Into My Arms (7 page)

I
jerk awake. The sudden movement sends black dots cascading past my eyes. The time isn’t yet dawn and the bed is empty. Somewhere close comes the sound of water splashing tile. Z must be showering in the master bathroom. Reaching to the nightstand, I grapple for the lamp switch and illuminate the room. Holy shit, the bedding is destroyed, pillows and sheets scattered everywhere. After sex, I fell into a hard dreamless sleep, with no discussion of what passed between us. My chest tightens and my next breath is shallow, barely enough to draw air. We’re going to have to talk, and soon.

As much as this weekend seems to exist beyond the space–time continuum, real life starts again Monday. At least for me. Z might have cleared his schedule but I’m scheduled to be back in the Fishbowl, at my desk.

Shit.
I grind the heels of my palms into my eyes. I can’t go back to how things were, door closed, having him PM me terse commands while Koroleva stares through the aquarium glass. But I can’t afford to quit either. And what about being taken seriously, getting funding for an app, having a project of my own? Did I just blow my best hope for a real future? A place of my own? No credit agencies sending threatening letters?

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Last night the idea of trouble sounded good, fun, a way to step outside the sterility of my day-to-day life. But now…everything is changed. And I’m not sure I like that. Screw change.

Except would I give up what I have now to go back in a time machine and refuse to enter that helicopter? Erase the hot taste of Z on my skin? The way he looks at me as if I’m a puzzle that will reveal its secret answer if he watches long enough?

Gah.

No.

I climb to the edge of the bed and find my pajamas crumpled in a ball. Slipping them on, I make the bed, at least that small nod to order is in my control. Then I pick up Z’s shirt, fold it on the bed, and reach for his slacks. His black leather wallet falls out, hits the floor, and scatters contents. I bend down with a muffled curse, picking up a special black American Express credit card, some crisp folded bills, and what appears to be a bent photograph.

I shouldn’t look. Z’s wallet is private. I didn’t mean to toss his contents on the floor, but that doesn’t mean a peek is okay.

Still, the man
is
an enigma.

Who would he keep in his wallet? An image of his dead parents? I open it with hitched breath, and horror and confusion spiral through me as the image falls from my fingers. I sink after it, dropping limply to the ground.

I rock back and forth.
Move! He’s going to be out any second. He can’t find you down here, not like this.

But I can’t get up—my legs are shaking too damn hard.

Even after everything that has happened in the past twelve or so hours, the discovery of that photograph takes the cake on strange and unsettling reveals. The shower is still going, so I pick up the image and stare again. It’s Z, younger, skinnier, and whoa, definitely nerdier. The kind of kid who looks like he was harassed by peers. You can see the bone structure that he’ll eventually grow into, the handsome man waiting in the wings to fill out, but however old he is here, fifteen or sixteen, he’s not there yet. This must have been the kid that Bran knew at the exclusive Australian boarding school where they were roommates for just over a year.

But that’s not what sends my heart up to clog my throat. No. That would be the girl next to him in the image, the one he’s slung his wiry arm around, the one who looks as if she wants to smile, as if it will appear genuine if she tries hard enough.

The girl who looks exactly like me.

We’re talking a total freaky doppelgänger. This is clearly the “someone” I had reminded him of.

When I stare closer, I can decipher tiny differences. This girl has a mole dotting the left corner of her lip. Her eyes are spaced a fraction more narrowly. But still, the likeness is uncanny, as if I’m staring at a twin I never knew I had.

“What are you doing?” I startle to my knees. Z looms above me, lean hips encased only in a gray towel. I can barely stand to look at him, even though another part of me longs to memorize each carved ridge and dip of his abdominal muscles, muscles that are clearly defined as he holds himself utterly rigid.

“I said what the fuck are you doing?” His accent is thicker when he is angry.

I inhale sharply and push to my feet. “I woke and you weren’t here so I decided to clean up a little. Your wallet fell out of your pants pocket and a few things scattered. Including this.” The photograph shakes between my trembling fingers as I hold it between us, the tension so thick it threatens to choke me. “Who is she?”

He tears the image from my hand and storms across the room, crumpling it into his fist, a fist that he slams into the wall.

