Page 65 of The Marriage

“Just tell me, Roman. What about my father?”

“There was a fire—at his home. They found a body. The FBI thought it was likely your father, and no one led them to believe any different.”

“He’s dead?”

The wetness in her eyes made his chest clench. Despite the complications that colored their relationship, he thought there was a small part of Karine that had to love Maxim because he was her father.

Maybe that part of her would never forget the father he used to be before her sister’s death.

Roman wished he’d prepared something to say, but he hadn’t bothered. He didn’t start thinking until he got there, and saw Karine again.

“No, he’s not dead,” he admitted. “Your father is still alive.”

TWELVE

“I don’t ... I don’t understand,” she finally settled on saying. “I thought Katina had—”

“Her plan—” He didn’t miss the wince Karine gave at that statement; Roman bet knowing her alter having a major hand in plotting the death of her father had to be a big blow. “Doesn’t seem to have gone through—at least, not how she expected.”

Roman had made his mind up to tell Karine everything this time. No matter how difficult that conversation would be, a part of her had played a big role in the events leading up to what he believed might have happened in Chicago. And she deserved to know how it could affect her now.

The hardest part was telling her about the hand Katina had in all this. No matter what her relationship with her father had looked like over the years—or the fact that she had been unfairly treated by him—Karine would not want to hurt him.

“I didn’t want to have to tell you this, Karine, and I tried to shield you from it as long as possible. Just until we had everything figured out because it was clear something wasn’t right from the start. It’s likely Leonid died in the fire, Dima’s been hiding it to use a false position of power and move around—nobody knows where Maxim is.”

It was a lot.

Even he knew it.

Karine stayed quiet while he held her in his arms, rubbing her shoulders with slow and steady pressure. She kept her face turned from him, but he could see the way her stare darted maniacally around the peaceful view of the garden. As if the small fish ponds would somehow give her the answers to Katina’s actions, and make sense of what Roman was saying.

“You flew all the way across the country just to tell me that?”

“You had to know—it could mean he’s coming for you. We don’t know that, or anything different, but we have to act like we do.”

“You could have told me on the phone,” she insisted.

“Could I, really?”

How well would that have gone over?

Karine didn’t argue that; he was more grateful than he would admit about it, too.

And he had more than enough money to burn so what was another four-hundred-k on a chartered jet? It was the paper trail risk that concerned him more than anything else, but he was always careful in that regard, anyway.

Karine shuddered as he held her, and she sniffled before covering her mouth to hide a soft cry. The sound alone was enough to cut him deep.

“I want to say he deserved it—that he deserved what she wanted to do to him, but he didn’t. Nobody does. It makes me just as terrible as Dima. It makes me a monster.”

Oh, this sweet woman.

She truly was too good for the world.

Their world, anyhow.

He took her face in his hands, stroking her silken cheeks with his thumbs and quickly swiping away any tears that dared to fall, saying fiercely, “Never, ever make the mistake of comparing yourself to that man. You can’t take fault for the actions of something you never had control of, to begin with—Katina was never you. She doesn’t think like you or act like you or even want the same things you do.”

“But she is me—in me. They’re like little doors. All these memories, and people, and things ... the feelings I don’t like or the images I can’t forget, I put them behind doors. And some of them won’t open again after I close them, and others never had a door to start with. She didn’t like it when I put one in front her. She’s still there, though. Always, there, Roman, and it takes so much to—”