Anna swallows. “They wanted you killed.”
The room goes quiet.
I don’t move. I don’t even blink. I just look at her and wait for the rest, because if I speak now, I’m going to say something I can’t take back.
She keeps her eyes on me. “They came to him first because he has the right contacts. He knows people who can make something like this happen without noise. That’s why they asked him.”
“And I’m supposed to believe he said no.”
“Yes,” she says. “He did.”
I let out a short breath and turn away from her for a second because I genuinely don’t know whether I’m angrier at her for saying it or at myself for understanding that this is exactly the sort of role Voronin would be offered in the first place.
When I turn back, I say, “Anna, do you hear yourself?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think you do. You’re standing in my study telling me that the man I’ve been fighting for years was offered a contract on my life, turned it down out of the goodness of his heart, and somehow still ended up at my son’s wedding while shots were fired on my lawn.”
Her face tightens. “I didn’t say it was the goodness of his heart.”
“Then why did he refuse?”
Finally she says, “Because of me.”
There it is.
I stare at her. I laugh once, and there’s nothing amused in it. “Unbelievable.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think of that right now.”
“It matters a great deal what I think of it right now.”
She flinches slightly, but she doesn’t back down. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”
“After a year.”
Her mouth closes.
I keep going because now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop. “A year, Anna. A year of you keeping this from me. A year of you seeing him behind my back. A year of deciding for yourself what I needed to know and what I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“No,” I say. “You know it sounds bad. That’s not the same thing.”
Yuri is still standing near the door, listening and saying nothing, which is wise of him.
Anna takes a breath. “He didn’t want this.”
“You invited him to the wedding, didn’t you? It wasn’t Camille who did, it was you.”
“I wanted him here,” she says. “At my nephew’s wedding. Ethan and I practically grew up together. All I wanted?—”
“Don’t complete that sentence,” I warn her.
She sighs. “I’m telling you the truth, he was here to warn you.”
“That is not an answer.”
