Page 51 of Lethal Alliance

“Yerunda.” The Russian word rasping from my throat sounds like someone else is speaking.

Sergei shakes his head slowly. “It isn’t bullshit, Roman. It’s the truth. Your mother left the United States years before the Orlovs attacked my family, before we even knew they were a threat. She was running from the Cardeñas cartel. Rosa’s father was their boss. She escaped his home in Colombia when she was a teenager, after he arranged a marriage for her she didn’t want. Her father had discovered she was in Miami. Aleksander, your father, asked me to get her to safety.”

Suddenly I’m eight years old, sitting on the landing in my parents’ house, hearing my father’s words to Sergei Petrovsky:“Get Rosa out of the country. Give her a new identity. Hide her tracks well, and don’t tell me how you’ve done it, until and unless we know it is safe.”

I know what Sergei is saying is the truth. I know it because I heard my father say it himself. But knowing it logically and understanding it emotionally are two entirely different things. The person making sense of Sergei’s words isn’t a thirty-two-year-old man running a billion-dollar empire. He’s an eight-year-old child who came home to find his mother gone and then watched his father die.

My limbs feel like stone, cold and locked in place. “You expect me to believe that my mother simply abandoned my father and me?”

“Of course she didn’t abandon you.” A flash of anger lights the old man’s eyes.

Good, I think savagely. I want him angry. I want him hurt. I want Sergei goddamn Petrovsky to feel even an ounce of the agony I do, at the thought that for all of those long, lonely years, the thousands of nights spent shivering in back alleys, my mother was out there, alive. Keeping my face studiedly neutral, I stare the old bastard down as I try to master my inner turmoil.

“Rosa loved you more than anything, Roman. You and Aleksander were her world. Her love for you both was the only reason she ran in the first place. Against my own—” Sergei cuts off abruptly, turning away and wiping a hand over his face.

Against my own advice.

I know what he isn’t saying. I remember how Sergei argued with my parents, tried to talk them out of their plan. And no matter how much I wish I didn’t, I clearly remember my father’s response:“I’m asking this of you now, for your children, as well as my own: get my wife to safety. Allow her to carry out my wishes. Let me do this for you, that all our children might live the life we dream for them.”

I don’t feel comforted by my memories. And I sure as hell don’t forgive Sergei Petrovsky. I remember all of that conversation, the promises he made to my parents.

Promises he utterly failed to keep.

I hear my father’s voice in my mind:“The Cardeñases have a Russian connection. Rosa’s contact told her that is how they found her.”

“She wasn’t just running from her father.” I stare him down. “She was running from someone else, too. A Russian.”

Sergei nods. “Your father knew it was a Russian who had betrayed her whereabouts to the Colombians. But we didn’t know who or why. I didn’t know it was the Orlovs until after the coup.”

“My father had been dead for seven years by then.” I barely manage the words. “What were you doing during that time?”

“Waging war against the Cardeñas cartel.” Sergei’s face is suddenly hard as a winter sky, his eyes cold and deadly. “They claimed responsibility for killing your father. They said it was punishment for having married Rosa. Half of the Russian families in Miami went to war with me to avenge your father.” He meets my eyes starkly. “Vilnus Orlov included.”

I control my revulsion with no small effort. It makes me sick to think of Vilnus Orlov “going to war” alongside Sergei.

My father’s blood was still wet on his hands.

I’m not sure what makes me more furious: Vilnus’s appalling hypocrisy or the fact that Sergei fell for it.

“And in the middle of this war, you never bothered to come looking for me?” I throw the words at him, my voice hard as Sergei’s face.

He meets my eyes without flinching. “Your house was burned to the ground. We searched every ash. We found the remains of two bodies. Dental records confirmed they were you and your father. Orlov must have switched the records, of course, and planted the second body, but I didn’t suspect that until many years later.”

I shudder despite myself. I’ve read the newspaper reports, of course. Knew some boy had been killed in my place.

“They came for me, you know.” I take a dark satisfaction in seeing Sergei recoil. “The Orlovs. Men with sparrow tattoos on their hands combed every street for me, for years. But I wouldn’t leave Miami. I couldn’t. I thought my mother would come back.”

Sergei’s eyes swirl with some emotion I can’t quite read.

Suddenly, I’m impatient. There’s no time to visit the past.

“Where did she go?” My voice rasps painfully. “No. Don’t answer that. My father gave her some kind of key. What did she do with it?”

Sergei lights another cigarette, draws on it deeply. “It takes more than just fingerprints to open the vault.” His eyes flicker to Darya, who is watching him as closely as I am. “There are also two keys. Your father gave one of them to Rosa. After I got her out of the country, she followed Aleksander’s orders to the letter. She went to Switzerland and placed the key to the vault in a safety deposit box. Then she ran, just as your father ordered her to.”

Switzerland.

The word thrusts me back to the horrible day when I stood in front of the safety deposit box, staring at the Fabergé egg inside it. Expecting to find my mother. Finding that meaningless piece of goddamn history instead.

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