Her Russian Beast: 50 Loving States, New Mexico (16 page)

B
AIR spent
the rest of the weekend, making up for lost time with his siren. They’d only been apart for six weeks this time as opposed to six years, but his need for her felt just as urgent as their original night in this condo. It was all he could do to let her enjoy a few hours at her own birthday party, before dragging her back to the space they’d transformed into their new paradise.

The only thing that got in the way of his enjoyment that weekend was his brother’s Russian words, still burning in his ears. “
She does not understand, and you still do not know her heart or mind. I do not like this situation, Borya. Remember how you became after the last time she left.”

Alexei had refused to believe when Bair had assured him that wouldn’t happen again. That he had a plan to keep her this time. That he knew and now she knew she belonged to him.

He told his brother this, and he told himself the same all weekend. Relentlessly taking her again and again, until they were both exhausted and shaking from the experience of too many intense orgasms in the row.

“This ain’t natural,” she murmured into his chest as they fell asleep wrapped up in each other’s arms. “Sometimes I get scared we’re going to fuck each other to death.”

“I would be happy to die this way, my little siren,” he answered into the top of her head. Solemnly. Without any humor whatsoever.

The truth was she scared him. This scared him. The feelings were so much more intense this time. She’d invited him into her home. Opened not just her legs, but her space to him. Told him her secrets.

And though she winced a little now when he called her Sirena, like she was biting her tongue, she didn’t deny the name. Did not remind him she was supposed to become her cleaning lady alter ego after her last performance.

That wouldn’t be a problem anyway. He already had plans for a few different San Francisco companies she could join. As a lead soprano of course. The opera world could be clannish with heavy insistence on paid dues. But he doubted the American companies were much different from the European ones. And Sirena’s voice was one of a kind. He could easily find a permanent place for his little siren with the right donation.

Which was why he stiffened when she asked about letting Dexter go at the breakfast table on Monday morning.

“You bought me that car,” she pointed out. “It’s not like I need him to drive me back and forth to rehearsal every day anymore, and I can tell he’s dying to get back to Chicago.”

“His wishes are none of your concern.”

She lifted her eyebrows at him. “Actually, they kind of are. I’m the one who has him stuck here, driving me around like Miss Daisy. And I have a doctor’s appointment in about twenty minutes that I really don’t want him driving me to.”

He resisted the urge to glare. She’d complained about being followed into the office by her bodyguard for her annual “lady parts” exam back in Germany, too. But he’d ignored those complaints. It wouldn’t be so easy to do so this time.

“Seriously…” she said. “I just want to start driving myself around. Just be like everybody else until I figure out my next move.”

“You are thinking about next move, so am I,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said, standing up with her purse. “We’ll talk about it when I get back. Until then, can you go downstairs and talk to Dexter about not shadowing me everywhere while I’m gone?”

“
Da
, I will talk to him,” he sneered, not bothering to disguise his distaste for the idea of his wife walking around unprotected.

But she reacted like he’d given her present better than jewelry. “Thank you, Beast,” she said in that husky sing-song of hers. “See you in an hour or two.”

“
I
’m already on it
,” Dexter responded when Bair called him fifteen minutes later. “I’m about three cars behind her.”

“
Nyet
, I’m calling to tell you to come back here. She does not wish to be followed and I have decided to grant her wish.”
After fifteen agonizing minutes of thinking about it,
he admitted silently.

“You sure about that?” Dexter asked, sounding very surprised.

“
Da
, I’m sure. Though I understand why you would question this decision. It is ‘not like me,’ as you Americans say.”

“No, I ain’t questioning it because it’s out of character,” Dexter answered. “I’m questioning it, because your wife just parked in front of a fertility clinic.”

Bair’s mind blanked. Then froze over. Then came back on line with dark reboot. “WHAT?!?!” he snarled.

T
HEL reentered
the apartment on wobbly legs. The interview with Dr. Rosenthal had taken way longer than she’d anticipated, with a whole lot of questions she couldn’t answer without sounding crazy.

Paternal Medical History. Oh, I’m sorry my father swam away—I mean returned home shortly after my conception. No, I don’t have any contact info for him. My mother? Three different children by three different men. That’s good, right—shows the woman in our family are pretty fertile? Well, yes I guess she did have all of her kids before the age of thirty, and I just turned thirty-two…and yes, I suppose I should have frozen my eggs before I went into chemo—though it’s not like I was thinking about children back then…Oh, why did I decide to try for children at this late stage?

