Page 70 of Lethal Alliance

I meet her eyes and smile faintly. “Deal.”

It’s after midnight,and Roman and Dimitri still aren’t home. Abby’s amazing spaghetti marinara is long finished, as well as a panna cotta I found in the fridge and most of two bottles of very good red wine, neither of which I’ve touched. We’re ensconced on the couch, my third pot of peppermint tea almost finished and Abby eyeing the rapidly dwindling contents of her glass.

“So all this time,” she says, staring at me in fascination, “I was living with a bratva princess? Heiress to some great fortune from imperial fuckingRussia?”

“Well, not heiress, strictly speaking.” It’s incredibly cathartic to actually talk about it, or at least the parts I know. “We’re Russian, andverytraditional. My brother is my father’s heir. Daughters are there to look beautiful, take care of their papas, and marry into profitable alliances.”

“Well, in that case, I’d say you’ve smashed it out of the park.” Abby holds up one hand. “Beautiful:tick. A hundred ticks.Take care of your papa:fucking target hit, above and beyond.Marry profitable alliance:Oh, let me check. Does billionaire bosshole tick that particular box?”

I’m laughing despite myself, despite everything. “I’m not really sure my father will see it that way. For that matter, Roman has never mentioned marrying me.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s coming, Darya. That’s been coming from the day you came down from his coffee delivery with your shorts undone and that glassy-eyed look. The man is obsessed with you, anyone with eyes can see that.”

There’s no time for either of us to be obsessed with anything at the moment.

Guilt and exhaustion wash over me again, as they do every time I momentarily forget the agonizing terror of Masha and Ofelia being in that compound.

Abby covers my hand comfortingly. “There’s nothing we can do but wait,” she says, for the fiftieth time tonight. I nod. There isn’t much else to be said.

“But I want to know more about this Naryshkin fortune,” she says. “What’s the actual story? Did your father really escape with it?”

I know she’s trying to distract me. But I don’t particularly mind. I’m exhausted from worrying at the thought of the girls in that damned room.

I turn my teacup in my hands. “There are parts of Papa’s story I know,” I say slowly, “and parts I don’t. Some that I’m just starting to piece together now. I’ll tell you what I do know, the part of the story my father impressed upon us as children.

“Papa’s father, my grandfather, was a prince who was imprisoned during the revolution. Papa never told me that my grandfather’s name was Naryshkin; that part I’ve pieced together myself over the years, and it’s only speculation. What I do know is that my grandfather and his best friend risked their lives helping many Russian aristocrats escape—including Peter Carl Fabergé, the jeweler. They remained loyal to the imperial family to the very end and were thrown into a gulag with one of the royal sons as a result. They risked their lives again to help him escape and got him safely to exile in Finland. They and their families were imprisoned in a gulag for the rest of their lives as punishment. Both my father and his best friend were born in the gulag.”

“Your father wasbornin prison?” Abby is openly shocked.

“And raised there.” I smile. “He never spoke about it like it was a hardship, though. When he spoke about it at all, which was rare, he told us about being taught by the imprisoned aristocrats in the gulag. Literature, music, languages, art... Papa said once that he and the other sons were schooled as rigorously as any student in an elite college. He used to describe sitting around a lone candle during freezing nights while someone read from a book they’d hidden.” I smile, remembering Papa’s reverence for the written word. “Our home was filled with books in Russian, French, Latin, Italian—room after room of rare books. I think if Papa could own every book in the world, he would, just to make sure they were safe.

“The older men also taught their sons useful things. How to hunt and fight. But most of all, they taught them their own skills. Everything from watchmaking to leather work, any skills they had were passed on to the sons born into captivity, as best they could be.” I cast Abby a sideways glance. “Including safe making—and breaking.”

“So that was Roman’s grandfather? A safe maker? What did you say his name was?”