Where’s that phone? I have an out. He said all I had to do was call Katya and I could leave. No questions asked. No reprisals. And right now I’m scared. He hits the wall again and the force is enough to crack the plaster. I let out a muffled shriek.

I stumble backward when he spins around, chest heaving, and swipes hair off his face.

“Bethanny. Wait. Remember how I promised you honesty.” He closes his eyes. “Know this before you walk out that door. I’m not a danger to you. I would cut off my own hand before lifting it in the direction of a woman.” He cocks his head with a tight smile. “I do not make the walls the same promise.”

“I am so confused.”

“Maryska,” he mutters with a heavy breath as if the word costs him physical effort. “Her name is Maryska. She is sick. Dying. I am flying to see her in the Ukraine on Monday, ergo why you cleared my schedule. I’ve known her since I was a boy.” He trembles even though he sounds like the epitome of calm control. “She was my first love.”

“I’m so sorry.” And I mean it. I can’t be jealous over a dying young woman. “What is the matter with her?”

Shadows cling to him. “A long illness. There has been…much suffering.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

He eyes the bed.

“Not that,” I reply firmly.

“You are intent to peer into things that you shouldn’t see, that no one should. But I will tell you everything and then you will know at last the sort of monster who pursues you.”

“You aren’t a monster.” He’s troubled, angry, and deeply wounded, but not a monster. I don’t know why I feel that with such certainty, but I do.

“Do you think the devil looks like a demon? No, he appears as a man.” He cracks his neck and grips the edge of his towel. “If you want to know everything, meet me outside, by the cliffs in ten minutes. The fog won’t burn off this morning, it’s too thick, so dress accordingly.”

I turn away to leave when he calls, “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

He grimaces as if his words taste bitter. “If you were debating whether to call Katya and leave this place, leave me, now would be the optimum time.”

The pleasant postsex humming of blood through my veins increases to a roar. I’m overwhelmed by wanting to put as much distance between us as possible but also wanting to crawl into his lap, press my forehead to his, and regain the closeness we’d just shared.

When I get inside my room, I shut the door, lock it, and lean against the wood, breathing hard. The phone in question lies on the center of my untouched bed. All I need to do is press a few buttons and within an hour I’ll be flying to Silicon Valley. I could crawl into my bed in my small room. Ignore Courtland and his lube and kick serious ass at my app presentation next week. If that gambit fails, I could continue to serve out the debt-repayment sentence I didn’t ask for or deserve.

But I would be in control.

If I go out that door, go to meet Z, I don’t know what will happen.

But one thing is certain. We’re driving foot down on the accelerator, steering right for the edge.

I
had set the chances of you joining me here at under twenty percent.” He doesn’t turn around when I crunch down the gravel path behind him, wrapped in a thick rose-colored cardigan. Strange how he dresses in such bleak colors, but everything that he hung in the closet for me was bright.

“Those aren’t great odds.” My voice is strange, hovering somewhere in the no-man’s-land between laughter and tears.

“But you always manage to surprise me, do you not?” The sun is rising, the dim gray light spreading over the cliffs and sea. Otherwise we are trapped in an alien shadow world. An illusion because I know somewhere not far away is Highway 1. Tourists are driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco or going farther toward the Pacific Northwest. We aren’t alone, and yet, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that we are the only two people remaining on earth.

A rogue wave slams into the rocks below us, sending spray into the air, and I stand in silence, watching the kelp bob like the hair of drowned mermaids. “Beneath that steely surface is a whole other world,” I say. “Perhaps things live down there that we can only guess at.”

“We see what we can bear to see,” he answers, turning to face me and extending a mug of coffee. “This is to help cut the chill. I have watched you enough to know your routines. You are never without a coffee at your desk in the morning.”

“A necessary vice.” I am glad to take the mug, let the warmth seep into my skin.

He dips his head, a dark lock of hair cutting across his furrowed brow. God, he really is devastatingly handsome, as if chiseled from stone, all hard angles with those even harder granite eyes.

“What if I had asked to leave?” I say, taking a minuscule step in his direction.

