Avoiding Danny had proved to be a lot harder than she’d anticipated. Both mentally and physically. On Wednesday afternoon, she finally admitted to herself that she missed him. He was fun to be around, and she especially missed their breakfasts. Samantha was still the lucky recipient of Danny’s breakfast concoctions and she took great delight in sharing every detail of every morsel of every meal with Anna. Anna was gaining weight just from listening to Sam describe the various menus.
Wednesday afternoon Anna was running one of the final, and most important, errands. She was picking up the wedding dress and her maid of honor dress from Josie’s. Jenna already had the final fitting earlier in the week, but she had to take Mike to a post-op appointment, so Anna volunteered to get the dresses. As she made her way from Josie’s to her car, she felt the itch between her shoulder blades again. This was not good. Her hands were full of freshly pressed dresses and she couldn’t drop them to defend herself when the dark shadow disengaged from the brick wall.
“Hello, Anna.”
“Mikhail?!” Anna tried to step away from him, but he grasped her elbow and pulled her down the sidewalk away from the shops. She tried to break free of his hold, but he just tightened his grip.
“Anna, please, don’t fight me. I need to talk to you.”
“Mikhail, stop. You’re hurting me.” He dropped her elbow and stopped walking.
“I'm sorry. God, Anna, I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.” She thought he was going to cry, but he pulled himself together at the last moment.
“Please, you need to hear what I have to say. Can we go somewhere and talk?”
Anna looked around. She didn’t want to be out in the open any longer than necessary, but she didn’t trust Mikhail and wouldn’t leave with him.
“We can grab a cup of coffee across the street.”
“No, we need to be in private.”
“You have to know I won’t go anywhere with you.”
Mikhail sighed, then lifted the edge of his jacket and revealed the handle of his pistol tucked into his waistband. “Come with me, Anna. I promise I won’t hurt you. I just need to talk with you.”
Anna nodded to the dresses in her hands, then asked, “Can I at least put these in my car?” She hoped she would find a way to escape if he got distracted for a moment while she arranged the dresses, but he was on to her.
“No, bring them or drop them where you stand. Just move!”
If she dropped them, someone would find them and wonder why there were left lying in the street. Maybe they would send a search party. Would they find her dead or alive? Mikhail made up her mind, by grabbing her elbow and pulling her, and the dresses, towards a van. He opened the passenger door and shoved her in. She barely had time to sit down before he slammed the door shut and locked it. Her hands were too full to try to unlock the door and find the handle before he climbed in the driver side and sped away. He drove away from town, towards the foothills. The further he took her, the more scared she became. She tried to get him to talk, but he just stared straight ahead.
After 15 minutes of winding up the mountain side, he pulled onto a barely-there dirt track and headed into the trees.
She tried pleading with him again. “Please, Mikhail, tell me what’s going on. Why are you here?”
He drove around the back of a small wood house and stopped the car. Hands on the steering wheel, he continued staring off into the distance. When he finally spoke, she jumped.
“I promise you, I’m not here to hurt you. I need to tell you some things, but we can’t be seen in public.” He turned to her and for a moment, she saw the 10-year-old boy who had befriended her in school and protected her from the older bullies.
She nodded, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Here, let me hold your wedding dress while you get out.” He reached across and grabbed the bags. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t correct him. She scrambled out of the car and walked around to the front while he carefully arranged the bags in the back seat. He seemed to genuinely care about how the dresses were handled.
“Walk with me, little one.” She cringed at the use of her school-girl nickname. He saw the movement and smiled. “You’ll always be my little one, Anna. No matter how grown up you are or who you marry.”
His tone was a bit sad, not angry or dangerous.
“I remember the first time I saw you. There were three older boys trying to steal your leather backpack.” He looked at her shoulder and laughed. “Yes, that one. You refused to let them have it. You swung the bag around and knocked one of them down. The other two jumped on you and started beating the shit out of you.” He stopped and shook his head. “I had never been so angry in all my life. By the time I was done, all three had broken noses and black eyes, one had a broken arm, and the other two limped for a week. My father beat me with a belt that night.”
At her gasp, he turned to her. “No, not for defending you. He beat me for my loss of control and because as his heir, I should have delegated someone else to defend you. That was the first time I truly understood what it meant to be the heir to Vladimir.”
He stopped walking by a picnic table and motioned for her to sit. She hesitated, then sat on the bench with her back to the table. While he paced in front of her and he gathered his thoughts, she observed the man he had become. A man clearly accustomed to wealth, he exuded an odd mixture of confidence and caution.
