Ultimate Vengeance (Wanted Men Book 4)(9)

She’d seen Vasily Tarasov in meetings with men Alekzander would later say were congressmen or the chairman of a bank known around the world. She remembered one such gathering hosted in their luxurious house in Old Westbury. She’d been cornered by two men, an arrogant Arab and a distinguished Frenchman. One had been in oil, the other in the insurance industry. Both had held private meetings with Vasily that evening, and all had appeared extremely happy afterward.

She also recalled both of those men being slightly aggressive. Disconcerted by that, Sacha had caught Alekzander’s eye. He’d left his group mid-sentence. With impeccable manners, but with frost crackling in his icy stare, he’d slipped his arm around her waist, letting his hand rest with blatant intimacy on her hip. After some casual conversation, he’d called over two women he’d assured would happily entertain the men then excused himself and Sacha. He hadn’t left her alone again the rest of the evening.

“Alekzander and I were once together,” she said. Because he wasn’t a chatty woman, she and Justin had never sat and shared their pasts over tea and pastries the way Sacha and Angela had done. But now that he’d been with her when her present and past had collided, she figured she should give him something. “We lived together. I left him when he cheated on me.” Justin made a quiet sound of disgust, but she didn’t look up from where she was once again spinning her parents’ wedding bands. “I will not bore you with the details, but in the end, I left without telling him I was pregnant.” No satisfaction came from her habit of slipping the common expression into her speech as it usually did. She tried extra hard to learn as much American slang as possible because it was always so embarrassing when she took things literally.

The car lurched forward when Justin hit the brakes too hard. “Wait a minute. Alek Tarasov is Lekzi’s father? And he doesn’t know?”

The quiet disbelief in his voice caused her head to pound, but rather than defend herself, she just nodded.

“No wonder she popped into my head the second I saw his eyes. Holy fuck. This isn’t good.”

No. It was not good. She sat very still and prayed she wouldn’t vomit all over the expensive interior of the car as images flashed like snapshots through her mind. Alekzander looking up at her amid random chatter and sounds of forks hitting plates. Alekzander smiling as he shrugged out of the leather holster he wore across his tattooed chest, his mouth finding hers as he whispered how much he loved her. Alekzander behind his desk, he and that woman looking over as Sacha interrupted the sex they were having; proof he’d viciously lied about their love.

Sacha then saw herself stealing away in the middle of the night from the hotel room she’d landed in after her world had imploded, and seven and a half months later, standing before the mirror in the tiny bathroom of her new apartment, her belly round, her face wet with tears because she’d been suffering over the decision she’d made. The kindness she’d received from the doctors who delivered her beautiful baby girl a week later sifted through her memory. As did the judgemental clerk’s knowing look when Sacha had requested the space listing her daughter’s father be left blank. Have a nice day, whore, the woman might as well have said as Sacha left the office clutching her beautiful treasure, her head bowed with a shame countless women before her had worn.

Humiliation stomped on the ruins that had once been her pride. “I must leave so that he cannot find me and take my daughter. He will come. I know he will. Did you hear what he said to his uncle? He will not let me get away again. Why would he say such a thing when it was him who drew away from us by choosing to be with someone else?” Tears singed the back of her eyelids at the size of his ego. She’d once thought it was confidence, and it had been so attractive to her because that was something she’d always lacked.

Her throat ached with the need to cry but she didn’t allow it. Alekzander didn’t deserve these feelings; the overpowering anger, the staggering sense of loss, the pain.

The love. God, she loved him.

He may have destroyed her with his infidelity, but he hadn’t destroyed the love she’d told him would be his forever. Only, now, that soft, fragile feeling was twisted and broken. Warped beyond all recognition. But still it lived. As did it’s opposite.

“I hate him.” Her voice was quiet but adamant. “And I will not allow him to ruin my life again by taking the only thing that brings me happiness. She is mine, and he cannot have her. Not any part of her.”

“Sacha. Cheating isn’t grounds for keeping a parent from their child.”