He gives his sprawling estate a dismissive wave. “I’d have stayed a little longer, preparing myself to face old ghosts…while being haunted by the new.”

“Me?” I ask quietly.

“Yes, if you had left, you would have become another memory to keep me awake at night.”

“Maryska. She haunts you.”

“Oh yes.” His smile is bitter. “As was her intention, I suppose.”

“Why would she want to hurt you?”

He holds up a finger. “To understand her, you need to venture further back. I will not presume to ask that you try to understand my father, because such a twisted brain does not deserve to be probed. I have tried and that has only led me to darkness. My father was a rich man who ascended to great power after the fall of Communism, becoming one of the principal oligarch families in Moscow.”

“But you are from the Ukraine?”

“Crimea.
Maty
, my mother, she traveled to Moscow as a young woman with stars in her eyes and a hunger in her belly for a life better than the one she had known. She traded the one asset she had. Her body. And my father, who was married and had children near her age, took her to be his mistress.

“But that wasn’t enough for a man such as him. One wife, one mistress. He and other associates formed a network of exclusive brothels around Europe. Expensive. Discreet. Depraved. My mother was eventually tasked with running one in Kiev after I was born and he lost interest in her physical body.”

“So you were—”

“Raised in a brothel, yes. But it wasn’t so bad, at least during the day. One of the other women had children.”

“Maryska.”

He nods. “Occasionally, my father would come for a visit. You see, he had only girls. I was the bastard, but a son. My cock gave me value. At the time, I didn’t know my father well, so looked forward to his visits. He showered me with expensive gifts. When my mother bragged how I’d developed an aptitude for technology, he kept me updated with the finest equipment money could buy. Eventually it was decreed that it was time for me to leave and go off in the wider world, be educated in fine schools, become the type of son fit for a man such as him—every king needs an heir.

“He selected a boarding school in Australia, a place where princes of England have spent time, saying I deserved nothing less. As if I could transition from a place where women discussed contraception and hand jobs like others might chat about weather or husbands. As if I had a shot of ever being normal. My final night, Maryska came to me. She begged, pleaded for me to stay. She said once I left things would be different. Everything would change. I tried to reassure her, promised no harm would occur. How young I was to make such a promise. So young and stupid.

“I left her behind. Of course, I thought about her. I sent e-mails and letters that went unanswered. I figured she was punishing me. But I grew distracted. My new school chums immediately sensed I was different, unlike them, and like a pack of hungry wolves they drew in. We went away for a school camp in the mountains, the Australian Alps they are called. During a hike, other boys took the advantage. Hit me again and again for no reason. I had done nothing to them, except have a big mouth and refuse to ever let them intimidate me.

“Bran is the one who found me afterward. I had disappeared and staff were worried that I’d fallen into a ravine. He knew better, discovering me in the camp office ready to erase the financial records of the school. Even then, computers were things that I understood while humans confused me. After that, things improved, for a time. He was my friend. Except when my father eventually caught wind of the happenings and considered any slight against me a slight against him. And that was it—he came and I was gone.

“On the flight home, he told me it was time that I become a man, not to let boys push me around. I didn’t realize what he meant until we arrived at my old home and there was Maryska. After I left, at sixteen, she was told that it was time to earn her keep. She had nowhere else to go, no one to turn to, and so she spread her legs to men like my father who came through the doors. That night, my father paid her to spread her legs for me.”

“Oh God,” I say, setting my hand on his arm. He jerks as if my touch is living fire. “The first time I saw you, you cannot know how it felt. The more I see you, the less I see her, but the resemblance is—”

“Uncanny, yes.”

“But you have such a hopefulness to you,” he murmurs, pulling me closer. “It is as if you are the sun, burning the shadows into submission.”

I tilt my face to receive his kiss when he stiffens. In the distance, over the sound of waves and wind, comes the faint
womp-womp-womp
of a helicopter.

“Katya.” He recoils. “You called him.”

I shake my head furiously. “Of course not.”

His shoulders crumple, his whole countenance retreating inward. “Bethanny…will you…will you hold my hand?”

“Yes, of course. What’s happening? Your face, that expression, frightens me.”

“Be frightened,” he responds gruffly. “If he comes now, he carries bad news.”