The expensive and stylish hair cut showed slight, and probably intentional, hints of gray at the temples. The Patek Philippe watch peeked out from under the cuff of the soft silk shirt and cashmere Burberry coat draping his lean frame. The custom-tailored pants and the handmade Italian shoes completed the ensemble of a wealthy New York businessman. Only his business wasn’t located on Wall Street. Her boyhood knight had grown up to become the handsome and successful heir to the most vicious Russian crime family in New York.
“My father’s dead.” He stopped pacing and studied her face. “The man most believed to be invincible was taken down by one of the most agonizing cancers; pancreatic cancer. Some would say it’s a fitting end for a brutal man.”
“I won’t lie and say I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. I’m tired of the lies. I prefer the truth. He was a horrible man and he deserved to die a painful death. You and I know that better than anyone.”
“Why are you here?”
“That’s my girl. You always did cut right to the chase. My brilliant little Anna who told no lies.”
“I’m not yours. I never was, Mikhail. We were friends, for a time.”
“I'm here to give you your freedom. To give you back your life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did you really think you could hide from us, from me, for all those years? God, Anna,” he laughed a cruel humorless laugh, “I’ve know where you were every day of your life. When that fry cook, Ralph Peterson, hit on you in Podunk, South Dakota while you were running across country, who do you think caused the propane tank to explode in his face the following day? When Professor Stanley Robinson gave you the only ‘B’ you ever received because you wouldn’t sleep with him, who do you think encouraged him to update the grade to the ‘A’ you earned before he jumped to his death from the tenth floor of the parking garage? Do you want me to go on?”
Anna jumped up and stepped away from Mikhail. “Oh, God, Mikhail. How could you? They were just dumb, horny men. They didn’t deserve to die.”
“Don’t you EVER defend them to me. They attacked you with the only weapons they had. It was my job, my duty, to protect you. I did what I’ve always done. I protected you.”
“No, it wasn’t your job. Why would you say that?”
Mikhail slumped down onto the bench and dropped his head to his hands. “I had to protect you because I was the one who put you in danger. I was the one who betrayed you to my father. I was so desperate for my father’s affection, I bragged about how Anna could hack any system. You were 12 and the brightest damn kid in the school. You would hack into the school records and show us our grades before the report cards were sent out, but you refused to change our grades. Not for money, not under threat of pain. There was no way we could bribe you. You were a good person.
“I came home from school and found my father fawning over Egor because he’d won the football game for his team. My father was a man of action. He appreciated brains, but worshiped strength. I would never be the smartest kid in school because you were always better. My father saw that as weakness, being bested by a girl. So, I sold you out.”
She sat down next to him. “Why are you here, Mikhail? Why are you telling me this now?”
“You’re free, Anna. With my father dead, you don’t have to run anymore. You can live your life out in the open. Marry the FBI man and have 10 babies. The threat to you is gone.”
“I don’t understand. If you’ve known where I was all along, why didn’t you or your father come after me?”
“I traded my life for yours. I told the guards to let you escape after your parents died. I promised my father I would follow in his merciless, bloody shoes if he let you go. As long as he was alive, I had to live his life to keep you safe.”
Anna swallowed back her tears. She could barely manage a whispered, “Why?”
“Because you were good and light and everything right in the world, until I took it all away and betrayed you. I was responsible for you being forced to lie, steal, and cheat. I destroyed the only good thing in my life. So, I sentenced myself to a life in a prison of my own making.”
The drive back to St. Helena was silent. When he pulled up to her car, Mikhail reached for her hand and held it tight in both of his hands. “I hope you can forgive me someday, Anna. Good-bye.”
Anna drove straight to Jenna and Mike’s house and told them the whole story. She was in the state of shock that this nightmare might be over. They encouraged her to share her story with Danny.
“You can trust him. I know he cares deeply for you, let him prove it to you.” Jenna begged her to open up and trust Danny, but she wasn’t sure yet.
“He’s a law and order, black and white, cops and robbers, kind of guy. He doesn’t even see one shade of gray when it comes to the law. It’s in his blood, his DNA to track down and arrest people like me.”
“Anna, look at me.” Mike waited until she’d looked up from where she was twisting her hands. “He and I are the same. We uphold the same laws. We’ve trained and studied the same. I know everything about you and what happened to you. I don’t hold anything against you. You were forced to do those things. If I can understand, trust me, so can Danny. Please give him a chance.”
“I’ll think about it.”