Destiny and Deception (20 page)

“What about
me?
” Gareth asked.

Kyanne stopped short, hearing his softly spoken words. “What do you mean, what about you?”

“If you’re going to say she’s guilty because of when she arrived to help, then I’m even guiltier being three steps behind you when she was only two.”

“Darn it, Gareth,” Kyanne muttered, looking down at the hand that a moment before had been in my face and now had fallen limp in her lap. “Why are you always so quick to fall on the sword?”

He refocused on the road, but I could glimpse just a bit of his face—hardened by some pain he never spoke of—in the rearview mirror.

I tried to find a socially appropriate response. “I’m sorry if you feel I’m letting you down, Kyanne,” I tried.

“Geez. Have you ever listened to yourself? You’re ‘sorry if I feel’ like this isn’t your fault, like it’s the fault of
my
emotions, not
your actions
. That’s one of the most retarded phrases I’ve ever heard anyone say. It ranks right up there with ‘because I said so.’”

Evidently Kyanne wasn’t hurting too badly. At least not physically. I had more important things to deal with than her emo spaz out. I turned my attention back to Gabe.

“Kyanne, you need to relax. It looks like you’re still bleeding badly,” Gareth tried.

“Well, of course I’m bleeding badly. It’s a gunshot wound. It also hurts like heck, if you didn’t know.” Then her voice got soft and the compassion crept back in. “But I think that you do know, don’t you, Gareth?”

Gareth’s eyes again focused on the road. Fiercely.

I tugged at Gabe’s shirt. The cloth stuck to the drying blood.

I looked out the window at the countryside flashing by. Even with my keen nighttime senses, I couldn’t accurately judge our location or the distance we were from what now served as our home.

“I should’ve just taken the deal.”

“What?” Gareth asked.

“The Russian. This’d be different if I’d gone along instead of thinking about it. Damn it.” I pressed the button on the door handle and watched the window roll down with a soft whirr. The wind rushed in and I opened my nose and my senses to the night.

Gabe muttered something like, “Glad I didn’t steal the Rusakovas’ red convertible.… It’d suck trying to get this much blood out of a real leather interior.…” He closed his eyes and dozed off under the weight and warmth of my body.

Gareth glanced back at the three of us, Kyanne still grumbling angrily, and me all but curled on Gabriel’s lap.…

He smiled.

And it made me just the slightest bit angry.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Alexi

We climbed the stairs to Wanda’s flat, and she opened the door just before I had a chance to knock on it.

“Hey, guys,” she greeted us. “Grab whatever you want.”

Max looked at me and shrugged.

“We will start with the coffee table,” I suggested, thinking about its glass top.

Max followed my lead, heading for the center of the room. “Ready?” Max asked, hefting the coffee table. “You get the doors. I have this.”

I opened each door and spotted him on the stairs and all the way to the door, but the picture from earlier—everything about it—seemed to overlay real life in a strangely surreal fashion. I had been there before.

I knew it.

Back we went for the recliner. And then the couch.

On the way down the stairs I suddenly remembered and slipped toward Max, my ass hitting two steps as I bounced down the staircase and was nearly crushed beneath the couch.

Max snorted. “It is only a couch. Why must you wrestle with it?”

I stood and, wincing, got a grip on the couch once more. “Do you remember what color the houses across the street from us were?”

“Where?” he asked with a grunt as he rested the couch on his hip to get a free hand to open the last door.

“Farthington.”

“There was that tan one. And the white one. And that strange one. It always looked pink if the sun caught it wrong.”

I kept my grip on the couch although I feared I might lose my grip on my mind. “
Da
. The strange one.”

We loaded the couch awkwardly in Mr. Gillmansen’s truck. “There are some boxes we need to get,” I said. “And then I think we will be finished.”

“Excellent,” Max said. “You just point and I’ll carry. Like the man in any couple would.”

I shot him a glare.

He responded with a grin.

Back up the stairs we went.

Wanda was back in the kitchen, so I took my chance and stacked two boxes in Max’s waiting arms. One that said
CRAP
and one that said
PHOTOS
.

