Chapter Thirteen
A wave of shock rolls over me.
My mouth opens and closes as I struggle to speak.
“Are you saying th-th-that I was adopted?” My voice cracks, and I have to push the words out.
He nods, a pained look stretching across his handsome features. “Something like that. Not legally. More like purchased.”
His words are a bombshell hurled into my reality, exploding, shattering it. “That’s crazy.” I sit up, shaking my head in denial, my brown locks sliding into my face. Sergei reaches out to brush them back behind my ear, and this time I let him. “I mean…no. I look just like my mother. Everyone always said so.”
“Yes. That’s true. Your father chose you because you looked like your mother.”
My father chose me. Vasily Toporov chose me.
I feel as if I’m slowly sinking into quicksand, but I force my mouth to move, to say things.
“Go on.”
His gaze slides away from mine. “Your mother wanted a baby. When it didn’t happen, they did tests. It turned out your father was sterile. So you were adopted.”
I struggle to reconcile that information. “If…if that’s true…why didn’t you just tell me sooner? I mean, plenty of people are adopted. I wish my mother had told me – but I understand why she might not have wanted to say anything. And it’s not the end of the world.”
He grimaces, looking really uncomfortable now. I’ve never seen this look on his face before. He’s still not meeting my eyes.
There’s more that he’s not telling me, I can see. “What were the circumstances of my adoption?”
“That’s the part I’d prefer not to discuss.”
“Sergei!” I scream at him. “Damn it to hell, stop messing with me!”
His gaze snaps back to meet mine. “I’m not trying to!” he shouts back. “All right. Your birth mother was a prostitute.”
I wince at that. “Okay. And my real father?”
“Unknown.”
“All right.” I feel light-headed. I’m turning this new version of my life over in my mind. “My mother wasn’t my mother.”
“But she loved you,” Sergei rushes in. “I know that about her, because I spied on your family for almost a decade. There’s very little about your family that I don’t know, Willow. From everything I’ve heard, Tatiana loved you with her whole heart.”
My heart hurts at the thought. My mother did love me. Well, the woman I called mother, anyway. She lived her life for me. She lived her life to make sure that I was the perfect little girl, to keep me safe from the wrath that burned just underneath my father’s skin. We were going to go on the run together right after I graduated from college. We’d been planning it for years.
She would have risked my father’s fury to save me from his terrible plans. She would have died for me.
“I don’t judge my birth mother for being a prostitute,” I say, struggling for breath. The thought of a woman so desperate that she had to sell her own child fills me with sorrow.
I can’t sit still. I sit up straight, scattering the pillows, and swing my legs over the side of the bed.
“What choice do many of these women have, living in tiny, impoverished villages, with no job prospects?” I’m staring down at the floor while I say that, but I’m picturing women, their lips blue with cold, digging up grass to boil for soup. Crying children with distended bellies, curled up under thin blankets. “They can starve or sell themselves. I understand. She probably thought she was sending me off to a better life.”
Sergei doesn’t say anything, and the silence stretches between us like elastic, drawn too taut and ready to snap. I look up at him, and when he catches my gaze, he winces.
“What?” I demand.
He gives the slightest shake of his head. “Just this once, I wish that I could lie to you,” he says. “Because the truth will hurt you. And it’s not necessary. All you need to know is that you were given up for adoption and you had a mother who loved you more than her own life.”
I feel tears shimmering in my eyes and I blink them away. Crying would be an insult to Tatiana Toporov, the woman who raised me and loved me. “Do you think I’m not strong enough for the truth?”
“I know you’re stronger than anyone I’ve ever met.”
I feel warmth fold through me. When he says things like that, I believe him. His belief is the architect that builds me into a castle of stone.
“So tell me.”
“When your father was on one of his business trips in Czechoslovakia, looking for little girls for his whorehouse, a woman approached him with a child for sale. You. You were one year old. You were a beautiful little girl, and you looked a lot like his wife, so he purchased you, but not to be raped. He gave you to his wife to raise as her own.”
That hits me like a punch in the stomach.
I think I’m going to vomit.
Now I know why he hid the truth from me all this time.
Adoption I could handle. It stung, knowing that my family had kept it a secret from me my whole life, but I could spin the story in my head into a beautiful sacrifice by a loving, impoverished mother. Was already spinning it.
Now Sergei has torn the fragile web of lies apart with just a few words.
My real mother gave birth to me and then sold me off to be raped. When I was a baby. What kind of degraded fiend does that?
Am I crying? I think I am. I think I feel tears. I raise shaking hands to my face, but my cheeks are dry, my eyes are dry. I’m just shaking all over.
Sergei takes my hands and folds his hands over them. Normally when he does that, I feel as if I’ve been wrapped up in a blanket of infinite love and warmth. Right now, I’m numb. I can’t even feel his touch.
An inner blizzard is forming, and I start to shake as it chills my soul. I don’t understand what makes some people like that. Some people are born so dark, so evil, that it’s truly as if they were spawned by the devil and sent to Earth to torment humans.
And my birth mother was one of those people.
Sergei sees the look on my face. “Willow, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.” He curses.
“No.” I whisper the words. “You should have. You should have told me sooner.”
He nods, a haunted look twisting his face. “Do you want to know her real name?” he asks gently.
