swallow hard. I’m not sure I’m ready to go there either, but it looks like I have no choice. Ignoring the throbbing pain in my arm, I push up to a more upright position. “Did she lie?” My voice wavers slightly. “Did she make it all up?”
He stares at me, the silence stretching into painfully long seconds. “No,” he finally says. “She didn’t.”
Something inside me withers. Up until this moment, I’d still held out hope that his sister was wrong, that despite what I saw him do to the two assassins, he’s not guilty of the horrific crime of patricide. But there’s no room for doubt now.
By his own admission, the man in front of me killed his father.
“What happened? Why—” My voice cracks. “Why did you do it?”
He doesn’t respond for another long, nerve-racking moment. His face is that of a stranger, dark and closed-off. “Because he deserved it.” His words fall like a hammer, heavy and brutal. “Because he was a Molotov. Like me.”
I dampen my dry lips. “I don’t understand.” My heart pounds against my ribcage, each beat echoing in my ears. A part of me wants to shut this down and run away screaming, while another, infinitely more foolish part longs to curve my palm over the harsh, uncompromising line of his jaw, offering comfort with my touch.
Because hidden underneath that hard, emotionless façade is pain.
There has to be.
He opens his mouth to reply when someone knocks on the door. The sound is quiet, tentative, but it kills the moment as surely as a gunshot.
Springing to his feet, Nikolai strides over to the door to open it.
“Konstantin is on the phone,” Alina says from the doorway. “His team has found something.”
4
Chloe
My stomach is in knots by the time Nikolai returns, the toast I’ve eaten sitting inside like a rock. I know Konstantin is his older brother, the tech genius of the family, and I strongly suspect that the “something” his team has found relates to my situation.
Now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, Konstantin is probably how Nikolai had known all those things about me from the beginning—like the fact that I hadn’t posted on my highly private social media during my month on the run. And he’s also how Nikolai got access to the police files and discovered that they’d been altered to make my mom’s murder look even more like a suicide.
Konstantin and his team must be the “resources” Nikolai mentioned during the car ride here, the advantage he has over Bransford.
Sure enough, Nikolai’s face is grim as he takes a seat on the edge of my bed and clasps my left hand in his strong palm. His touch both warms and chills me. “Chloe, zaychik…” His tone is worrisomely gentle. “There’s something you should know.”
My heart, which was already galloping in my chest, does a backflip. His gaze is no longer that of a stranger; instead, there’s pity in his golden tiger stare.
Whatever he’s about to say is awful, I can tell.
“How much do you know about the circumstances of your conception?” he asks in that same gentle tone. “Did your mother ever talk about it?”
It’s as if an icy wind sweeps through my insides, freezing every cell on the way. “My conception?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from some other part of the room, some other person.
He can’t mean what I think he’s saying. There’s no way Bransford is—
“Twenty-four years ago, your mother lived in California,” Nikolai says quietly. “In San Diego.”
I nod on autopilot. Mom had told me that much. She’d lived all over southern California, in fact. After the missionary couple who’d adopted her from Cambodia were killed in a car accident, she’d gone from one foster home to another until she emancipated herself at seventeen—the same year she’d given birth to me.
“She wasn’t the only one who lived in San Diego at the time,” Nikolai continues. “So did a certain brilliant young politician whose local campaign she volunteered at to get extra credit for her American History class.”
The icy wind inside me turns into a winter gale. “Bransford.” My voice is barely a whisper, but Nikolai hears it and nods, squeezing my hand gently.
“The one and only.”
I stare at him, simultaneously boiling over with emotions and numb. “What are you saying?”
“Your mother tried to commit suicide when she was sixteen. Did you know about that?”
My head nods of its accord. When I was a child, Mom had always worn bracelets and bangles around her wrists,