The Romanov Legacy (8 page)

“What happened?”

Her features relaxed into the purest smile he’d ever
seen.  “Beth.  She saved me.”

“What does she think about all this?  Does she think
you’re schizophrenic?”

“She thinks I’m like Joan of Arc, visions and all. 
Maybe it’s the same thing.”

“What do you think?”

She shrugged and twisted away from him.  “It’s bigger
than me.  I’m just the puppet.”

“Who’s the puppeteer?  God?”

“Fuck if I know.  If I think about it too much, it
makes me hate everything.  You know what happened to Joan of Arc, don’t
you?”

“Yes, I know.”  He recognized the bitterness in her
tone and knew just where it came from.  Lana believed that what happened
to her was her fault, too—that she deserved to be beaten and raped and left for
dead, even though
he
was the one Lazovsky wanted.  “It’s not your
fault.  You know that, right?” 

Her smile was like a jack-o-lantern, scooped out and
hollow.  “I know lots of things.”

“How do you deal with it?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

She shrugged and shifted position on the bed. 
“Sometimes I burn myself with a cigarette lighter.”

“To be like Joan?”

“To see if I can feel it.”

“What if you can’t?”

“Then I do other things.”  She dropped his gaze and
picked at the decaying chenille bedspread.  “I just wish I knew why Belial
picked me.  Beth thinks I’m so smart, but she’s a million times what I’ll
ever be.  Maybe it had to be this way so she could be who she is. 
That’s okay.”  She blinked rapidly and sniffed.  “I would do anything
for her.  But I still want to know, you know?”

Her words hit him in the gut like a punch.  She’d
accepted what had happened to her as a trade for her sister’s more successful
life.  “Jesus,” he said, “Natalie, look at me.”  He put two fingers
under her chin and tilted her head back up towards him.  “None of this
happened as some sort of cosmic trade for your sister’s success.  It’s not
your fault.  Believe me, sometimes things happen for no reason.” 

“Not this.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You don’t know anything.”

She tried to pull away but he held her face in his grasp,
brushing her cheekbones with his thumbs.  “It’s not your fault.” 

“But how do you know that?”  She leaned her forehead
against his and suddenly, her lips were just inches away.  “You can’t know
that.”

“I do.”  He held her gaze.  “Somewhere inside, you
do, too.”  He watched her eyes thaw like the ice they resembled, slipping
from something hard and cold into something liquid, something he couldn’t grasp
if he tried.  He closed his eyes and gently brushed her lips with his own,
intending to pull away when she was comforted. 

But something happened.  Instead of pulling away, she
opened her mouth to him.  Hungry and angry, her tongue swept his in a
honeyed frenzy.  She slipped shaking hands around his neck and pulled him
closer.  The heat from her body swept through him, setting his blood on
fire in an instant.  He kissed her back and imagined pressing her down
into the creaking bed.  “Natalie,” he said, pulling back.  “You
shouldn’t do this.”

Her heavy breaths moved her hair where it had fallen over
her face.  “You asked me to believe you.  Do you believe me?”

Her eyes, melted pools of Siberian ice, held more fear and
more pain than he could fathom.  Maybe, he thought, the best way to help
her wasn’t to try and change her.  Maybe the best way was simply to do
what she asked—believe in her.  

He let her pull him down onto the bed and covered her body
with his. 

July 2012

San Francisco, California

Beth Brandon lay in bed with a book in her lap.  On the
cover, a half-naked redhead writhed in the arms of a pirate who looked like
Fabio.  She wished she were the type of professor who read Foucault or
Goethe for fun, but on most days, she could barely manage Jared Diamond. 
Life was already full of guns, germs, and steel.  If there happened to be
a shortage of any of these, Roosevelt filled in with an admirable second-place
trifecta of dog drool, poop, and urine.     

In the past week alone, she’d picked Seth up from the
principal’s office for fighting, disciplined a grad student for writing sexual
comments on a freshman girl’s paper, badgered Scott into sending May’s child
support, hired a contractor to fix the leak in the second bathroom, and miffed
a speech to the university regents after Natalie hijacked her cue cards. 

