But her lungs just stubbornly kept on expanding.
The first few days of her desperate campaign to compel Oleg Arbatov to let her see his son had been all frantic effort, which had availed her nothing. Not surprising. She’d been incredibly rude to the man, and Arbatov was so corrupted by his secret power, there was no way to successfully oppose him. She’d known that, but just having something impossible to do had helped. The flailing, the carrying on, the noise she’d made.
She’d been terrified to stop. As if squawking at Oleg while Aaro was still alive was her last, tenuous link to her love.
But day three had gone by. Day four. Day five. And Aaro couldn’t still be alive on day six. Squawking at Oleg had lost all meaning.
If only the man would just tell her what happened. When Aaro had died. If he had asked for her. Maybe she could eventually find out where he was buried. Having a place to visit. It might help.
Or not. She felt hollowed out, brittle. Edie and Kev were kind and gentle, but they both knew there was nothing anyone could say. So for the most part, they stayed quiet. The great thing about Kev and Edie were their impervious mind shields. Both of them.
What a relief.
She couldn’t just give up. There was still work to be done.
Lara was still languishing in captivity somewhere. But she would have to be brilliant and heroic to figure out how to help Lara, and she was fresh out of brilliance and heroism. The well had run dry.