24. Xander

If I was asked to jump off a cliff to save my son, I would. If I was asked to jump off a cliff to save Katerina, I would.

That simple logic leads to a quiet understanding. But life has never been that simple. And sometimes I feel like I’ll never understand Katerina fully. Currently, its late afternoon and we’re lying next to each other on her bed. I’m on my side facing her and her eyes are close. She looks like she’s asleep but there’s a tiny crinkle in the side of her forehead that lets me know she’s not. We’ve been in this position for an hour. After we eventually wore ourselves out.

“Stop staring at me, weirdo,” she mumbles after a couple more seconds pass.

My lips pull up into a smile. “Are you ready to stop pretending to be asleep?”

Her eyes still don’t open.

“Actually I was hoping you could treat this as one of those one night stand situations and leave before I wake up.”

I arch an eyebrow at the statement but decide to play along regardless, “I would, but it’s in the afternoon not at night. And I don’t think one night stands usually involve as much sex as we just had.”

“They do if the guy has a lot of stamina,” she replies.

That has my eyebrows climbing. “And you know this how?”

Something bubbles in the pit of my stomach. I know enough to recognize it as jealousy. Katerina doesn’t reply my question however.

“Princess,” I prod.

Her eyes are still closed. “Don’t you have somewhere to be, Xander? It’s almost 3 and you have to pick up Nate from school.”

“I’m aware,” I state. “And I’ll go as soon as you look at me.”

She doesn’t.

“Katerina.”

She lets out a soft sigh. “If I look at you, then that makes everything real and I’m not ready for it to be real yet, okay?”

“But if I leave without you looking at me, then how can you be sure it was ever real in the first place?” I counter.

That gets her to open her eyes. My pulse races as my gaze meets soft brown ones.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she tells me quietly.

Her words are like a searing bolt to my chest, one that can’t be ignored. Before I can rethink my actions I’m climbing off my bed.

“Tell you what? What if I asked Mikayla to go pick Nate up from school? The both of them can hang out for a while.”

Katerina sits up at that and I see relief in her expression but also some confusion.

“So you’re not leaving?” she questions.

I make sure to look her in the eye as I pull on my boxer briefs. “I told you. I’m done running away, princess. This is here and now. We can’t keep living in the past.”

She still looks doubtful but I have every intention of proving myself to her. After making the call in which my sister was all too happy to oblige, I’m climbing back into bed beside her. We sit in silence for a couple of seconds, her backs resting against the headboard.

This is hard. There’s no denying that. We have so much to unpack, so many things we need to figure out. I remember reading or seeing something somewhere, in a book, a movie where one of the characters asked the other how they could work on removing their armor. The reply was simple, adequate, just three simple words. One at a time.

And I relate so much to that in this moment. Because if there are two people who have been living with armor our whole lives. It’s me and Katerina. Her much more than me. She lives with so much of it, I’m not sure it would be possible to take it all off. But I plan to help her.

“Answer me this, princess,” I start. She looks sideways at me. “What do you wish for the most in the world? Tell me three of your greatest heart desires.”

That makes her smile. It’s a soft, warm smile, “Since when are you a genie, Alexander?”

“Just tell me,” I prompt.

“Alright,” she says, “But three things don’t even begin to cover all that I want if I’m being honest.”

“Too bad, I asked for three,” I state. She looks at me imploringly and I find myself caving. “Okay fine. Five things?”

She nods, happy with my amendment. She sits up straighter before beginning to speak.

“One of the things I want is mostly superficial. But I want to go to Paris. My sister and I used to take bi annual trips to Paris when we were teenagers. We would go shopping in Rue Saint Honore. And after visiting as many luxury stores as we could, we’d go and eat at the most spectacular places. There’s a particular restaurant called Le Meurice Alain Ducasse. The food there is impeccable. I loved going there with Sophia but as we grew up, there were less and less chances to travel because of school, college, work, and eventually we just stopped going. She probably doesn’t even remember.”

I reach for her hand in slight awe because while I’ve never heard the story before, I believe with all my heart that those trips with her sister were probably her happiest. The only times when she was able to completely be free.

“Thinking about the trip leads me to something else I want and wish for with my whole entire heart,” Katerina says, “I want my sister to forgive me. Sophia’s my best friend and her absence in my life feels like I’ve lost a limb. I just want my sister back.”

Her eyes are a little glassy as she says that.

“She’ll come back, princess,” I say offering quiet reassurance. “What else do you wish for?”

The next one must be pretty hard because it takes her a while before she’s able to voice it.

“I want Nate to call me mom,” she says, her voice low. “Maybe it makes me selfish. I mean I haven’t been back in his life for too long and these things take time. But I really do want with all my heart to hear it. Even if it’s just once.”

My heart tugs at that. I shift closer to her on the bed, placing my arm around her shoulders and drawing her closer to my chest.

“It’s not selfish to want that, Katerina. It’s human. He’ll call you mom eventually. He just needs a little more time, princess. And I promise you’ll hear it as many times as you want. Maybe you’ll even grow sick of it.”

“I would never.”

I smile, “What else do you want, princess?”

She huffs out a soft breath. “Maybe I’ll just keep the rest to myself.”

“No,” I say pulling away to look her in the eye. “Tell me.”

“Seriously, Xander. You’re not a genie and you’re not magic. You can’t just flip a wand or your wrist and fulfil all my heart desires,” she mutters.