To top it off, someone had prank called the house twice that
night.  Occasionally an enterprising student found her phone number and
begged for an extension on a paper or a higher grade on the final exam. 
These calls weren’t like that.  The other person never said a word—all she
could hear was calm, soft breathing.  She hated to think that someone
might be watching the house, trying to learn her schedule.  Seth was never
home alone, and even if he were, Roosevelt would surely bark at any intruder. 
Still, she couldn’t bear to think of her son being in danger even for a moment.

She glanced at her nightstand to make sure the phone was in
reach and added another item to her to-do list: test the security system. 
Maybe I need to ask for an upgrade
, she thought. 
Maybe I need
to get Seth a panic button. 

She turned back to the pirate book and read one paragraph
before a noise in the hallway caught her attention: slippers shuffling on
polished hardwood, making their way to her door.  Seth’s small fist
knocked twice before he turned the knob.  “Mom?” he said, poking his pale
head into her room. 

“Yeah, baby?” she said. 

“I’m not a baby,” he said, frowning.

“I know.”  She patted the empty space beside her. 
“What’s wrong?”  Her heart still hurt when she thought of how often he’d
come to her with questions about his father, why he never called, and when he
would get to go down to L.A. and visit.  She arranged her face into a
smile while her brain formed quick answers to a barrage of dangerous questions.

He shuffled inside and scrambled up onto the bed.  “I
can’t sleep.  I tried listening to my iPod, but it didn’t work.”

“Wanna sleep in here tonight?”

“Maybe.  If Roo can come, too.”  His soft blond
hair fell diagonally across his forehead and he brushed it up out of his eyes.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” he said.  “Are you busy?”

She held up the romance novel so he could see the
cover.  “Babe, I’m reading a book about pirates that doesn’t mention
anything about vitamin deficiency, disease, rats, or the lack of basic hygiene
on a pirate ship.  I think it’s safe to say I’m not busy.”

Her son nodded, well versed in the falsehoods of popular
representations of pirates.  “Shark Week started tonight, Mom.”

“Did they talk about great whites?”

He shook his head.  “It was hammerheads.  Aunt
Natalie said she’d watch it with me, but she never came.”

Beth felt a quiver of arrows pierce her heart.  Every
doctor who’d reviewed Natalie’s file had insisted she be kept away from Seth,
but Beth could never bring herself to obey them.  “Oh, sweetie,” she said,
forcing a smile.  “I think it was my fault.  I’m sorry.”

Seth’s brown eyes blinked at her solemnly.  “Did you
tell her not to come?”

“We had a fight.  She probably thinks I’m still angry
at her.”

“You’re not, are you?  I mean, you said you’re sorry,
right?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?  You make me say I’m sorry all the time.”

“I guess I thought I wasn’t sorry,” she said.  “But I
am.”

“Then you need to tell her.  I don’t want you guys to
fight.”

“I don’t want to fight with her, either.”

“So can you call her?  And find out if she’s coming
over tomorrow?  It’s really important, Mom.  They’re gonna talk about
megamouth sharks.”

Beth sighed.  “It’s not that easy, babe.”

“Yes, it is.  You just pick up the phone and call
her.  Ask her if she’s coming tomorrow…please.”

“All right.”  Beth put down her book, wondering why she
needed her eight-year-old son’s prompting to apologize to her sister. 
I
should have done this myself
, she thought. 
Why is it so hard for
adults to say they’re sorry?
  Her cheeks burned as she realized how
stupid it all was.  So what if her speech had been less than stellar and
received a tepid response?  If she was that dependant on cue cards, the
problem was hers, not Natalie’s.

She reached for the phone and hit the speed dial for
Natalie’s number.  “It’s ringing,” she said to Seth, watching her
anxiously.  It rang four times before Natalie’s answering machine picked
up.  “Nat, it’s Beth.  Look, I’m sorry for getting mad at you the
other day.  I know you’re just trying to help, and I shouldn’t have
snapped like that.  I just want to make sure you’re okay.  I’ve got
someone else here who really wants to know if you’re coming over to watch
megalomaniac sharks tomorrow—”

“Megamouth!” her son yelled.  “Mom, get it right!”