“Borovsky. He wasmygrandfather’s best friend, although Papa never told us his name when we were growing up. He never used names in general. Everyone he knew in the gulag was explained to us using nicknames: Papa’s father, for example, was nicknamedGraf, or the Count; Roman’s grandfather, Borovsky, wasGlaza,the Eyes. My father never mentioned his own nickname, but he did say that his best friend, Borovsky’s son, was known asRuki—the Hands.”

“And you think this Ruki was Roman’s father?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. You have to understand how secretive Russians are, particularly those who were raised in gulags. My father will never stop looking over his shoulder until the day he dies. They trust no one but one another. My father might have told Alexei his stories, because Alexei is his son, the rightful heir to our tradition. But not me.” It’s difficult to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Especially after all we’ve been through together, all I’ve done to keep Papa safe, it’s hard to accept that he still sees me as his daughter, someone to protect and shelter, rather than trust as he does Alexei.

If Roman and I do make this work, I vow,it’s going to be different between us, traditional or not.

“Anyway,” I go on. “When Papa was around thirty years old, long after their parents had passed, the gulags were closed, and he and Ruki were released.” I shoot Abby a wicked grin. “And this is the part of the story Papa would reluctantly tell, but only to us, his children, and only after too much vodka, when he was in a very good mood.

“During those long nights spent telling stories in the gulag, Ruki had been taught by his father how to make—and crack—safes. Papa had been taught how to fight and hunt. When they were released from the gulag, they broke into Papa’s family home, which by then had communist officials living in it. Papa never told us exactly what they stole. All he ever did was give us a wink and a wicked grin and tell us that he and Ruki ‘took back what belonged to Russia.’ Then they fled the country.”

I can’t help the note of pride that comes into my voice in this part of the story.

“They walked the entire way to Switzerland, just the two of them, in the dead of winter. Those were the stories my father would tell, about the rabbits they caught, the berries they ate. It’s why I remember the name Ruki so well. Papa always told us that his father had taught him that only one thing mattered:keep Ruki safe.Keep his best friend’s hands safe. Papa told us his father even had a saying for it, that Alexei and I learned when we were children:Glaza boyatsya, a ruki delayut.In English it meansthe eyes are afraid, but the hands do.It’s a bit like ‘feel the fear, and do it anyway.’Papa always said that until he and Ruki were safely far away from Russia, his job was to make sure that Ruki’s hands were kept safe, no matter what happened to them both.”

“But what did they steal? Or—take?” Abby is fascinated.

I shake my head, smiling. “I don’t actually know. No,” I laugh, when she starts to protest, “truly, I don’t. I don’t know much before Papa came to America. I do know that he lived in France before that. Mama told me he was even married there and had children. I don’t know what happened there, only that his wife and children died. He never spoke of those years, just like he never opened the vault in our home and showed me what was inside. When I’d ask, he’d always say, ‘that is a story for another day, myshka.’Then he would take me to the library and give me a book and say that the only true treasure lives in our heads and hearts.”

My heart twists at the memory. I can almost smell my mother’s cooking stealing through the compound, feel the rich paper of Papa’s old books beneath my fingers.

There’s something incredibly cathartic about telling someone about my past. I’ve never told my story to anyone. Our family was a tight circle of trust, our stories told in our kitchen, and only ever to us. I don’t know when I first knew that our secrets weren’t ever to be shared, but I do remember the heavy feeling that came with keeping them. The shadows of the past lingered in every corner of our room, in the books my father reverently took down from the shelves, in the priceless art on the walls. We were surrounded by the past, but it was also a world my brother and I were never allowed to fully understand. The past was a mystery that haunted my father’s eyes when he thought we weren’t looking, that lived in the thousand brutal scars on his body. When I got older, I understood that the stories he’d told us of the gulags were rose-colored memories fit for children. His own father died when Papa was still a teenager, and yet he lived in the gulag for years after that. The gulag raised him. It created Sergei Petrovsky, the man who built and then lost a family in circumstances he’d never speak of. The gulag created the fiercepakhanhe then became, the warlord who created an empire that inspired both respect and fear.

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