22. NICK

We lie on top of the coverlet, chests heaving, feeling the sweet summer breeze flowing in through the window to dry our glistening skin.

“That was…” I begin.

“Even better,” Storm finishes with a heavy sigh.

I sneak the hand that’s not holding hers down to the outside of my thigh and give myself a discreet pinch. Hurts. Good. That means I’m not going to wake up and find this was all a dream.

“You’re really good at this,” she says.

“Only as good as my partner.”

She rolls over and lays her head on my chest.

“I doubt that,” she says. “But I’m a quick study.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

She giggles. “Maybe tomorrow. I don’t think I could possibly do any more tonight.”

“Me either. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Youth is overrated.”

“Says the young one,” I chuckle.

“I’m serious,” she says, stroking my chest. “I’ve never met a guy my age who cared about anything other than getting me into bed. And I’ve definitely never met a guy my own age who could have handled Arkady and his goons the way you did.”

“Well, I’ve had a lot of practice at it.”

“Which, getting me into bed? Or handling goons?”

“Which do you think?”

“You’re pretty good at both, I’d say.”

I laugh again. “Yeah, I’m a real Renaissance man.”

“You think that’s funny,” she says. “But it’s true. Maybe not academically, but you came to America as a teenager with nothing – I bet you couldn‘t even speak English, could you? – and look at what you’ve accomplished since then.”

“I had some help,” I say.

“Yeah, but still.”

“And I was ruthless.”

It’s out of my mouth before I can stop myself. But now that it is, I’m glad: she needs to know that this mansion wasn’t bought with lottery money, or the sale of some Internet tech company. My fortune was built in dark places where decent people shouldn’t go, doing things I’m not especially proud of.

I’ve been away from that life for a long time, but it’s still a part of me, like a scar that will never go away.

This thing with us has been fun up till now, playing cat and mouse. The freedom that comes from not knowing the whole story. But now it’s different. If Storm is going to share my bed, she needs to know who I truly am.

She’s quiet for a while, then says: “I know that. You don’t learn how to do what you did to Arkady in school.”

“I left it behind when I bought this house,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do what I did. People can change the way they act, but they can’t change who they are.”

She nods. “Did you ever… do something to someone who didn’t deserve it?”

“No.”

“Did you protect people who couldn’t protect themselves?”

“Yes.”

“And you left that lifestyle, what? Fifteen years ago?”

“About that.”

“And since I’ve met you, you’ve been nothing but noble and kind,” she says, lifting her head to look me in the eye. “You don’t judge anyone, as far as I can tell. You’re generous to a fault. So yeah, you’re a real monster.”

Ever since she woke up in my house, Storm has forced me to look at things in new ways. Now she’s making me think differently about myself. When she puts it that way, I can almost believe that maybe I’ve redeemed myself, at least a little.

I wish I was a poet so I could tell her what she’s meant to me, how she lifted my soul out of a pit that I didn’t even realize it was in. How she made me feel for the first time in years.

But I’m no poet.

“Thank you,” I say.

She kisses my eyelids.

“Finally, someone besides me says thank you,” she sighs. “It’s about time.”

We kiss for a while, softly, sleepily. I can feel myself on the edge of drifting off when Storm speaks, and suddenly I’m fully awake again.

“Why did you leave it?” she asks. “Why did you buy this house?”

I knew the moment had to come eventually. I guess I just thought it would be later. But she deserves to know, just as I deserved to know what led her into Arkady’s clutches.

And the past can’t hurt me anymore. Remembering shouldn’t hurt anymore. I know that now, thanks to Storm.

“It was for a woman,” I say.

She smiles. “Well, duh. No guy does what you did for any other reason.”

“How did you get so wise?”

“I binge-watched Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix. So who was she?”

It’s hard to know where to begin. It happened so quickly, and it ended almost as quickly.

“Her name was Katrina.” It’s the first time I’ve said her name aloud in years. “The girl from Happy’s Liquor World.”

“Okay, now I have to know the story.”

I smile. “That’s where I met her. She was working at a corner liquor store in Brighton Beach, where Josef and I lived. I stopped in for a case of beer one afternoon, she smiled at me, and that was it. I knew she was the one I wanted.”

“Really?” Storm asks. “You guys were young, rich and dangerous – you must have been surrounded by girls.”

I shrug. “Josef thought the same thing. Told everyone I was ‘slumming’ with Katrina.”

He said a lot worse about her later on, but I won’t get into that right now.

“It was her eyes,” I say. “They were the kindest eyes I’d ever seen. I chatted her up while I was paying for my beer, and she had no idea who I was. At the time, everyone in Little Odessa – that’s what we called Brighton and Sheepshead Bay – knew about Nikolai Chernenko. Josef and I ran things. Josef used to talk about ‘respect,’ but I always knew what that really meant: people were afraid of us. Of me.

“But Katrina wasn’t. To her, I was a blank slate. We talked for an hour while my beer got warm on the counter. I asked her for a date right then and there.”

Storm kisses my shoulder. “That’s really sweet.”

“I took her to a nice restaurant that first time, and she gave her doggie bag to a homeless man on the street as I walked her home. She was always giving panhandlers her spare change. But she’d smile and chat with them, too. Before I met her, I wouldn’t even make eye contact with people like that. I thought they were weak, not worth noticing.

“Katrina taught me that there was more to life than survival of the fittest. That there was more to me than being a surly, alpha male. That living in a hard world, full of hard people, had given me a distorted view of reality.”

I turn to Storm. “In a way, you’re doing the same thing. Showing me that the world doesn’t have to be a cold and lonely place.”

Her eyes shimmer in the dim light, her throat bobbing as she swallows hard.

“So what happened next?” she asks.