That makes me shudder. “Not particularly. Maybe someday. Maybe never. She doesn’t even feel real to me. She feels like a monster from a horror story.”
Then it hits me. “Czechoslovakia? Lukas is Czech. And the second he saw me…it was like he recognized me.”
“Yes. Lukas is your half brother. You look a lot like your birth mother, and that is why he thought you were her, returned for him.”
Is he fucking kidding me?
Rage explodes inside me, and I slap his face so hard my hand stings. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I scream. “I had a right to know! He’s my brother, and you kept that from me? That is my family! What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Because then I would have had to do what I just did!” Sergei cries out, and his eyes are twin mirror pools of despair. I’ve never seen him like this before. Not a hint of hardness, just devastating remorse. “I’d have had to take away your real mother and replace her with that pool of human sewage who would sell her own baby into sexual slavery. My own mother did the same thing to me and my brother, and to know that, it kills my soul and my faith in humanity. She sold us to be raped. She knew what would happen to us. I didn’t want you to have a mother like that. It’s poison. Knowing that the person who created you wants to destroy you…it’s like a denial of your right to exist. I just… You deserve better than that.”
He drops my hands, gets up and begins pacing. “I’m sorry. I am not saying I handled things well.”
“No, you damn well didn’t.” I spit the words out bitterly. “And why do you even have him at all?”
He stares out the window as he answers me, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I went to Czechoslovakia to do some investigating. I was looking for any information that I could find on your family. I was constantly digging up pieces of their past to use against them. I found out who your real mother was, and I went to the village, and found out that she had…” he glances at me… “overdosed on heroin and died the month before.”
I shudder.
Blow after blow.
My mother hated me.
My mother hated life.
“Her son was being cared for by the drunk next door, and…” He casts his glance down, and his gaze drifts far away. “He looked so much like Pyotr. So sweet and pure. His clothes stank of piss and he was starving, but he lit up with this huge smile when I walked in the door. So I took him away. Taking care of him…it was like taking care of Pyotr. Giving him all the things that Pyotr never had. Making sure that he was safe and fed and loved. Marya and Kris, I’m paying them, but they love him like their own grandson, and he truly believes they’re his family, and he adores them.” He’s staring off into the distance now. “He has a magical life. A fairytale life.”
And there are tears in his eyes.
He’s in another world. Tears are brimming, threatening to spill, and his breathing is harsh, choked with sorrow.
The ice man is actually crying.
And all the hate drains from me as I think of the agony that has chewed at Sergei’s soul for so many years now. The guilt that he should never have to feel. A twelve-year-old boy blaming himself because his baby brother was raped by perverts. A boy who was ready to sacrifice himself to save his brother, but who accidentally survived instead.
My bones melt, too weak to hold me up. I sink back onto the bed.
Sergei is shaking as he settles in next to me, and tears spill down his cheeks, glittering in the lamplight. The long-buried agony is burning its way to the surface, finally released.
“I understand,” I say gently, and I stroke his arm. “You saved Lukas from a life of starvation and abuse. You saved my little brother.”
I don’t want Sergei to hate himself, because he has no reason to. Sergei is his own worst enemy. Nobody can hurt him worse than his own mind.
Finally, Sergei tears himself away from wherever he went off to, and he looks at me, but he’s got the thousand-yard stare of a man who’s seen too much. “He can come live with us when we leave here,” he tells me. “With Marya and Kris, of course – I wouldn’t traumatize him by sending them away. We’ll tell him that you are his sister, that he has a family.”
I nod.
And then finally I start to cry. I’m crying at the lie that’s been my entire life, at the joy and relief that I am in no way related to Vasily, at the sorrow of being hated so very much by the woman who carried me in her body for nine months.
I call up my mother, Tatiana Toporov, from the depths of memory. I force myself to picture my mother’s face, which is not something I do often. It hurts too badly.
“I’m sorry.” Sergei is hugging me tightly now, and I need that. I need him so badly right now. “I’m sorry I told you.”
“No.” I sob into his shoulder. “Don’t be sorry. I needed to know. You know…my mother is the woman who raised me. You haven’t taken anything away from me. If anything, this makes me love her even more. I wasn’t her flesh and blood, and yet she loved me so much. And I had seventeen beautiful years with her.”
I’m curled up in a ball, and I cry and cry.
Sergei stays with me until finally I fall asleep.
When I wake up in the morning, he’s still there, his arms wrapped around me, staring at me with love and tenderness. He actually slept in the same bed with me. The kiss that he presses onto my lips is as soft as clouds.
He strokes my hair out of my face and looks into my eyes.
“Do you love me?” he asks.
My heart swells in my chest. “Yes, I do.”
“Will you marry me?” He’s making himself so vulnerable asking that question. Sergei has metamorphosed before my eyes. He’s letting me see a part of himself that nobody else sees.
But I close my eyes and remember the day he left me. The fear is still with me, the fear that a switch could flip inside him and I’ll lose him again. He could turn back into the man who sat there calmly while I screamed and cried and broke in front of him.
His lies hurt me worse than the bullwhip that cut the skin of my back. Flesh can heal; the heart can only take so much before it’s crushed beyond repair.
But can I imagine a life without him?
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “That’s the best I can give you right now.”