I wish I could. If I could make her happier by doing, so I would.

“Tell me,” I repeat, my tone leaving no room for argument.

She breaks eye contact, staring off at the wall. It takes her a long time before she’s able to say the words.

“I want to be able to love you without feeling so terrified.”

My stomach hollows at that and a burn radiates in my chest.

“Why is that so terrifying, Katerina?” I ask softly.

Instead of replying, she starts to climb off the bed. I try to ignore the way heat rolls through me at the sight of her naked body. Her ass jiggles as she walks and my cock twitches which is crazy because after what we were up to all afternoon, it should be completely out of commission. Katerina heads for a closet and grabs a dress, pulling it on and effectively hiding her body from view.

“I’m going to tell you my last wish. But first I have to try and show you the answer to that question,” she tells me. “Come on.”

I get off the bed as well, and put on my clothes before following her out the door. Katerina starts to lead me towards the end of the narrow hallway. The large brown door I saw earlier, the one she deftly tried to pull me away from. My heart pounds with the possibilities of what could be behind the door.

“We’re not going to enter,” Katerina says once we’re standing in front of it. “I don’t think I physically can.”

I don’t need to voice the question. She sees it in the way I look at her.

“Because this was my mother’s room. The room she shared with my father before she died.”

The pain behind those words, the look in her eyes, undoes whatever shred of hesitation I’d been feeling ever since I kissed her. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that I wanted to hunt down every single thing that causes her pain and destroy them.

When I notice a tremble go through her hand, I immediately slip mine into hers.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, Katerina,” I tell her.

“No,” she shakes her head. “I didn’t tell you ten years ago because I was a coward. Maybe if I had let you see all of me, we wouldn’t be in this position. I won’t make the same mistakes again.”

“I’m listening,” I say quietly.

She takes a deep breath. “I was eight years old when my mother died. She passed away from cancer. Losing a family member is always a terrible thing. But losing someone to cancer, eats away at you in an inexplicable way. Because it’s watching that person die and being unable to do anything about it. Watching them suffer in pain and being helpless. I hated feeling like that. I was only a child but I remember praying so hard, trying so hard. I would always hound the doctors for more information, beg them every day to do their best to save her. But in the end there was nothing they could do. The day she died, I was the only one in her hospital room. I watched her die.”

I suck in a sharp breath at that revelation.

Katerina continues, “I’ve killed a lot of people over the years. I’ve watched as life was sucked from them. As they stopped breathing. But no matter how many people I watch die, none of it ever compares to the feeling of seeing my mother take her last breath. Watching her fight one last time as I screamed for help. I wasn’t supposed to be in the hospital that day. But instead of going home I managed to convince one of my father’s capos to take me there. If I had gone home, I wouldn’t have had to witness something so traumatizing. I lost someone I loved more than life itself and it scared me, Xander. Because I’ve never felt pain like that before. And I never want to again.”

She’s trembling by the time she’s done speaking. I pull her into my arms and hold her. The hallway is silent in a way that feels haunted. No one deserves to go through what she and her family went through. And now I understand why she tried so hard to build a wall around her heart. I might not know the full depth of her pain, but I feel it regardless.

Eventually I’m able to lead her back into her bedroom. She seems tired, so I tuck her into bed, aware that I won’t be getting anything else from her today. She needs a break from all the high emotions, we both do. I tuck her into the covers, ensuring that she’s comfortable before placing a kiss on her forehead. I should probably get back home anyway.

“Xander,” she says softly just before I turn to leave.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to be scared anymore.”

My heart warms as I stare down at her.

“You don’t have to be scared, princess.”

“I wish my mom was still alive,” she says quietly, so quietly that I almost don’t hear it.

But I do and the words cause a searing pain through my chest. Because that’s the one thing I can’t do for her. No matter how much I want to.

She’s fast asleep by the time I walk out of the room. I run into Rico on the way out of the house and while he does arch an eyebrow in question, he doesn’t ask me anything.

“She’s not feeling too well,” I inform him. “Maybe just let her sleep.”

He nods before telling me goodbye. Things can change in the blink of an eye. When I came to her house earlier today, I didn’t expect all of this to happen. But I’m happy it did. Glad that we’ve at least made some progress. That we’re both finding it within ourselves to heal.

Two days later,I’m alone in the penthouse. Katerina came over for dinner last night but aside from a few lingering looks and a secret kiss goodbye, we weren’t able to talk. She has a lot of work to do and only came because Nate asked her. I’m currently biding my time until she’s free so we can continue our conversation.

Because while a part of me doesn’t want to be too hopeful, I’m almost sure she wanted to tell me she loved me. And hearing those words would be a defining, irrevocable change. One that would completely uproot my life. And if she can’t say it yet, then I’m prepared to wait until she does. I’d wait forever to hear those words from her.

I’m working on a plan for a new job when I hear the elevator open. My brows furrow, because I wasn’t expecting anyone and I should have been informed by the receptionist downstairs if I had a guest. I get to my feet and the sight that greets me is a platinum blonde woman in her early fifties, dressed head to toe in designer clothing, a fur coat thrown over her outfit. There’s a large red suitcase behind her and a look of irritation on her face that clears only a bit when her eyes meet mine.

“Oh, hello darling,” she greets.

My jaw grinds. “Mother.”