The memory conjures up black emotions, the kind that kept me here, alone for so many years. The kind I’ve managed to overcome since Storm arrived.

“Josef and I fought,” I say. “I told him I wanted out. He said I was blinded by Katrina’s – well, he used a word I won’t repeat. Said I was swimming in women, why should I settle for one? The joke was on him. Katrina and I never… consummated.”

Storm’s eyes widen. “Really?”

I clear my throat, trying to keep my voice even. It’s hard to talk about.

“Her family were strict Catholics,” I say. “You wait until marriage, period. So we did. I asked her to marry me after our sixth date.”

“Whoa, Turbo. You don’t waste time, do you?”

“Why wait when you know it’s right?”

“You’ve got me there,” she says. “So she said yes?”

I nod. “But we had a long talk first. Katrina knew how I made my money, and she didn’t like it. But she never told me not to do it. I came to that conclusion on my own. I wanted to live in her world, not force her to live in mine.

“That didn’t sit well with Josef. I told him I wanted to divest myself from the business. He said no.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t go over too well with you?” Storm says.

“He forced my hand. I told him that he had two options: buy me out or go to war. Either way, I was getting out.”

“Holy shit,” she whispers, and I wonder if I’ve finally crossed a line with her. “How did he respond to that?”

“He tried to kill me.”

“What?!”

I nod. “Five men attacked me in my house in Brighton in the middle of the night. Luckily, Katrina never stayed over. Of course, Josef knew that. He would never have allowed anything to happen to her.”

“Some code of honor?” she asks.

“Self-preservation. He had to strike against me to keep face with the family. But he also knew that, if he’d harmed Katrina, I wouldn’t have stopped until I’d burned his entire world to the ground.”

Storm’s head is tucked into the crook of my shoulder, so I can’t see her face. But I hear her breathing stop for several long moments. Again I wonder if I’ve finally crossed a line.

“I let the attackers live,” I say. “As a diplomatic message to the Volkovs that I didn’t want war. But I put them in the intensive care unit to let Josef know that I was serious about being left alone.”

“Did he?” she asks. “Leave you alone, I mean?”

“Yes, but we never spoke again. We agreed on a buyout through our lawyers – it was tangled and messy, but I eventually ended up with nothing but legitimate business interests. I thought my future with Katrina was set.”

“But it wasn’t. Did she – I mean, Josef didn’t…?”

“That’s the irony,” I say with a bitter laugh. “It wasn’t my lifestyle that took her from me. It was cancer. Leukemia.”

“Oh, my God, Nick.”

My throat aches like a rotten tooth, so swollen I can hardly speak. After all these years, the memory still hurts so much.

“It was fast,” I say, my voice hitching. “I noticed dark circles under her eyes one day, and three days later her doctor was ordering tests. Two days after that, we had the diagnosis – it was terminal.

“But Katrina still wanted to get married. We had the ceremony in her hospital room. Her body looked like a tangle of wire hangers inside the wedding dress she’d chosen so carefully just a couple of months earlier. I spent our wedding night at her bedside, reading to her and emptying her bedpan as she drifted in and out of consciousness.

“Less than a week later, she died in my arms.”

Storm wraps her own arms around my torso, her hot tears streaming down my chest. Her warmth gives me the strength to finish the story.

“Every hope I had for the future died with Katrina that day,” I whisper. “Everything good about me, everything I aspired to be with her, disappeared.”

Storm sniffs hard. “What did you do?”

“I wanted to explode. Wanted to track down every person who’d ever wronged me in my life and make them pay. To make everyone hurt like I was hurting.”

“But you didn’t.”

I shake my head. “No, I didn’t. Instead, I took my boat out from Brighton Beach and went up the coast of Long Island. Found a little pier and tied her up, then went for a walk. Next thing I knew, I was standing on the cliffs right behind this estate.”

“Seriously.”

“I was staring at the rocks down below and wondering how big a mess I’d make when I landed.”

“My God,” she breathes. “What stopped you?”

I glance over at the floor beside the bed at Samson and Delilah, snoring softly on the rug.

“Their father,” I say, smiling through my tears. “His barking snapped me out of my cold thoughts and brought me back to reality. Came charging up to me and almost knocked me off the cliff himself, licking me and jumping around.

“He took off toward the house, and I followed him, thinking he must belong to whoever owned this place. But when I got to the house, I saw Louis’s realtor sign in the window. Turns out the owner had died months earlier.

“I don’t know why, but suddenly I wanted this house. Maybe on some level I recognized it was a symbol of me – big and empty and isolated. Whatever the reason, I called my lawyer that afternoon and had him liquidate almost all of my business holdings, then bought the house and moved in. I never did find out where the dog came from, so I adopted him and called him Atlas. He died a few years ago, but I’ve got these two mutts to carry on his legacy.”

As if realizing they’ve just been insulted, Samson and Delilah open their eyes and raise their heads curiously.

“He’s only teasing,” Storm says soothingly. They close their eyes again.

“Then a lot of years passed,” I say. “Finally, I went down to tie up my boat in a storm and saw this crazy young woman in a party dress getting tossed around by the Atlantic.”

She kisses me softly, stroking my cheek.

“That’s a hell of story,” she says.

“So was yours.”

She nods. “So… where do we go from here?”

I glance at the antique mantel clock over the fireplace. The hands point to the three and the seven. I pull the chain on the lamp, leaving only the light of the moon streaming in through the open window.

“I think we go to sleep,” I say. “We’re supposed to be feeding our guests in a few hours.”

A few minutes later, I feel Storm’s soft, rhythmic breath against my neck. As sleep tugs me down into the darkness, I see Katrina’s beautiful face in my mind’s eye.

She’s smiling.