“Get your disrespectful ass back,” his uncle gritted out. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He waved Sydney forward. “Please take Sacha to the restroom. I’m sure she would like to splash some water on her face.” He quieted Sacha’s protest by shaking his head and pointing to the door. “Go with them,” he ordered Maks.
“Give me your phone before you do,” Alek said to Maks, taking the cell when it was handed over.
The second they were alone, Vasily started. “Why the fuck am I watching you disrespect her and our family name again? The last time, I’m ashamed to say I let it go. I can’t do that again. I don’t think you quite understand what you did to that girl the last time you were together, so let me paint a picture for you.”
He jerked a chair over. Alek shook his head. “Can’t sit.”
“Fine.” The chair was tossed across the room. It came to a stop with one of the legs imbedded in the wall. “Dmitri tracked her through the cab company she used when she left your home for the last time. She ended up at a small hotel just off the 59th Street Bridge.”
Alek knew that because Maks had found her in the same place.
“When she opened the door to me, I’ve never been so ashamed of my name, my gender; ashamed of the very genes we Tarasov men carry that make us treat the precious women in our lives with such cruelty. Sacha was a young, insecure girl who worshipped the goddamn ground you walked on in the most honest, open way. She was a pleasure to be around. Not that day.”
He jammed his hands into his pockets as he began pacing. “She stood in that grungy little room, shaking, her teeth chattering. She kept making these quiet, pained sounds. Her cheeks were raw from wiping at her tears, her eyes swollen. She looked as if she’d been mauled by death but hadn’t been lucky enough for him to finish the job.” He grimaced. “Polite as ever, she invited me in, and like an insensitive fool, I made the mistake of mentioning your name. She broke right in front of me. When she gathered her composure, I insulted the hell out of her by offering the only thing I could; money. A new start. She refused, and I walk away.”
Remorse clouded the room, coming from both of them. It subdued Vasily’s voice, and tempered Alek’s anger. It forced him to see his part in all of this.
“It haunts me that I left a young girl with no father, no male figure to stand for her. I have stepped in and supported so many in her shoes, young men and women who come to the U.S. without their families. Yet the one who loved you almost as much as I do, I walked away from and left her to her agony. I should have tried harder to convince her to let me help. She had no one, and, because I became wrapped up in your pain, that’s who I left her with. No one.”
“Not true.”
Vasily turned from where he’d ended up at the far wall, and Alek could plainly see the guilt ravaging him was most definitely about more than just Sacha.
With his temples throbbing because he wasn’t sure anymore if he had a right to the anger burning through him, Alek brought Maks’s phone over and handed it to his uncle.
“She wasn’t alone.”
SIXTEEN
“No, I was not alone. I gave birth to Alekzander’s daughter in April of this year.”
Vasily looked up from the records he’d just read through for the third time to see Sacha alone in the doorway. He was shell-shocked. It was funny how certain things still had the ability to do that. Sacha pulling off something like this? Staggering. And to learn of it after his impassioned speech that had portrayed her as a meek little victim? He might now have to accept that was something Alek’s woman was not.
He wasn’t sure if he should be proud of her or pissed at himself for misjudging her so badly.
A baby? A little girl? Holy shit. It didn’t surprise him in the least when euphoria swept through him to overshadow everything else.
He held it off and gave his attention to his nephew’s not-so-meek girlfriend. Likely due to nerves, Sacha reverted to Russian when she spoke, her gaze fearful but steady as she owned up to stealing who was essentially Vasily’s granddaughter. He listened to the baby’s mother with a lump the size of a melon lodged in his throat.
“Her name is Alekzandra Liliya Urusski. I deliberately kept her a secret after I walked in on her father in a…compromising position. He told me a few minutes ago that he set that up, and why, and I believe him. But that does not change the fact that he broke me when I saw…what I saw. I had planned to tell him about his daughter, but the chance was taken from me. I will now do anything to make up for the time I stole from him. And you,” she added quickly. “Anything but be separated from my child. Please, do what you will, but do not take my life away by taking my daughter from me. That would not only punish me, but it would hurt her because I am all she has known since she was born.”