“You never gave up on anything. You hated quitters. Oh, you really hated quitters.” The smile fades. “Just come and look. You couldn’t get the exact right color of thread.”
I sit on the couch. “Enough.”
He shuts his eyes. It’s what he does when he tries to quell his emotions. I feel frightened to know this, as if I’m being pulled away from my heart’s desire.
“I get it—this is all going too fast for you. You had a trauma. You have amnesia. I’m going to help you, though. It’s okay if you don’t remember everything. Maybe it’s even better to not remember things all at once, but in your heart…”
“I’m not her.”
He comes to me then, sits right next to me. I feel the force of him, the power of him. I feel him on my skin, in my belly. “Do you truly not want to remember?”
“I told you what I want. I want to contact the convent. I want to know what you’re doing for my captive sisters, and if you aren’t planning on freeing them immediately, I want you to set me free so I can go back there myself. Maybe I’ll bring the police and we’ll free them.”
“Right, the police. How will you know which of them you can trust? Do you think a place like that can run without police protection? We have it under control. I was there planting surveillance and getting into their network. It’s being handled.”
I gaze at the fire, hating this helplessness.
“You say you don’t want to know your old life, but how do you know which is the better life if you don’t know anything about one of them?” He takes my hand. My fingers spark at his touch. “You don’t know.”
“I know what I have now is better than any other possible life.”
“The life that you had before, it was glorious.”
“Is that why my body’s covered with the marks of violence? My body is proof that the life I had wasn’t glorious.”
“The life, maybe not always, but you were glorious. You were a warrior. Fierce and so beautiful and brave. You were…” He trails off, searching for words, and there’s that beauty again. My blood races. He’s beautiful when he remembers her. “You shone,” he finally says. “Brighter than anything—”
“You don’t know true brightness.”
“Wrong. I did. I knew you. You were so impressive, brave…” He pauses, his sadness like a raw thing; even his voice comes out rough. “You were my whole heart.”
Something turns over inside me. It frightens me the way I feel him, the way I know him. But the life he speaks of put scars on my body and landed me over the side of the cliff with nobody searching for me.
He takes both my hands now and lowers his voice to a whisper. “I loved you so much, Tanechka.” He presses his forehead to the unruly ball that our hands make together.
My heart thunders.
“I loved you so much. I need you to remember.” He lifts his brown eyes once again to me. “You saw the tattoo. Could that lie?”
“It tells me only that I had a different life before.”
He studies my eyes as if to search for the woman he has lost, but he’s the one who’s lost. He’s lost and beautiful. I stare at our fingers together, mesmerized by his warmth, by the rough familiarity of his skin.
“I never thought I’d touch you again, never imagined…” He kisses my fingers, quick, fervent kisses that swell something inside me, as if his kisses are nourishment. He glances up at me, then he turns his face back down and kisses my fingers again, and this time his kisses are slow, his lips warm and soft. A strange and pleasant feeling spreads all through me.
Lust.
I yank my hands from his, heart pounding.
I was drugged, kidnapped, threatened, kept prisoner in an underground brothel. I was forced to eat meals with a sick and twisted man, but I was never truly frightened.
Until now.
“I am not her. Respect that.”
His look is stern and dark. He stands. “I respect Tanechka. Tanechka would want me to fight for her. She’d do the same for me.”
“I am Tanechka.”
Chapter Eight
Viktor
Tanechka stops talking with me an hour after she arrives. I show her to our bedroom. I tell her that there are clothes in the drawers and the closet. She informs me again that she won’t change, and she closes the door and locks it.
Fine. The bedroom is a nice room. She’ll be surrounded by familiar things. It’ll be okay.
Aleksio and Mira come by before dinnertime.
“Anything on Kiro?” I need some good news. I need to know he’s not locked away in a prison where we can’t get to him.
Aleksio shakes his head. “Nada.”
I suck in a breath. “Okay, then.”
Mira’s impressed with the home I’ve made. “I didn’t know you had all of this in you,” she says, fingering the rich red tablecloth, embroidered with folk art designs.
“It’s Tanechka. This is like the home she made for us in Moscow.”
“She still doesn’t…” Mira begins.
“No.” I shrug. “She doesn’t remember. Yet. They say to surround her with familiar things. Familiar people.”
“What if she still can’t remember?”
“She will.”
Aleksio studies my face. “What if she does remember?”