His Pregnant Christmas Bride(55)
* * *
At the end of the enchanted day, what everyone said qualified as one of the best days of their lives, excitement and happiness were coursing through Anastasia, making her downright giddy.
But to her consternation, after all the bustle had died down, she felt as if a freezing hand was squeezing her heart.
It was that darkness that had lurked in the back of her mind, that hadn’t been resolved after yesterday’s revelations. That unease that had been coming to her in waves, even among the ocean of rapture of last night and today. It now surged, crested, loomed over her like a tidal wave about to crash.
She’d just entered the bedroom suite with Ivan when it did.
She had no evidence. She just knew. Where that dark unease had come from. And what it signified.
The truth.
What was even worse than her worst nightmares.
She had no idea how she continued interacting with Ivan until he entered the bathroom. Then feeling as if she was walking with her own two feet to the slaughter, she headed toward her parents’ suite.
The moment she entered and found them both sitting there in silence, looking like automatons, the knowledge solidified.
“I felt it, Dad.” Her voice sounded alien in her ears. “When the revelations were being made. Even among the upheaval, I felt it. You know something more about Ivan’s past. You more than know. You had a hand in it.”
Her father looked at her as if he’d sustained multiple stab wounds and was silently bleeding to death.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she rasped. “You’re the one who did this. You’re the one who sent Ivan to hell.”
Her father rose to his feet as if from under rubble, aging before her eyes, looking as if he’d have a stroke.
“It was me.”
The whispered words speared Anastasia in her gut.
Her mother.
Turning away from her father, she looked at the woman who’d given birth to her, whom she’d loved and believed in all her life.
What she saw in her mother’s eyes brought her whole world crashing down, crushing her beneath its debris.
“Your father and I...we were marked for liquidation,” her mother said, looking as if she’d taken a decision to end her own life. “We were beyond desperate when I learned of The Organization. I approached them for a deal, and my only bargaining chip was Kostya. He was such a prodigy... I knew they’d do anything to get their hands on him. They said if I convinced my friends to let them have him, they would get us all out of Russia and give us new lives in the States. So I made a plan to indirectly convince them that it was a great opportunity, so they would never realize it was I who initiated the bargain, or learn of its true nature or that of those I made it with.
“And there was not a single minute that passed since when I didn’t regret it, not one breath that wasn’t poisoned by his memory or the taste of my crime. When I thought Kostya died in that accident, I was almost relieved that fate chose to end his torment before it began. Everything I did since was aimed at trying to make it up to Glenda and John, to atone. Not that I thought anything would or could. Then I saw Ivan, and everything inside me screamed, even though it seemed impossible. I only told your father when we found out who Ivan really was.”
Her mother lay down on the couch, curled up, shaking, her eyes dry. She must have already expended all her tears.
If desolation and death had a sound, they would sound like her mother did now. “I deprived my friends of their son, and fate only bided its time before finally retaliating in kind.”
Then there was silence.
And in the silence, the cacophony of realizations attacked Anastasia.
Her mother had sold Ivan in return for their safety. She believed Alex had died to settle the cosmic score.
Anastasia herself had lived a life of security and freedom at the expense of Ivan’s despair and degradation.
The enormity of it all held its breath over her like a vast, black cloud. Then it detonated.
And there was nothing more.
* * *
Surfacing from the nothingness was terrifying.
She wanted to remain there where she’d once hidden, where it was dark and silent, where she was sinking in an eternity of pain-free paralysis.
But oblivion was relinquishing her to awareness, expelling her to its mercilessness. She was already feeling, hearing. And once she opened her eyes, she’d see what she couldn’t bear seeing. Ivan. Frantically hovering over her, going insane with worry.
From the voices with him she knew he’d brought Antonio, and Isabella, a surgeon, too, and the wife of his partner, Richard Graves. They were both assuring him she was physically perfectly fine, that fainting was not unheard of in the early months of pregnancy, especially after the physical and emotional tests she’d endured in the past months.