Page 50 of Chained Fate
Our baby.
One we may never have.
I don’t realize I’m blinking back tears until Sonia lays her hand on my arm and says softly, “Oh, honey.You have it just as bad as he does, don’t you?My psychic said that would be the case.I guess she was right again.”
“Your psychic?”I stare at her, distracted.“She told you about… Alexei and me?”
“Of course.She tells me everything.”Sonia’s hazel eyes shine in her round face.“When Alexei was eighteen, she told me he’d meet a girl soon, and she’d forever be the one for him.Said their path wouldn’t be easy, but if they made the right choices, it would all work out in the end.”
That’s exactly the sort of thing a “psychic” would say—vague and generic, applicable to pretty much anyone.Yet my spine prickles, as if someone has tickled my neck with a feather, and I find myself weirdly hungry for more.
“What exactly did she say?”I ask, and instantly want to kick myself.
Why am I encouraging this madness?I don’t believe in psychics or predictions.
Sonia’s voice softens, the shine in her gaze dimming.“She told me that Alexei’s fated love would have great trauma in her life… that she’d experience a tragedy that would sink its claws not only into her soul but also her flesh.”
Chills run down my back, even as I tell myself that Sonia is just saying this because she knows my story.If Alexei or whoever told her about my cancer, they probably also spoke to her about my parents’ deaths… maybe even gave her the full story.Then Sonia blabbed to this con artist, who promptly repackaged it with a profound bullshit wrapper and sold it to her as a so-called prediction.
It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
“She also said that she’d either break or emerge stronger from it,” Sonia continues.“And that ultimately, she would have to make a choice.As would Alexei.”
More vague bullshit.Could the con be more obvious?And yet… “What kind of choice?”I demand.
Sonia shrugs helplessly.“She didn’t say.”
Of course she didn’t.Because she was talking out of her ass, making up the most plausible-sounding thing that could apply to hundreds of different couples and all sorts of situations.Come to think of it, Sonia didn’t even need to tell this con woman about my parents.
For most young people, “trauma” and “tragedy” could mean anything from losing a favorite pet to getting rejected from their first-choice college.
Still, as Sonia starts telling me about all the things the psychic predicted about her hamster, I can’t help but think about choices.
I’ve made mine.
Yesterday, I admitted to myself and to Alexei that I love him.
And he didn’t say it back.
I’m trying not to dwell on it, to remind myself that he’s going through a traumatic loss of his own, his second one in as many years.I tell myself that he’s shown and told me in a dozen different ways how he truly feels.Yet a small, insecure part of me can’t help but wonder if the reason he didn’t say the words was because he didn’t want to lie to me.
If, after everything, he’s made his choice as well… and I’m not it.
I’m still ruminatingon the topic when Alexei comes to retrieve me.As the service begins, the priest launches into a monologue about what a great man Boris Leonov was, and I only half-listen, all my attention on Alexei.
His expression is remote.Emotionless.Even as his fingers curl tightly around mine, keeping my hand warm in the frigid wind that smells of approaching snow, he doesn’t look at me, doesn’t acknowledge that I’m there.
I know he’s hurting.I feel his pain and grief as if it were my own.But all I can do is stand by his side and hold his hand instead of embracing him as I would if we were alone.That is, if he’d let me embrace him.There seems to be an invisible wall between us, a barrier that I can’t penetrate.
I don’t understand why it’s there.Is itbecausehe’s hurting?Some kind of tough-man act where he doesn’t want to show weakness?Or is it what I said?Did the admission of my feelings, coming as it did after all these years, seem… anticlimactic to him?
Presumably, this was his goal all along: to make me fall in love with him.Everything he’s done, all the manipulations, all the blood spilled, has been in service of that.But maybe that’s the thing… Maybe the fun was in the chase, not the getting.He could be realizing that he only wanted me for as long as I didn’t want him back—or claimed not to.
That he doesn’t actually love me and never will.
“How are you feeling, Alinyonok?Are you tired?”Alexei’s low-pitched voice cuts into my gloomy thoughts, and I all but jump.
He’s looking at me now, his gaze filled with familiar concern.The priest is still speaking, but Alexei doesn’t seem to care, his focus on me once more.
