Page 52 of Twisted Secrets
“It can wait.”
“No, it can’t.” She already felt bad enough about bringing him into this mess. For him to do it without knowledge of exactly what the threat was would be unforgivable. “You remember how I said I have an ugly history?”
“I remember.” He turned onto the turnpike, heading west.
“Well, I might have underrepresented that threat.” The panic she’d been fighting ever since Dmitri left tried to close her throat, but she forced herself to breathe past it, even though the effort left her light-headed. “You ever hear of the Romanovs?”
His hands went white-knuckled on thesteering wheel, but his voice was still just as calm as it had been since he picked her up. “Out of New York? Run by Dmitri Romanov? Those Romanovs?”
“The very ones.” Of course he’d be familiar with the family. People like him had to be aware of the threats around them, and Dmitri was nothing if not a threat. The next part was harder to get out than she’d expected. “Dmitri…He…” She took a shuddering breath and started again. “We share a father. He’s my half brother.”
“Half brother.” That calm in Cillian’s voice didn’t waver, but his hands also didn’t relax their grip. “I’m surprised he let you move to Boston.”
“He didn’t have much choice. I’m not exactly one of the inner circle—up until my father died, I was nothing more than a nuisance that he wasn’t quite willing to turn out onto the street. But he wasn’t too keen on interacting with me, either. It was an arrangement that worked out well for both of us.”
Andrei had spent the first twenty years of her life doing an admirable job of pretending she didn’t exist. He was too busy running his empire and raising Dmitri to be everyone’s favorite sociopath. But, bastard or not, she was his blood, and he hadn’t quite turned her out. She had a room in his obscenely large house and she never went hungry. Growing up, she’d been so damn conflicted over whether it would have been better to actuallybehis daughter—or to never know he existed. That half acknowledgment drove her to do some truly questionable things over the years.
Like Sergei.
It wasn’t until Andrei had been diagnosed with lung cancer that he seemed to change, to focus on family more than his empire. He started requiring that Oliviaattend weekly dinners with him, which she’d resented the hell out of. She hadn’t needed a father in her life for the first twenty-one years, and she wasn’t ready to fall at his feet in gratitude now that he was dying and decided she was worth a damn.Too little, too late. Except maybe it wouldn’t have been if he’d lived longer. He wasn’t exactly the warmest man on the planet, but a part of her couldn’t help wondering if he’d have convinced her to come around given enough time.
And then she’d remembered the way he’d treated her mother—and herself—for the last twenty-one years.
Daddy issues, thy name is Olivia.
She realized she’d been silent too long. “When I was eighteen, I hooked up with one of his generals. It wasn’t an intentional ‘fuck you’ but it came across that way.” Cillian still didn’t say anything, so she kept going. “It also wasn’t a great love affair. Sergei was…I don’t know. Uncomplicated. He wanted me, and I confused that with being in love with me. I was young and stupid and desperate for attention.” Maybe she still was. Otherwise, why would she have let herself get so close to an O’Malley? “It was on again and off again for a few years, but when I got pregnant, I wanted to leave New York and everything Romanov behind. My half brother probably would have let me go, but Andrei seemed to take the whole thing as a sign that it was time to officially make things right. He wanted to formally adopt me and bring me into the fold.”
“I take it you weren’t a fan.”
Understatement of the century. “Would you have been?”
Cillian glanced at her. “After being ignored for my entire life, it’d be a slap in the face.”
“That’s exactly what it felt like, though it was more than that. I might not have been involved in theinner workings of the Romanov enterprise, but I saw enough to know I didn’t want my daughter raised that way. I told Andrei to take a long walk off a short pier, and made my plans to get out of town. Sergei came to pick me up, and it seemed like I might actually make this work.”
It still hurt to think about, the words like shards of glass in her throat. “And then he drove me to the Romanov residence and basically carried my screaming, pregnant ass inside. I was under house arrest for the four months it took for Hadley to make her way into the world.” And every day she’d had to deal with Andrei’s forced shared meals. He’d talked about her mother, though she never graced them with her presence. It hurt to know that he’d seemed to truly love her mother, and that she loved him in return. Olivia didn’twantto understand either of them, didn’t want to know her mother was capable of loving another person more than she’d ever love the daughter she never stopped resenting, not when they’d put every other aspect of their lives before their daughter time and time again. It was almost a relief when he’d finally given in to the cancer and died, because it meant she wouldn’t have to have the past neither one of them could change thrown in her face.
“Jesus.”
“When Andrei died, Dmitri was so focused on stabilizing the power structure that he just wanted me out of his sight.” Or maybe he didn’t like the constant reminder of the fact that his father had seen her pregnancy as a deficiency ofDmitri’ssince he hadn’t started a family of his own. “He didn’t care that I was moving out of town, and so I hopped a train up here when Hadley was less than a year old.” She hadn’t had much in the way of savings, but it was enough to get her started at the apartment until she wasable to find a job.
“So what changed? If he was fine with you leaving, you’d think he’d want to forget you even existed.”
“If only.” She picked at the hole in her jeans over her knee. “Andrei was obsessed with making things right, and for whatever reason, he decided that making me a Romanov was the way to go. He set up an account with a truly ridiculous amount of money that will be mine once I officially change my name and take my place in the family.” He’d left her mother a villa in the South of France, which would have made a normal person happy, but all her mother had ever wanted was an official place at the Romanov table, and seeing Olivia granted that option—and rejecting it—was the final straw. She was under strict instructions never to contact her mother again—as if she was in danger of ever doingthat.
“Except you don’t want it.” He didn’t sound judgmental one way or another—just stating a fact.
“No, I don’t want it.” Maybe her life would be easier if she could just fall in line like a good little soldier, but that had never been her way. There might be more money than she could wrap her mind around waiting for her if she did what Andrei had wanted, but the strings that were attached with it were legion.
And those strings would pass down to Hadley.
Even if she was willing to take the hit for herself and choose a comfortable material life in exchange for…everything…she couldn’t do that to her daughter. Hadley deserved to grow up in a world where she was able to make her own mistakes, without being used as a political pawn or exposed to the darker side of organized crime. That kind of thing was all well and good in theory or fiction, but the reality was that even on the outskirts, Olivia had seenthings she wished she could wipe from her mind. She couldn’t imagine how much more she would have experienced if she’d been treated like Andrei’s actual daughter.
No, thanks.
The silence stretched on as they passed mile marker after mile marker. Finally, Cillian said, “So what changed? You’ve been in Boston for about six months by my count. Why are things going sideways now?”
She watched his face in the growing shadows, the lights of passing cars playing off his cheekbones.God, he’s too gorgeous to be real. It’s not fair.And she was heading off into the country with him. She called and he came, no questions asked. That made him even sexier, if that were even possible.