That question had been particularly hard to answer. How to explain the scene with her mother a few months ago, right before Thel left Virginia to become Sirena again…?

“Oh, look who’s here!” her mother said when Thel came out of her room with her suitcase that morning. She’d then turned back to the unseen spirit apparently sitting on the other side of the small breakfast table. “It’s your mama. Can you see her?”

According to Marian, her not yet born daughter had been so broken up at her grandmother’s funeral, that Thel herself had told her to seek her grandmother out as soon as she went into the afterlife. So she had.

“But she lived to be one-hundred and fifty-two, so it took a while,” Marian explained to a wide-eyed Thel. “Wave to her, oldest daughter. The poor dear is crying like the baby she’s about to become again at just the sight of you standing there.”

So Thel had waved to the spirit she couldn’t see, completely stunned, while her mother came around the table to comfort the sobbing woman. “There-there now, grandbaby, don’t cry. It’s just another story. I’m sure your mama’s in another good one now, just like the one you’re about to re-open.”

But try explaining all of that to a skeptical fertility specialist.
Yes, I know I did everything wrong to prepare myself to possibly have a child in the future. Yes, I’m aware it’s going to cost nearly every single dime I made playing Santhe to even try to make this dream come true. But I have to try…

Yes, as crazy as it was to even consider trying to get pregnant on her own after having gone through two rounds of cancer treatment, she had to try. The thought of the daughter crying at the little wooden breakfast table her brother had made had been haunting her ever since.

But thanks to her opera training and possibly her mother’s past life acting skills, Thel somehow convinced the doctor she was sane enough to go forward with the treatment. So the nurse had taken a cup of her pee and several vials of blood before scheduling for Thel to come back for an ultrasound later in the week.

Which was why Thel’s brain felt like something that had been run over by the time she came back into the apartment…

And found Bair in the exact same place she’d left him. At the kitchen table, his hand wrapped around a nearly full cup of sugar coffee.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, thinking of the situation that had called him back to Russia. The one he hadn’t said word one about since his return.

He’d never been forthcoming with her about his family, but now she felt compelled to ask, “Do you have to go back to Russia?”

“Where were you?” His question dropped down into the space separating them like an anvil.

She froze. “The doctor,” she answered carefully. “Why are you just sitting there—?”

“What kind of doctor?”

She thought about lying. She really did. But in the end, she knew Bair too well. He rarely asked questions, and when he did, he almost always already knew the answers.

“You obviously had me followed, despite me asking you not to, so I’m assuming you already know I went to a fertility specialist.”

“No children,” he said, his voice feral and low. “I thought you took care of this.”

“No,” she answered, a Taylor Swift break-up song growing like a gnarled tree inside her chest. “
Cancer
took care of it. Now I’m consulting with a doctor to see if there’s anything that can be done to get me pregnant.”

“No children,” he growled, shaking his head. “I tell you this from beginning. No children.
NO CHILDREN!
”

“No, you told
Sirena
that!” she answered, trying to keep her voice level. “A dumb girl who was so messed up with grief, she nearly got her tubes tied to make you happy. But I’m Thel now, and you don’t own me. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“I don’t get to…” He came out of his seat and flipped the table, sending everything on it crashing down on the front room’s hardwood floors.

“You
belong
to me, Sirena. You will always belong to me. NO CHILDREN. Call this doctor back and tell him you will not be seeing him again.”

Thel just stood there, staring at all the dishes he’d broken with his table flip, sadness rolling over her in waves.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “I knew you were catfishing me with Bair 2.0. I knew you hadn’t really changed.”

Bair sneered, like she really was the stupidest woman he’d ever met. “There is no change when it comes to this.”

She had changed a lot over the years since she first met him in a dirty Greek basement. A lot. But one thing remained the same. She still wasn’t scared of him.

“I want a child,” she told him, folding her hands over her chest. “And I’m not going to let you stop me from having one.”

With all the swiftness of his supposed big cat progeny, Bair got all the way up in her face, snarling, “Stop pretending you have choice in this. You belong to me. Stop being stupid girl. I will move here to the States, and you will come live in San Francisco with me. You will sing opera and we will be together, without children, because you belong to me—”

He cut off when she suddenly dropped to her knees.

“Okay, get out your gun and shoot me then, because I’m done being your pet.”

A shocked beat as he processed what she’d just said. Then: “Sirena, get up.”

