“Maybe you wasn’t old enough to hear the story,” Aaron said, his voice thoughtful. “It’s a long one.”
To his consternation, he found himself having to fight the urge to laugh. “Oh, is it?”
Aaron nodded somberly. “That’s what Mama told me. How old are you?”
“Old enough to hear the story now, I believe.”
Maria chose this moment to walk over to Aaron and guide him toward the door by the shoulders. “We will let your parents talk now, si?”
But Aaron didn’t go without one last question, thrown over his shoulder, “You won’t hurt her, right?”
“No, I will not hurt her.” Not physically, at least, he thought to himself.
As soon as they were gone, he set aside his plate and said, “The only reason I am talking to you here, as opposed to in a room full of lawyers, is because I have just decided I do not want Aaron to grow up without a mother as I did.” He leaned forward in the chair. “I will have my lawyers draw up papers, which will grant me full custody and provide you with an apartment below my own. If you sign the papers, you will be allowed occasional access to him at my discretion. If you do not, then I will make sure you never see him again. This deal is only on the table for fifteen minutes, so you will need to decide now.”
Her response to this was to set her own plate down and quietly say, “Okay, you know what, I’m through with you and your threats and your blackmail. Just go on ahead and kill me already.”
“What?”
“Take out your gun or send over your hit-man or give me some poisoned tea or whatever ya’ll do in your family when you want to get rid of somebody. It’s obvious you only care about winning by stomping all over me so you can prove nobody can beat you. So I’m inviting you to either take your kill shot or stuff your custody agreement. I’m not going to play your business games anymore, and if you want to take my son away, you’re going to have to do it over my dead body.”
“I am not trying to win or prove anything,” he said, his old Russian accent actually invading his speech, she was getting him so riled up again. And it was all he could do to keep his voice level, so the others wouldn’t hear him in the dining room. “You are one who lied. You are one who left with my baby inside of you because I am not rich enough, and you are one who did not tell me about him, even when I asked you directly who he is.”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react exactly this way,” she whisper-yelled back at him. “I knew you wouldn’t consider what was best for our son, only what was best for your ego. You think he’s some pawn in this argument between you and me, but he’s a little boy and he needs his mother! The fact that you’re even talking about full custody tells me you still don’t get that he’s a human being, not some extension of Rustanov Enterprises.”
He hated her at that moment. Hated her for keeping Aaron from him and hated her even more for being right about his ego coming before his son. It was true, he wanted Aaron in his life, and he wanted the boy to be happy, but he couldn’t stand the thought of Eva not suffering for what she’d done.
“Why?” he asked, still keeping his voice low, but coming to his feet. “Why did you not tell me you were pregnant? I know I said I do not want children, but did you really think I would not have taken care of my responsibility? I would have dropped out of school and gotten a second job if that was what it took. I would have not turned away from you and my son. I thought you knew me better than that.”
She also stood, her movement stiff with anger. “I thought I knew you, too. But then I found out I didn’t know you at all.”
He shook his head, confused. “I do not understand your meaning.”
“My meaning is you keep asking me why I did this and why I didn’t do that, but you don’t want to hold yourself to the same standards.” She paused, as if shoring up the courage to say what she said next: “Why didn’t you tell me back then you were supposed to be the next head of a Russian crime family and that you killed a man and only came to America for college to lay low?”
He shook his head in confusion. “So you read my Wikipedia page and now you think you can hold that against me? It will not hold up in a court of law. No judge will grant you full custody because of allegations of what I am only rumored to have done.”
She shook her head right back at him. “No, Alexei, I did not find out about it on your Wikipedia page—though trust me, that was an interesting bit of reading in itself. I discovered all of this back in grad school before you became famous and that’s why I left you.”
Alexei’s eyes narrowed. He had purposefully kept the truth from her back then, but now she was claiming she had somehow found out. “No,” he said. “You are lying. You will do anything to get me to let you have Aaron to yourself. “
Her mouth fell open in offended shock. “Are you out your dingdang mind. As much as I love being a mother, doing it by myself has been hard. Really hard. Even with a kid as great as Aaron. You know, my parents didn’t just immediately take me back after what I pulled. I was on my own for two years. And if you had ever had to deal with back-to-back ear infections, explosive poop, and figuring out how to pay for full-time daycare, which you could barely afford on a social worker’s starting salary, you would never accuse me of trying to keep Aaron to myself. Believe me, there were a lot of nights I had to stay up until the early morning with him crying because he was sick, and I’d start crying, too, because I was so tired and I need someone to come in and relieve me. But I couldn’t have that, could I, because you were his father.”
Alexei pushed aside the guilt that sprang up when he thought of her crying while dealing with a sick baby all by herself. “You could have contacted me, even in Russia. You could have. Or better yet, you could have come to me as soon as your parents denied you. I would have forgiven you if I had known you were carrying my child.”
She looked at him, her face more angry and bitter than he had ever seen it. “No, I couldn’t have. You want to know how I found out about all your interesting pre-college experiences in Russia? Your uncle told me all about them when he came to your apartment and threatened to kill me and make it look like an accident if I didn’t break-up with you.”
Then she spat out, “When I found out you had decided to break the news about our time in South Padre behind my back, I wasn’t just running away from you, I was trying to run away from your uncle, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
EVA must have been more wrecked by her cross-Atlantic trip than she thought, because at that moment she actually felt sorry for Alexei. He reacted as if she had physically hit him again when she dropped the bomb about his uncle.
For what had to be at least a minute, he said nothing, as if his brain had locked him in place while it attempted to process what she was telling him.
But then he took a step toward her and said, “You are saying my uncle came to our apartment and threatened to kill you if you did not leave me?”
“Yes,” she answered, realizing how unbelievable that must sound to him. “He said you were supposed to be the head of the family, not him, but you wanted to stay in America with me and he wanted you to come back. He also said a bunch of stuff about him not wanting you to marry a black girl, or even an American, but I’m pretty sure it was mostly because I was black.”
“He did not know about you. I kept this from him.” Alexei said. “I only told him I did not want to come back to Russia.”
“Well, apparently he figured it out somehow, because he was real clear about the fact that he would kill me if I didn’t leave that night. He even sent somebody over to clean out my stuff and had it delivered to Layla’s apartment, even though I hadn’t told anybody I was staying there.”
“So that is where you were hiding from me when I was trying to find you,” he said dully. “With Layla.”
“Yeah, I knew I had to go to someone you didn’t know I knew, and she’s still the only person I’ve ever met who would take in a girl she’d met once in a CPR seminar.” She lowered her eyes, suddenly nervous about making a full confession about what she did and how she did it eight years later. “Funny story, that’s actually how Aaron got his name. Her middle name is Erin, so I named him after her—“
“Eva,” he said, cutting off her ramble, his voice harsh with anger. “You are telling me you did not leave me that night because I was poor or because you were pregnant, but because my uncle threatened you. This is what you are telling me.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. I didn’t even find out I was pregnant until, like, a month later, and by then, I was way too scared of what your uncle might do to me to tell you.”
He blinked, his face becoming a cold mask, and when his eyes met hers, for the first time, she saw in them the other Alexei, the one she’d been told about. In that moment, he wasn’t the passionate, intelligent, caring, and sexy Russian she’d thought he was when they’d first started dating, but the cold-blooded killer his uncle had presented him as in their tiny little apartment.