“So?” she said at last, after taking in the view and then tossing her hair, putting her hand on her hip and jutting her jaw at me, feigning a toughness I knew she did not quite possess. I admired the bravado, though. “Alaric.”
A wave traveled through me as she said my name.
“What kind of name is that, anyway?”
I set my drink down. “The origin of a name is only of importance, Natalia, if it tells you something about the person who bears it.”
“Myname,” she said defiantly, “is Nata-lie, FYI.”
This seemed like as good of a place to start as any. “No,” I advised her. “It is not. Your name is Natalia, and your surname is Karkarov, not this... Paulson. You are the daughter of a man named Kyril Karkarov.”
Her defiance had cracked and fallen apart, leaving her wide-eyed and eager to hear more, as though someone had broken a plaster shell and revealed a doll inside of it. “I’m an orphan,” she said quietly, bringing her hands to her heart and clasping one with the other. “I don’t have any information about my parents.”
But I could see that, for all she wanted to deny what I was saying, she knew she could not.
“What do you remember of your childhood?” I asked her. “Before...”
I cut myself off. I didn’t feel like finishing.
Her eyes flashed. “Before what? My mother gave me up when I was born,” she said bitterly. “I moved around from foster home to foster home.”
The hurt in her body was evident; her eyes fell.
I had never given any consideration to this aspect of Natalia’s life. The pain of being alone, an orphan, believing yourself to be a child that no one wanted. It had been my own story, and I had felt the bitterness that stung her now.
I knew better than to offer sympathy.
But in Natalia’s case, I could offer her something else.
“Your mother died in childbirth,” I said gently. “And then your father, a man I knew and to whom I owe a great deal, cared for you until his death.”
Her body convulsed, and I knew the tears were coming. I had expected that—what I hadn’t expected was that I would feel her raw pain in my chest.
This girl was becoming a problem I did not know how to deal with.
She shook her head. “That isn’t right,” she argued, but she was losing conviction with every word. “I don’t remember—”
“You were five when he died,” I continued.
She shook her head vigorously. “No, I remember things from when I was five, I remember my foster parents, I remember... always... living with them...” Her voice trailed off.
“He died in a helicopter crash,” I continued, as gently as I could. She was already bringing her hands to her head and letting out a terrible wail as I said the next part. She already knew, and the memory was surfacing, unbearable for her. “You were in the helicopter with him. I thought... you were too young to remember.”
She collapsed onto the floor, her hands to her head. She was shaking her head, but I knew that she could feel the truth of my words even if her memories were suppressed.
“Natalia,” I said, stepping toward her when there was a break in her sobs. “Your father loved you very much. He wanted... he asked me to hide you.”
She looked up at me, tears on her face. “Fromwhat? What are you saying?”
I was reaching for her without even thinking of what I was doing, my fingers in her hair, pulling her gently toward me as I knelt on the floor. She brought her hands to my forearms, as though she wanted to tear my hands away from her, but her body fell toward me, and she sank against my chest. “What are you talking about?” she repeated.
I brought her close to me, my arms around her, wanting to envelop her in something that would not break apart, or leave, or let her get hurt. It was a promise, when all of this started, but now it was all that I wanted. To protect her, to keep her from harm, to love her...
“I swore to your father that I would protect you. You were presumed dead, and I wanted to leave it like that... but you started to work for Andrej Sulov. And it was just a matter of time before he found out... who you were.”
Now that I had her in my arms, I was feeling a sharp, painful fear, reaching backward into the past. All the time that I had left her out there, exposed to harm, all the time I could have kept her more carefully under my watch. Anything could have happened to her. I had been foolish, and I wouldn’t let this happen again.
She cried for a while, and then she pulled away from me. “Who cares? Why does any of this matter?”
