Chapter 169 169
Chapter 169 169
Another fat tear slips down my cheek. “She must be so scared…”
“She’s half Isaak and half you,” Nikita says, patting her hand on my knee. “She’s strong and resilient enough to survive this.”
“She’s five,” I point out. “She shouldn’t have to be anything other than happy.”
“The world is unfair,” Nikita says. “Children are forced to grow up long before they should have to.”
Some note in her voice forces me to look at her.
She looks… older. Her expression is pained and I realize suddenly that she’s trembling all over. The first crack in her façade I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever. I think about how much time she’s spent with Jo in the last few weeks, and I realize that she’s as scared as I am.
She’s just doing a better job of hiding it.
Maybe she’s putting on a brave face for me. Maybe this is just how she deals with every difficult situation that’s thrown her way. You’d never known that only a few hours ago, the woman had been knocked unconscious and her granddaughter stripped away from her by bloodthirsty enemies.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I… I haven’t even thought about how difficult this must be for you.”
“You never get used to it. But you learn to endure it.”
“I don’t think I can ever learn that.”
“Trust me: if you love him enough, you will.”
I sniffle and dab at my eyes with another tissue. “Nikita, can I ask you something?”
She nods. “Ask me anything.”
“How do you know if you love a person enough?”
She looks out the window as her eyes go hazy with memory. “When you’re prepared to do anything to be with them,” she says. “Even if it means your life.”
I nod. “You’re talking about the man you fell in love with.”
“Yes.”
“If your husband had found out…”
“He would have killed us both. I suppose, in the end, he did kill him anyway.”
I freeze. “Wait—did he find out?”
She shakes her head. “Not quite. He wanted to seize control over the Bratva, and Yakov was simply in his way.”
It takes me several seconds to dissect that sentence. Not just because of the easy way she delivers it, but because of the shocking truth it contains.
Yakov.
“Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”
She takes a deep breath. “I’ve kept the secret so long. It feels good to say the words out loud now. It feels… freeing.”
I just stare at her. Her beautiful, austere features have relaxed. She doesn’t look so tired anymore. Definitely not as old. It makes me believe that all the pain etched into her features is a result of the secrets she’s been carrying all these years. The gravity of hiding something so huge.
And now that she’s let that weight fall from her shoulders, she looks like she could soar.
“Your secret lover was your husband’s brother?” I ask. “Maxim’s father?” I know I sound dumb and obvious, but it feels important to say it out loud.
She nods. “It’s the main reason Svetlana hated me.”
“She knew?” I gape at her.
“She suspected. She always knew that Yakov had a soft spot for me. She just didn’t know how deep it went. Not until the end, anyway.”
I stammer without really forming a word. I’m truly not judging her. I’m just trying to wrap my head around this information. I’ve only ever heard secondhand stories about Yakov, and I scramble to try and recollect what they were.
How did Isaak describe him? A weak leader, but a better man that his father was? I wish I’d been paying closer attention now.
“I had an affair with my brother-in-law,” Nikita says, like it’s important for her to say it out loud, too. I’m impressed at the fact that there’s no guilt, shame, or regret attached to her tone. Just honesty. Fondness, even. “It started innocently enough. We lived in the same house. And he was… he was so different than Vitaly.”
“How?”
“When he looked at me, he really saw me,” Nikita explains in a hush. “He was interested in my opinions. He liked discussing books with me. We started talking, we became friends…”
It makes sense. She was trapped in a lonely, unhappy marriage. Of course she’d find solace in the one man who saw her as more than a possession.
“What about his wife?” I ask.
Nikita sighs. “I’m not going to pretend as though I thought much about her,” she admits. “I wish I could say even now that I felt guilty. But she and I, we were never really friends. The day I married into the Vorobev, she decided to make me her enemy. And when she started noticing how kind Yakov was to me, she got insecure. Cagey.”
“Was it real?” I ask softly.
It’s a personal question, but I figure that she’s the one who chose to tell me about this hidden part of her life. Maybe a part of her is done keeping secrets.
Maybe she wants to surrender the truth to the world and be judged for it, come what may.
“Yakov and I?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She smiles. It tells me more than words ever could. “It was so real that it made us think we had a future together,” she says.
“Really?”
Nikita nods. “I suppose it was another reason Yakov started dismantling the Bratva and selling it bit by bit.”
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “You were going to run away together?”
“We didn’t have a definite plan,” she admits. “It was such an impossible thing we were trying to do. But Yakov was determined to step back from the Bratva at some point.”
“Why didn’t he just hand it over to Vitaly then?” I ask. “He must have known that his younger brother had bigger ambitions.”
Nikita sighs. “That was the whole reason he came up with that plan in the first place. He wanted to stamp out the power of the Vorobevs so that if Vitaly did take over, he wouldn’t be able to come at us with the full force of the Bratva behind him. Vitaly would be too busy picking up the pieces to worry about where his wife had disappeared to.”
“Were you planning on taking the boys?” I ask.
She smiles, but this one nearly shatters my heart. “We were so naïve. We were planning on taking all three.”
“Maxim, too?”
Nikita nods. “Yakov refused to leave behind Maxim. Since I couldn’t imagine going without Isaak or Bogdan, I understood. In fact, it made me love him more.”
“Oh, Nikita,” I say, putting my hand over hers. “I’m sorry…”
She shrugs. The gesture is heavy with old pain. “It was a foolish, naïve plan. It would never have worked. But Yakov was enough of a dreamer to believe in it. And I was young and in love. It seemed to me that he could move mountains if he chose to.”
“You’re sure that Vitaly never knew about the two of you?” I ask.
Nikita nods confidently. “He never knew. If he had, I’d have been drawn and quartered. And Yakov would have suffered a much more gruesome death. As it was, he was poisoned slowly. Over time. It was done so subtly that even I didn’t suspect until the last possible moment. And by then, it was too late.”
I shake my head in dismay. “I can’t imagine what you must have gone through.”
Her eyes grow filmy with the memory. “His death was the worst day of my life. His funeral was the second-worst. I had to stand on the side and watch Svetlana play the grieving widow. I should have been standing where she was. She may have had the title of his wife. But I had his heart.”
“Did you ever confront your husband about what he did?”
Nikita gives me an ironic smile. “I don’t have the type of bravery that you do, Camila. I didn’t yell and scream and accuse. I didn’t display my pain and anger. Doing that would have only made him suspicious. I did fight back, though. I fought back in the shadows, when he wasn’t paying attention.”
I frown. “I don’t understand…”
“I had to wait years,” Nikita tells me. “I had to time it just right. But after Maxim started pushing back, questioning the way his father had died, I decided it was time I had to act.”
“Nikita…”
“He was so confident in the collar he had strapped around my neck that he never once thought that I might bite back. I played the dutiful wife and he ate the food I gave him, drank the cocktails I mixed for him. When he started to exhibit symptoms, he didn’t once question why he was experiencing the same thing that killed his brother.”
My jaw drops. I stare at Nikita, trying to reconcile the calm, reserved woman I know with the femme fatale who had murdered her husband in revenge for her lover.
“I… I thought… Isaak told me that Maxim had Vitaly killed?” I ask.