Page 26 of Dark Soul

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Alexia

That night, she dreamed of Rob.

This wasn’t unusual, in and of itself. The therapist she’d seen back at home, in the months after they’d buried Rob, had said dreaming of loved ones who were gone was the mind’s natural response to grief, and a chance to hold on to the good memories.

But Alexia’s dreams weren’t those kinds of dreams.

In her dreams, people died. Most often Rob but, sometimes, she was the one standing on the bridge, unable to move out of the way as the yellow Lamborghini accelerated towards her, the distinctive, triangular headlights growing bigger and bigger, like a bat’s wings, before the car hit her, her body flying up into the air before coming back down and disappearing under the car’s tires.

Rob had had a closed casket burial. Her parents had never let her see his body. But she’d read the police report, and that had given her more than enough material to imagine what her brother’s death had been like.

Her little brother.

Technically, Rob was her half-brother on her mom’s side, but he’d been her brother in all ways that mattered since the day he’d been born, when he’d first looked at her with those big blue eyes, his hand tightening around her finger.

She’d been four at the time, but she remembered. She remembered the way he’d changed from a baby into an unsteady toddler, the way he’d reached for her hand as he took those first steps. The way they’d always been there for each other.

Except you weren’t there for him.

Not at the end.

He’d only just turned twenty-one and was starting to spread his wings. He’d wanted to be an artist, so the chance of a summer internship in the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg had been too good to pass up.

Alexia hadn’t been there for him. She’d been busy studying for her master’s degree, hadn’t even found the time to drive him to the airport. One month later, he was dead, his body showing clear signs of having been hit and dragged by a low sports car.

A car that, in one initial report, was traced back to Arseny Kvyat.

Then the report disappeared, just like the car, until it seemed neither had ever existed.

Nothing was ever done, and Alexia had watched this slowly destroy her mother and stepfather. They’d never fully resigned themselves to not getting justice for their son, had promised to fight for him for the rest of their lives.

Which turned out to be a short time, since they’d both died in a car crash a year later.

Alexia would never know for sure what happened to them. But she knew what had happened to Rob—she knew it, and she hated Kvyat for the way he’d refused to take responsibility for it.

She’d finished her master’s degree and had taken a role as a teacher in a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire. She’d resigned herself to the loss of her brother and her parents, resigned herself to never knowing justice, until, six months earlier, an anonymous message had appeared in her school email account, with a subject line that had caught her attention.

What if we could bring him down?

There had been no message inside, only a job posting for a private tutor role for an uber-wealthy family of Russian origin traveling in Europe during the winter.

The next day, she got another email. Again, same subject line, but this one contained a phone number as well. And that same number had called her, at night, when she was alone in her apartment, a mechanical, distorted voice that seemed to know a lot about her, and even more about Arseny Kvyat. A voice that claimed to want justice as much as she did, and that they could take advantage of the fact that she and her brother had different last names to get this justice—that, together, they could expose Kvyat’s crimes.

After much deliberation, she’d decided to apply for the role, never expecting that she would end up being offered the job.

Her mystery contact was clear. All she had to do was observe, and report back on anything of interest, any shady deal she witnessed, any strange happenings. He would take care of everything else after that, and make sure Kvyat paid.

What Alexia hadn’t expected was that she’d come to care for the boy as much as she had in just a short few weeks, but then Nikolai was as different from Arseny as night from day.

As for Arseny, he was still the same monster that had populated her nightmares for years, but he was also more real to her, now. Loud and boisterous, yet fearful. Eager to be seen, yet locked up in his office all day, afraid to go out without his security team. Alone now, after his third wife—Nikolai’s mother—had moved to London and served him divorce papers.

Had Kvyat been anyone else, Alexia would have felt sorry for him—or as sorry as one could feel for someone who single-handedly polished off a huge jar of caviar every night, often feeding the leftovers to his cat—but to think that the man she had breakfast with every morning was the same man who’d run Rob over, leaving his dead body on the road like it was trash … it was almost more than she could bear, and she was glad she wasn’t seeing that much of him, though of course that also defeated the point of her being here at all.

At least Kvyat hadn’t tried to come on to her. Probably because, although she was two decades younger than him, Alexia was a head shorter and a good twenty pounds heavier than any woman he’d dated in the last twenty years. Maybe also because he was still in love with his estranged wife. In any case, that was a good thing, since she was pretty sure puking all over her employer would have ended her job quickly.