Page 164 of Deceptive Vows

There… was only one person my father saw early in the morning yesterday, and he would have spent the day with them.

The same person who was the only one outside my guards who knew when Natalia would be leaving for the airport and who she was going with. Once I declared who she was going with, they would also have known what car they would have taken. Levka always drives the Bugatti.

It wouldn’t have been that hard to track them.

“Mikhail, are you still there?” Eric asks but sounds suddenly far away, and the room looks dim.

I hear footsteps and turn to Sophia walking up to me.

She picks up the cup and smiles wide.

“Good, you finished it,” she states and then laughs.

There’s something wrong with the way she looks, though.

There’s something wrong with everything, and my hand feels numb. Fucking numb. The phone falls from my hand and hits the floor. That sounds far away, too, but loud at the same time.

The room spins as I reach for the sofa.

“If you’d eaten the sweet I gave you last night, you could have died peacefully with your father,” she tells me in that good-natured tone I’ve been used to my whole life. “This way is better, I suppose. This way carries more of a punch and you get answers to the puzzle that mystified you so much.”

“Sophia, what did you give me? What are you saying to me?”

I don’t understand what she’s saying to me, but I understand what truth is screaming at me along with the voices in my soul.

That person who was with my father all day yesterday and would have been with him in the morning was her.

That person who knew what time my wife was leaving for the airport.

It’s her.

It’s fucking her.

My aunt.

She’s the person working with Ivan. But why?

And… what did I just drink? My vision speckles, but I fight to stay awake. I need to. I have to get out of here and find my wife.

“It’s a concoction of poison from Russia they used in the war. I made this blend a little less vicious, if you will. So, you can die slowly. Just like your father.”

“You poisoned my father? You did all of this?”

“I did, my love. It was me.”

“What about Ivan?”

“Of course, he was right alongside me, and the only reason you couldn’t find anything on him was because you were tracking the wrong person.” She gives me that laugh again.

She sits back down and sets the cup back on the table.

“Why? Would you do this?” Of all the people, I never expected this from her. Not her, the last person I trusted.

47

Mikhail

“You poor, blind fool. You’re just like your fucking father. You think because you have power, you can hurt people and get away with it. You think because you say something, we should live by your rules like mindless automatons.” Sophia’s face contorts with rage as she shakes her head. “Ivan’s mother was my best friend. We grew up together. She was like a sister to me, and your father cheated on her with your whore of a mother. Your whoring mother worked into their home, saw they had a child, and thought she’d destroy their family by spreading her legs for your father. Mybest friendkilled herself, and her little boy found her dead in the bathtub. All because of your father.”