A month ago, on a flight from Bangkok to Paris, I’d slept with him. This time, he didn’t want me around. A lead weight settled in my heart.
“I’ll stay here then?” Though it was a sentence, the way I phrased it was as a question.
He looked at me and smiled. For a second, the old Alexander was back. His dimples indented his cheeks, and a familiar, amused light gleamed in his eyes, but only for a second. “You should do whatever you want, Ellie.”
Ellie. I had wanted him to call me Ellie. But not like this, with an abyss between us.
“I want to come and sleep with you.” My voice was bold. I wasn’t his slave. Though he could reject me, I had the right to ask.
He didn’t turn me away. Some nameless emotion flickered in his eyes. Did he feel the same longing I did, with no knowledge on how to cross the chasm that had suddenly divided us? I couldn’t tell. I took a step towards that precipice. He did too. We both moved towards each other. We both hesitated.
There was nothing in my prior experience that provided any sort of guidance on what I should do now. I just had instincts. The same instincts that had correctly told me I could trust him.
My hand reached up and I touched his cheek. There was a trace of stubble on his skin and my thumb traced soft circles on his face. “Ellie,” he muttered, his voice barely audible over the noise of the engines.
“Please, Alexander.” This was not a situation in which we kept our feelings from each other to protect our pride. We were past that point. Too intimate, yet too disconnected. The truth brought us together yet kept us apart. “Just hold me.”
He took a deep breath. I waited, my heart in my mouth. Finally, he smiled again, a real smile that reached his eyes. “I can do that.”
For the moment, I was content with that. So much was uncertain now. Lucien was still in Hanoi. I’d killed Dylan. Everything I’d worked towards in the last six years had come to a culmination, but life was not the movies. There was no curtain that fell down; no pretty ‘the end’ sign that flashed on the screen.
I was twenty six. I had no money of my own, just some money in Jenny Fullerton’s name that I wasn’t sure if I could access. I didn’t have a college degree or a passport in my real name. I’d probably been presumed dead. The future was frighteningly uncertain.
For the moment, I wanted to burrow my head into his chest and pretend that none of that mattered.
Chapter 24
Alexander:
Two years ago, I’d stood in my Paris house and comforted Sasha. I’d never been able to forget the words she’d said to me that day. “Every single time, he knew he could die,” she had said about her lover, Andrei. “But he didn’t care. Training was all that mattered. It gave him purpose. He didn’t know how to cope otherwise.”
And I remembered the words Ellie had said right after the symphony. “I don’t know who I am, Alexander,” she had said, her voice bleak.
Every single thing in her life in the last six years had been about killing my father and getting her revenge.
And everything in my life since I was eighteen had been about atonement. My mother had died in childbirth – I blamed myself. My father had kidnapped and raped and tortured fifteen women – I felt the need to make amends.
I hid it better than her, but I didn’t know who I was either. Not really. We had both put our lives on ‘pause’. Now, the clock was ticking again.
My mind knew the answer that my heart did not want to acknowledge. We were both broken and we both needed to be whole to love.
Today would be a day filled with endings.
***
Ellie:
It was daytime in Paris when we returned to his house.
My mind was clawing with disquiet; my heart ached in anticipation of oncoming pain. The chasm between us hadn’t been closed in the hours I’d passed on the plane, clinging on to him tightly, never wanting to let go.
He hadn’t made love to me. He hadn’t reached for my body and he hadn’t kissed me. With each step I took towards him, he took one back.
He’d promised me a conversation in Paris and here we were. Seated in his living room, on two couches across from each other. Both holding matching cups of coffee as if the mugs were armour.
“You must have questions for me.” His voice was strained.
So many questions. I still hadn’t processed that he was Dylan’s son. “When did you know who I was?” That seemed the most important thing to me at the moment.
“I knew you were Rachel as soon as I saw you at Madame Lorraine’s,” he said quietly. “Did you think I could forget you, bright star?”
I swallowed. “So my cover story was always pointless?”
He shook his head. “Not quite. Lori had an instinct that something was wrong, but she wasn’t sure. She asked me to keep an eye on you.” He smiled a small smile. “The instant I recognized you, I would have bid on you anyway. I wanted to learn more about you.”