Page 27 of Brutal Loyalty

“Someone will escort you,” the receptionist said. “The staff has already been notified. Someone will be here shortly.”

“Thanks.”

Elena cast a glance across the lobby and through the windows of the reinforced doors leading into the building’s interior. There was no question that the facility was well-maintained and high-class, but there was still a sterile, uncomfortable feeling to it.

It’s a prison,she thought to herself, crossing one arm over her chest nervously.It’s done up prettily and maintained, and the staff is soft-spoken and always smiling, but it’s still a prison. And my father put my mother here for life…

A pang of regret and frustration clenched in Elena’s chest. She understood that her father was the kind of man who got shit done when it needed to be done, and who didn’t tolerate anything less than excellence, but to do this? To the woman he’d supposedly loved, the mother of his children?

And that was for nothing more than the sin of getting sick. What would he do to Elena when he found out that she had no intentions of killing Viktor? Or that she’d started an affair with Roman? She shook her head to wipe away any thought ofthoseconsequences.

She’d always known that her father was a formidable foe and that it was always better to be his friend than his enemy. Even being his friend came with risks, Elena reminded herself—after all, he’d poisoned the previous pakhan. No one was safe. Not from him.

A young man in scrubs arrived in the lobby. He smiled politely at Elena, greeted her quietly, and then led her through the reinforced doors and into the interior of the facility. It looked like an apartment building, Elena thought as they walked. The doors were numbered and cheerful enough. There were seasonal wreaths on some of them, and children’s artwork on others. Gifts from grandchildren, she imagined, who had come to visit.

The door they came to a stop in front of was barren, however. Elena’s heart dropped into her stomach. All of the cheer was sucked out of the atmosphere around her, leaving the same sterile, captive feeling she’d experienced back in the lobby.

The young man knocked politely on the door. A few moments later, it opened. A woman in pink scrubs stood in the doorway. She looked at the young man, then glanced at Elena in surprise. “A visitor?”

“For Mrs. Popov.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded and stepped back from the door. Elena took it as her cue to enter. She stepped over the threshold, eyeing the nurse. The shock on her face had turned to something much more like anger, and Elena got the feeling that she wasn’t welcome here. It wasn’t enough to deter her from seeing her mother, but it left her uncomfortable. Did her mother feel this way all the time, like a nuisance? Was she suffering here, believing that she wasn’t wanted?

Elena let out a breath slowly through her nose in an attempt to ground herself, then stepped into the small sitting area. The room was hardly larger than her closet, and there was a musty smell to it, like the windows had never been opened. A small television was on, airing a gameshow episode, and there, seated on the couch in front of it, was a frail woman whom Elena barely recognized. Her skin was wizened and thin, almost transparent. Once thick hair had thinned and whitened over time. Bony hands capped knobby knees, mostly hidden by plain pajama pants. But the arch of her nose? The rigidity in her posture? Elena recognized it. Her mother was still in there somewhere, trapped in the skin of someone who looked thirty years older than she should have appeared.

She didn’t look at Elena as Elena entered the room.

“Mom?” Elena asked, barely finding the courage to speak. “Mom? It’s me.”

No response. Her mother’s gaze remained glued to the screen.

“Mom?” Elena tried again. Her voice cracked. “It’s me…Elena. Your daughter.”

Nothing.

Elena looked over her shoulder at the nurse in the pink scrubs, who stood with her arms crossed just a short distance down the hall. The young man who’d escorted Elena to the room seemed to have gone.

“What’s wrong with her?” Elena asked, her voice wavering. “MS is a physical disease, isn’t it? Why…why does she look so old? Why isn’t she responding?”

“There are several other diseases that Raisa has been diagnosed with since coming to stay here with us,” the nurse replied. “Comorbidity is common in MS. It’s just how it is.”

There was a snide tone in the nurse’s voice that struck Elena’s ears in the wrong way, and Elena froze as she realized what was happening. She’d told enough lies in her life to recognize when one was being told to her—especially if the liar wasn’t particularly good at it. Elena turned to look at her mother again, who was only now moving her head to look in Elena’s direction. The slow, stiff way she moved was almost corpse-like. Someone was doing this to her. It wasn’t natural—her symptoms too extreme.

She’s a living corpse. Father left her here to die, and she’s decaying while she’s still alive…

“Mom?” Elena asked again now that she had her mother’s attention. “Mom, it’s me, Elena.”

“Who?” Her mother’s voice wasn’t the same one she remembered—it was a husk of what it had been, a raspy, withered thing that no longer bore any of its former beauty.

“Your daughter,” Elena stressed. “Do you remember me? Please, you have to remember.”

“Who?” This time, it was spoken with distress. Her mother’s sunken eyes darkened with fear, and she pushed herself into the back corner of the couch as though recoiling. “Who are you?”

“I’m sorry that we left you here all alone for so long,” Elena said, a sob catching in her throat as she tried to speak clearly. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I didn’t know you were here. I didn’t know you werealive. I would have come to see you if I’d known. I swear.”

“Who are you?” The warble in her mother’s voice tore Elena’s heart in two. It spoke of distress, confusion, and terror. Something was wrong here; Elena knew it in her heart. The care she was receiving wasn’t right. There was no way she would have decayed like this if she’d been receiving proper treatment.

Had her father been paying them to let her die—or even to hasten it along? Elena didn’t want to think it, but the thought wormed its way into her mind and refused to be wrested free.

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