Page 58 of Beautiful Rush
“Never fear. The bodyguards were always in close pursuit,” I teased. Although it wasn’t a joke. It was true. “When I was a senior in high school, I applied to a few out of state colleges. I wasn’t really into going to college, but it seemed like the thing to do. I just wanted to get far away and live my own life. When I didn’t hear back from any of the colleges, I called the admissions offices and they had no record of my applications, even though I’d done them online. Wonder of wonders I got accepted to the University of Miami. I hadn’t even applied to that school.”
But the injustice of my father’s power play was eclipsed by Sasha’s disappearance. “Sasha disappeared a few weeks before my high school graduation.” A chill ran down my spine. “He’d gotten mixed up with these drug traffickers.”
The media had reported that, so I wasn’t telling him anything new. “He used to take off for days or weeks at a time. So, when he disappeared, I didn’t think much of it. They pinned his death on a Mexican cartel.” Again, that was in the news. “And maybe that was true, but I never believed that was the whole story.”
“Why not?”
I chewed on my bottom lip. “It doesn’t matter now. He’s gone. It was just a sixth sense.” What I didn’t say was that I thought my father was involved in Sasha’s abduction. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, not to Deacon, not even to myself. If my father was responsible for having a nineteen-year-old boy killed, myfriend, that would make him a monster. And if he had done that, he deserved to rot in prison. Thirty-four years wouldn’t be nearly enough for justice to be served. But maybe he had nothing to do with it, so I kept my suspicions to myself.
“The crazy part is that I never planned to turn over that flash drive…I just wanted leverage.” I was jumping timelines in this story, but Deacon seemed to be keeping up, so I kept talking. “I was going to lock it in a safe box and use it to buy my freedom. Something to hang over my father’s head so he would let me live my life as I chose. I’d just figured out that my parents had kept my brothers a secret all my life. And I was so angry. Fed up with all the secrets and lies. I confided in Anthony, he was the only one who knew that I knew…I was sure that if I told my parents, my father would feed me more lies and my mother would clam up and say nothing. She’d shut me out, just like she always did.”
“And Anthony handed over the flash drive? Just like that?”
I nodded. I had heard the skepticism in his voice.
“Did you trust Anthony?”
“Yes.”
Deacon didn’t comment, but I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. He’d obviously come up with his own theory, but he was keeping it to himself because he had no proof.
“When I got to Brooklyn, Connor told me he was going to the FBI to tell them his story.” I glanced at Deacon. “He told you everything that happened in Miami, didn’t he?”
Deacon nodded. “Yeah. He came to me first.”
“He said he didn’t want revenge, he wanted justice. Even if the feds didn’t believe him, he wanted to come clean and tell the truth. So, I handed him the flash drive. I figured that if anyone deserved justice, it was Connor. I told him the flash drive would be extra ammunition if he needed it.”
“You know that information you handed over wasn’t the reason your father got thirty-four years.”
I nodded. I did know that. The feds had been tracking my father’s ‘business ventures’ for years. The information I handed over was just the icing on the cake. White collar crimes they could pin on him. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I handed it over, Deacon. It doesn’t change the fact that I betrayed him. And he knows that. He expected unquestioning loyalty from me and my mother. If I could do that to my own father, someone I loved despite everything, what kind of person does that make me? You want to know who I am? Well, now you know. I’m not loyal and I can’t be trusted.”
He didn’t say anything, and we sat in silence for a while.
I leaned back against the rough bark of the tree, exhausted from the tears I’d shed earlier, and my confession. I had just bared my soul and now Deacon knew what kind of person I really was. How little he should trust me. I’d laid it all out there, making myself more vulnerable than I’d ever been with anyone in my life. I closed my eyes, too weary and too sad to run away. I stayed where I was and waited for him to walk away from me. To realize that he could never possibly love a girl like me. I was only capable of bringing trouble into his life. My heart hurt, yet I felt lighter, like a burden had been lifted. I didn’t have to pretend anymore. This was me, in all my messy glory.
He took my hand in his and laced our fingers together.
“My real name is Aleksei Konstantin Nikolevsky.”
My breath caught. He wasn’t leaving me. He was telling me who he was. He was laying it all on the line, every secret and truth revealed.
Aleksei Konstantin Nikolevsky. That sounded so…Russian. Deacon was Russian? It wasn’t just a cover then.
“My mother’s name was Natalya. She left the Soviet Union before it fell. She came to New York City with a dance troupe and she stayed. She wanted a new life in America, but she ended up working in a strip club in Brighton Beach. There was never enough food in the house, but there was always plenty of drugs. One time I stuffed coke up my nose and spread it on my gums the way I’d seen her do. I thought my heart was going to explode.”
Oh, Deacon.
“When I was five, she committed suicide. She washed away on a sea of vodka and pills. She thought that her death would give me a better life. I guess she was desperate or just weary of life…I don’t know. She wrote it in a letter. It’s in Russian. I keep it in a box with the few things I have from her. After she died, I went into the system. Bounced around to different foster homes and different schools. I was labeled a troublemaker with attachment disorder.”
I knew this was hard for him, and I knew from the way he was telling his story that he’d never told it before. It didn’t sound rehearsed. It sounded raw and real and tragic, like all the best fairy tales. “When I was eight, the Ramsey’s fostered me. They asked me if I wanted to live with them permanently. I said I didn’t care, but it wasn’t true. Thankfully, they were intuitive enough and smart enough to understand that. My dad is a lawyer, specializing in family law so the adoption went through quickly. I wanted to be someone new, I guess. When it came time to change my last name, I told them I wanted to change my first name too. I didn’t want to be Russian anymore. I chose Deacon because it was my grandfather’s last name and I thought it sounded cool.”
“It’s a cool name, Batman.”
He smiled. “Thanks.”
Deacon squeezed my hand. “You can’t choose your parents, Keira. You’re not your mother. And you’re not your father. You’re your own person. And I like the person you are. I like how strong you are and how you fight for the people you care about. Youareloyal. To the right people. Some people don’t deserve your loyalty or your trust. It has to be earned, not demanded. And I can sit here and name every crime your father committed and make my case for the reason why he belongs in prison. I can tell you hundreds of times that you have absolutely no reason to feel guilty. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. You need to make your own peace with it.”
I thought about what he said. Parts of it were similar to what Killian had said and what Tate had said. But he had called me loyal, and I liked to think that I was. I liked the way he saw me.