He looked at me a moment, and I just shook my head, warning him to silence.

I needed answers now that my mind was filled with so many fresh questions.

All I knew was what I could remember and what I had just discovered. Mother had called Wanda a traitor, something I had dismissed as part of the madness that came with being an older oborot. Wanda had been working in the area when we were in the same area—before Junction.

Mother had gone jogging once or twice a week and mentioned a little rat of a dog. Wanda and her rat of a dog were in a photograph in front of a house that looked oddly pink. A house that stood across the street from ours in Farthington.

The photo positioned Wanda on our sidewalk.

With the photographer standing on our lawn.

With everything loaded, I returned one more time to Wanda’s flat. I needed to see her again. To read her face and hope that I was wrong. That everything was circumstantial. That I was making something out of nothing.

Standing before her open doorway, I called her name and she appeared.

“Thank you for taking all that stuff,” she said with a sigh. “I hope it makes things better.”

“It seems to be what we
do
with stuff that makes things better. Or worse,” I added.

She nodded. “There you go again. Thinking.”

“It is a hazard of being me.”

“Well, don’t let it mess up the good things in your life—sometimes overthinking ruins things. And remember what I said: If it’ll make you feel better, you can pay me back. But you don’t have to.”

“
Nyet
,” I said, my voice falling into a whisper. “I will most certainly pay you back,” I promised. “For everything.”

She smiled and said good night and good-bye and I stood there a heartbeat after the door was shut and the lock slid into place before going back down the steps.

Paying her back would be the least I could do. But I doubted it would be the sort of payback she expected now that I knew the truth.

Marlaena

The car pulled around to the door of the abandoned little farmhouse. No need to park in the driveway like a proper family, so we rolled over a few bushes and got as close as we could to our ramshackle sanctuary.

More important than maintaining a lawn was maintaining our lives.

They rushed out to greet us, all grins and laughter—expecting success—until they saw the grim truth tumble from the backseat. Help rushed forward to cradle their friends—their family with a capital
F
—and help to bring them into the house.

Gabriel was flopped onto the nearest couch, and Kyanne fell into a heap of fabric and springs that once—probably years ago—had been a fashionable chair.

I watched a moment, making sure everyone was settled before I left the room and returned to the car to retrieve the zipper bag.

I sat down in the passenger’s seat again, setting the bag on my lap.

I tugged on the zipper, feeling it catch on a dollar bill. Or maybe a check. I quietly hoped it was the former. Checks, I couldn’t do anything worthwhile with and the only contacts I had who could turn a check into cash were miles and miles away. “Cash,” I whispered. “Have lots and lots of cash. Small bills,” I added, reworking the zipper so that it finally ran loose.

I pulled it back and opened the bulging bag wide to examine the tops of the bills. I fingered through the stack, ruffling the edges. Not a bad take. Junction might be just one more economically depressed bit of small-town America, but at least this store had a decent day.

Except for the death of its owner …

I swallowed.

That was an unexpected consequence of feeding my family.…

Killing was new. But if we went with the Russian, it might be necessary. Several times. Killing might become the norm.

Weren’t our lives “kill or be killed”?

I tugged the stack of bills free and ordered them neatly so all the presidents’ heads were right side up. Then I arranged the bills by denomination, unwilling to count any of it until it all had some semblance of order.

“Was it worth it?”

I jumped at the sound of his voice, nearly dropping the money loose in my lap.

“Jesus, Gareth.”

He eased himself into the seat beside me and put out his hand.

I looked from it to the money and back.

“I’ll count it tonight,” he whispered solemnly. “I want to know what it all comes down to. What’s the cost of one man’s life?”

I threw it all at him, the money, the bag with some coins in its bottom, and the last bits of attitude I had. But I felt no satisfaction as the bills floated down around his head and landed on the dashboard and in his lap. Even the thwap and clink of the bag and its coins hitting him square in the chest did nothing to alleviate my loathing.