“Thel. I’m Thel now. I’ll never be her again. Especially not for you.””

“Sirena…”

“
Thel
! You fucking psycho! I’m Thel now, goddammit, and I
will
be somebody’s mother. If you can’t deal with that, then put a bullet through my head right now. Because I’d rather die then share air with you even one more minute.”

“You don’t mean that—”

Oh, but she did.

“Sirena is dead!” she bit out with hot tears in her eyes. “You will never have her again like you had her in Germany, because that girl is dead. Cancer killed her. And I will never go back to being your fuck puppet again.”

Silence. Such violent silence. She could feel his glittering black eyes on her, evaluating her, perhaps coming up with a threat that would get her off the floor…

But the next thing she heard was a door opening, then slamming closed. And when she opened her eyes, she was alone in the apartment.

He let her go.

He’d finally let her go.

She sagged with relief. Happy to have finally won an argument with the Russian Beast. Sad to be without him. But everything about her and Bair was so fucked up. So very fucked up.

She’d gotten lucky, she decided. They both had. And now they’d finally ended their eleven-year game of chicken by jumping off the tracks before the inevitable train wreck that would have come with trying to continue their relationship.

Her phone’s ringing startled her out of her thoughts. That was when she realized she was still on her knees.

Rising back up, she grabbed the ringing device out of her purse. Just to turn it off, but then she saw it was a local number. Not the opera, but the clinic she’d just left.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, Thel, this is Dr. Rosenthal,” the voice on the other side said in a sympathetic tone. “We just got your preliminary blood tests back, and I wanted to call you right away.”

Thel sank down on the couch. Already having some idea what this was all about. Of course he’d order blood marker tests, to double check her claims of being cancer free. And while her oncologist had been very confident her strain of breast cancer wouldn’t be coming back, Thel had been warned that they were still in the early days of “cures” based on genome mapping. She’d been given the go-ahead to live her life to the fullest, but hadn’t been guaranteed anything. Especially not children.

And if the doctor was calling her himself, that meant it had to be bad. Really bad.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Okeanos,” the doctor continued. “But it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to move forward with your fertility treatment plan…”

I
’D rather die
than share another minute breathing the same air as you.

The words rang in his ears as he fended off the punches and kicks of his opponent. This was his sixth match of the night in the Turkish basement—the same one where he’d been stabbed twelve years ago. But he was much older now. It had been over a decade since he received “his scratch,” and he was starting to get tired. That meant he was almost evenly matched in this fight, but not nearly.

The boy was good and younger, but he didn’t have a Siberian tiger’s blood running through his veins. Or a woman who would never again be his, screaming in his ear that she wanted nothing to do with him.

“You fucking psycho!”

The insult burned in his mind, and he tried to defend himself the way he had after he’d found her diary.
I’m a psycho? Well, you’re
a…

But he couldn’t bring himself to repeat the old litany. Every time the words began to form in his mind, the memory of her would tug him down for a determined kiss.

“This is happening, Beast.”

Five minutes later, his opponent lay on the floor, face mottled and at least one or two bones broken.

Bair merely dead-eyed the battered fighter before calling out, “Next,” in Turkish.

“That is enough, Boris!” a voice called out behind him. “You will come with me now.”

Bair looked up and sneered. Alexei was now standing among the crowd that had encircled him. His height and lack of enthusiasm for the fight easily distinguishing him from the other Turkish spectators.

Of course. Only his older brother would manage to track him down here in Turkey at an underground fight only a little bit removed from the one Alexei had to clean up for him eleven years ago.

“I am on vacation,” he reminded the older man. He’d purposefully filed for time off, so that his brother wouldn’t seek him out after their short call about the break up.

“Yes, and I took time from my wife and children to fly over here to find you. This visit is an inconvenience for us both. Now come, Brother.”

He walked away, splitting the crowd easily with his sheer size, and expecting Bair to follow. Bair did, but only because he knew it was the only way to get his brother to leave so he could get back to his fights.

“What?” he growled when they were further away from the crowd, in a dark corner of the cold basement.

“Do you still have eyes on Sirena?”

I’m
Thel now. I’ll never be her again. Especially not for you.

“No,” Bair answered, nose flaring. “She and I are done. I already told you this on the phone. I will no longer interfere in her life.”

Alexei nodded. “I know what you told me, and I tried to tell her the same when I called her about a part in a possible Pittsburgh production of
Chrysanthemum
my associate Nathan Sinclair is offering to co-finance with me. But she told me she could not take the part.”