“—so call me, or just come over, okay?  I love you,
sis.”  She hung up the phone and smiled for Seth.  “You’re my
witness.  I invited her over for sharks.”  She glanced at the clock
radio on her nightstand:  2:30 a.m.  It was odd that Nat wouldn’t
answer this late at night.  She should know Beth wouldn’t call this late
unless it was important, in which case she would pick up.  Natalie
couldn’t be out and about this late, could she?  What if something had
happened to her? 

“Hey, kiddo, why don’t you go back to bed now?” she said, in
a voice that sounded falsely bright, even to her.  “If Nat calls back,
I’ll tell her you say hi.”  She held her breath, wondering if Seth would
call her bluff.

He looked at her for a moment, the questioning expression in
his eyes so much like that of his father that she felt tears gather beneath her
lashes. 
I wish you could have seen the best of him instead of the
worst,
she thought.  Then he nodded, and slipped down off the
bed.  “See you in the morning, Mom,” he said, smiling as he closed her
door softly behind him.

“I love you,” she said thickly.

Beth lay back and listened for the click of Seth’s door
latching shut.  It came just as the phone rang again.  She snatched
it up, eager to tell her sister how brave her son was in the face of her
absence.  “Nat?” she said.  “Is that you?”

But no one answered.  All she heard was slow, gentle
breathing.  “Who is this?” she asked.  “If you don’t stop harassing
me, I’ll call the police.”

In the background, she heard something familiar—a foghorn,
blaring out into the night.  One, two, three blows.  She held the
phone away from her ear and realized she heard the same noise outside her
window.  The caller was watching the house. 

She slammed the phone down and ran to her bedroom
window.  She threw aside the curtains and looked down at the street. 
It was empty—no cars, no pedestrians.  “I know what I heard,” she
said.  “I know you’re there.”

The next number she dialed was 911.

July 2012

San Francisco, California

Constantine watched Natalie sleep, curled in a fetal
position on one of the grimy beds.  Her lips were rosy and softly
swollen.  After one frantic embrace she’d drifted off in his arms, lulled
to sleep as his fingertips traced the Cyrillic alphabet on her skin.  Part
of him felt relieved.  No matter how beautiful she was or how hypnotic her
stories, she couldn’t separate fact from fiction.  He had no business
sleeping with her, even if she thought it was what she wanted. 
  

His eyes drifted down to the puffy silver scars on her
arms. 
It can’t be true
, he thought, remembering her story about
Dante and the German forger.  But why invent such a lavish story to
explain a suicide attempt?  Lana never explained anything—she just kept
trying. 

He remembered the day his sister came home from the hospital
after Lazovsky’s attack.  She smiled, went into her room, and closed the
door behind her.  Without a sound, she calmly sliced the flesh from her
cheeks and fed it to her tiny dog.  It was morning before they found out
what she’d done. 

Constantine understood certain kinds of death—the
star-bright explosion of pain delivered so well by bullets, bombs, and
knives—but he didn’t understand it when it came from the inside out, attacking
the mind before it attacked the body.  How did these women silence the
scream of their own flesh, the cry for life when confronted with death? 
Obeying that cry was all that had kept him alive in Chechnya.

He shook his head to clear away the images of blood and
death.  It was time to do his job.  He picked up his phone and dialed
Vadim.  He needed to check in and find out what the hell had gone
wrong.  “We have problems,” he said as soon as his boss picked up the
phone.

“Greetings to you, too, Constantine Alexandrovich.” 

“Vadim, are you alone?

“What happened?”

“You’re not going to like anything I have to say.”

“Then let me pour a drink.  Start with the least
objectionable item on your list.”

“Make it a double.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I didn’t get Elizabeth Brandon.”

“Jesus, boy, I thought I told you to start slowly.”

“I did.”

Vadim paused.  “Go on.”

“I want you to find the analyst who did the intelligence
work for that file.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t do his homework.  He sent me to Natalie Brandon,
not Elizabeth.”

“Are you telling me you kidnapped the wrong woman? 
Constantine, we’re not even supposed to be in that goddamn country!  How
the hell can I keep this a secret if you’re kidnapping people everywhere you
go?”