My loathing of him, my loathing of my lifestyle and, most of all, my loathing of myself for not being able to find some other way for all of us.

Survival shouldn’t have to be so hard.

“Find out then—tell me what a man’s life is worth,” I demanded. “Because I know what the survival of all those lives in there is worth to me, and it always comes out on top regardless of what anyone else thinks or feels. Always!” I slammed the door and stormed away.

Alexi

“I am sorry, Pietr. But you must try harder. Surely there is some work you can find. You are very clever,” I added. The fact that the brightest among us was struggling to find a minimum-wage job was frustrating beyond words.

Pietr cracked his knuckles. “I’ll ask Wanda and see if there are any openings at the library.”

Jessie and I both began speaking at the same time. “She’s—”

“Not to be trusted,” I blurted out, and everyone’s head snapped up, all eyes sharp and at attention.

“Damn,” Jessie said, her voice little more than a whisper. “I was just going to say she’s out of town for a few weeks.”

“Alexi,” Pietr said, taking Jessie’s hand, “what are you talking about?”

We were all keenly aware of Jessie’s father’s intentions toward Wanda. They had fallen into a romantic relationship—initially a bit one-sided—as Wanda needed a way to stay close to the students of Junction and being around Jessie and her smart-mouthed little sister provided decent intel considering how girls talked. But Wanda seemed to have truly fallen for Jessie’s dad. And Jessie was just beginning to accept the idea.

I should have kept my mouth shut. “It was nothing,” I said, seeing the darkness grow in Jessie’s brown eyes.

“No,” she said, her eyes fixed on me, her gaze full of daggers and, worse yet, the fear that I was right. “Tell me—tell
us
—what you meant. Why
now
can’t Wanda be trusted?”

I sat heavily. “I have learned a few more things about her past.”

“Oh.” Jessie heaved out a sigh. “Her past?”

“
Da
.”

“So this isn’t about something she’s doing right now.”

“Yes and no,” I said, struggling to clarify. “It is about her past, but she has yet to come clean about it now.…”

“Sometimes there are things in a person’s past that no longer matter in the present,” Jessie said. “People change and grow. People make mistakes but they can get past them.”

Amy watched her, hope in her eyes.

I hated to be another one who dashed her hopes, so I chose my words carefully. “People can change—I believe that. But what she did should have been explained. Although I doubt there is any explanation that could suffice.…” I ran a hand through my hair and tried to focus. “She has not told us all about a very important part of her past. A part that ties in directly to our family’s past.”

“Quit beating around the bush,” Jessie urged me. “What did she do in the past that caused you to not trust her now, after all we’ve been through—the way she fought beside us against the company. What could it possibly be that she did that was so wrong you can’t trust her even now?”

I looked at her levelly and licked my lips before saying the words that already lodged in my throat. “She murdered our father.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Alexi

Jessie seemed to stop breathing. She blinked once, a slow move that made it possible to believe I was actually watching the wheels in her brain struggle for traction. “Wanda murdered your father?” she asked.

I knew it was unbelievable. I could not even grasp the depth or gravity of what I had so recently discovered—and what I had finally said aloud. “
Da
.”

“Proof, Sasha,” Jessie begged.

Had she ever called me that before—ever called me Sasha?

“I need proof.”

But I knew what she really meant was:
Please let his proof be something I can blow a hole through—please let him be wrong
. Oddly, I felt guilty knowing I was not wrong.

Wanda had saved Jessie’s life—had probably saved most of us at least once—which made it even harder to fathom the level of her betrayal.

How much worse to know all the good she had done recently and still know it could not stack up against her cruelest work—taking away our father’s life and imprisoning our mother?

“There was a woman that my mother spoke of briefly while we lived in Farthington—a friendly woman with a small, yippy dog. Mother met her when she was out for a jog one day and they began meeting every morning. They were not close friends, but they talked.”

Cat leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. “That was the little dog Mother joked about eating,
da?
‘Just a hairy morsel,’ she laughed one day, ‘barely any meat—just fur and bones.’”