“She can. I will not—” Bair broke off, swallowing his pride. “I will not stop her this time. I meant what I told you. I am done with her. I am letting her go.”

“I told her you would not interfere, and she said she still could not take the part.”

Bair frowned, and not just because two other fighters had replaced him in the circle on the other side of the room. “Why not?”

“I do not know. That is why I am here. But her exact words were, ‘I can’t,’ which struck me as odd given what you told me about her cancer.”

Bair’s heart froze in his chest at the thought of the brave woman who’d faced him down on more than one occasion, once again being visited by that wretched disease.

But then he shook his head. It could also be a baby. Another man’s baby that she’d had some doctor put inside of her.

“I have to fight,” he said to his brother. “Do not bother me with such thing again.”

“Boris…” his brother started.

Bair didn’t hear the rest. He was already slamming his fists together and heading back toward the fight circle, before his brother even had a chance to finish the thought.

T
hel was almost done mopping
the floor of Hanno’s Carpet showroom, when she heard the unmistakable click of a camera phone.

She looked up to see her boss, Jimmy Hanno, standing between the carpet samples and the hanging area rugs.

“Lead opera singer cleaning Jimmy Hanno’s Floors,” he said. “Wonder how much I could get for this pic? Might as well get something out of this arrangement, seeing as how you tricked me into hiring you.”

She rolled her eyes. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised Jimmy—“the other Greek,” as she’d taken to calling him in her head—had found out who she really was. She’d stayed on in Santa Fe and really, it had only been a matter of time before one of the flooring company’s customers recognized her from the Summer Opera series.

“Dunno,” she answered, keeping her voice deliberately casual. “Only opera blogs would care, and I’m pretty sure they don’t pay money to scumbags looking to skirt equal opportunity laws.”

Jimmy pointed two fingers at her. “Keep it up, Okeanos. You just got one strike for insubordination. Two more and I won’t have to skirt any laws to fire your ass. Then where you will be?”

Without insurance again, which she really couldn’t afford right now, given the hospital bills she had coming up.

“You need this job,”
she reminded herself, biting her tongue.

Just like she’d been doing at cleaning jobs for years now. Sometimes it was hard for even her to believe, that she’d once been bold and fierce. A tough girl, with the kind of reputation that had made most of the kids at her 99.9% white school think twice before crossing her.

Save for those couple of episodes with Bair, it’d seemed like she’d spent most of her adult life holding her tongue, she thought driving home. And by the time she pulled into her parking space, she’d definitely had enough of dealing with assholes for the day. Which was why she sighed with true irritation when Bair’s name lit up her phone just as she was pulling into her space.

She’d known her charmed life—living rent free in the condo he’d bought for his pet, Sirena—would come to an end soon. She also didn’t feel great about the fact that she was still using the car he’d given her as her main mode of transportation.

But, desperate times… And she’d been hoping to finagle a few more weeks out of the situation before she had to return home to get her mother and sister’s help. Again.

“I just need a couple more weeks and I’ll be out of your condo,” she told him when she answered the phone.

“Why did you tell Alexei you cannot do opera?”

“None of your business, that’s why,” she answered as she heaved her tired body out of the copper-colored Audi.

“Are you sick again? Has the cancer come back?”

“What? No?” she answered, unable to stop a bittersweet pang from going off inside her heart in that moment. When, oh when would her heart to stop melting every time he said or did something nice for her, she wondered. “I just…can’t.”

Pause. “You say ‘can’t.’ I ask why not?”

“I meant, I don’t want to,” she quickly amended, realizing her mistake. “I’m settling back into being Thel and I don’t want to fuck with that.”

“I see,” he said on the other side of the line.

“Anything else?” she asked. “How are things in Russia or wherever you are these days?”

He hung up on her.

So she guessed that was her answer.

Whatever
, she thought. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she ever wanted to see him again.

She was just tired, she told herself as she climbed up the steps to the condo. Crazy tired after a long day of cleaning. That was the only reason like three albums worth of sad Adele songs were chewing up her chest—

The Adele montage came to an abrupt stop and Thel froze on the top step…

Blinking at the person standing at her door, she now realized how her sister must have felt all those years ago when she discovered Thel waiting for her outside her apartment in Germany.

Except instead of her sister, it was Bair waiting by her door, phone gripped in hand. His eyes glued to her now very swollen belly.

“You are pregnant,” he said, his voice little more than a choked whisper.