Thank fuck no one ever tried.
When we finally got back to New York almost two full days later, I went straight to Emma’s apartment, my ex-girlfriend. I went to her partly because I wanted to make sure they hadn’t gotten to her, but also because I had no one else to help me.
And she did exactly that.
She let me sleep on her couch for four months with Brandon beside me in a portable crib. He was a fussy little fucker, had me up all hours of the night, too. She was an angel to put up with that for as long as she had, but each day that passed, I knew we were getting closer and closer to an eviction. Not because she wasn’t happy to help, but because her relationship with her boyfriend had turned serious and I knew they’d want to be living together before long.
And it was probably for the best because seeing them together and happy hurt like fucking hell. They had everything I was supposed to have with Anya, and it twisted painfully in my gut every time they smiled, laughed, hugged, or said goodbye at the door with a kiss.
Emma tried to help me grieve the loss of Anya, but whenever she brought it up, something about it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right inside me to think of her as being gone. It didn’t feel like she was gone, absent from the Earth…and I don’t think it ever really had felt that way.
Twice before that night in the forest, I’d been nearby when Anya almost died, and I’d felt the snap of it breaking my heart, followed by a hollowness in my gut. But that hollowness was quickly filled when her breath returned. It was once before when Nikolai drowned her in the pool and again when Vigo tried to drown her in the bathtub.
I remember thinking she seemed invincible for all that she’d been through, and that word was rolling around in my head more persistently.
Though I’d been sad, though I’d cried a billion tears, though I’d cursed the four families for causing the death of my blue-eyed girl, I didn’t feel empty…I didn’t feel hollow in my gut. At first, I thought it was just because I had Brandon to fill the empty spaces. But more and more, I was feeling her absence as something that needed to be corrected, as something that could be corrected.
My heart insisted that she was invincible.
Four months into my stay with Emma, four months of conversations with local police, the FBI, the CIA, I decided that I needed to find her, with or without the help of law enforcement.
But first, I had to find her sister. I’d already waited four months too long and my only excuse was that Brandon took up all my time and attention.
It was almost too easy to find her. Lidia Antonov was on several social media sites that she posted to regularly and that was shocking to me. It was shocking because the four families could’ve tracked her down and taken her out after our departure, even though Nikolai had called off his goons who took weekly pictures of her with a scope measurement from the rifle they aimed at her.
Initially, I thought that must mean that Anya was, without a doubt, dead. Because they would have no reason to go after Lidia if Anya were dead. After all, I had no ties to Lidia in their eyes. If Anya was somehow still alive and in their care, they might’ve killed Lidia as punishment. They might’ve taken Lidia and sold her. But that just didn’t feel right to me.
And then I thought, What if Anya is alive, but the four families don’t know? And if she is alive, where the fuck is she?
I’d gone to Lidia then and told her everything.
She believed me, thank fuck.
She believed me because Brandon looked like Anya, except for the eyes.
His eyes were a light gray with flecks of green and brown when he was a newborn. But gradually, the brown faded and so did the gray, leaving him with stunning green eyes and a quickly growing mop of thick, blond hair.
He and I share the same eyes and hair, but the rest of him is undoubtedly all the best parts of Anya.
Lidia took to Brandon instantly, and suddenly, I had a family. Unfortunately, I never got to meet Anya’s mother. Lidia told me that she died of a heart attack a couple of years ago—undoubtedly, the stress of not knowing what happened to her oldest daughter took a toll on her health.
But right away, I bonded with Lidia and she stood by me as I lost my fucking mind deciding to pursue a potentially useless search for Anya. We both felt that if there were any possibility that she was still alive, that we would leave no stone unturned to bring her back.
We got a small place together because she insisted that I needed her help with Brandon. I did, but really, she wanted to be close to him because just like me, he was all she had left of Anya. It turned out that the 5,000,000 Rubles of Russian currency Kostya had given us was about 70,000 American dollars. It was enough to get by on while I went crazy in my overseas search. Lidia stepped up to take care of her nephew when I had to be gone to chase a new lead.
I talked to some unsavory people and I did some things that I’m not proud of, but if I hadn’t, I never would’ve stumbled upon the underground group of rogue agents who had been trying to bring an end to the four families for two decades. It took me a couple of months to convince them of my story, to feed them the information I’d gathered about the four families so they could compare it to their own intel. Once I introduced them to Brandon and Lidia, that was it.
We partnered.
Their intel, military training and expertise, their insiders…they gave me access to everything they had to help me find Anya. They had a stake in finding her because undoubtedly, she could give them even better information than I had since she’d been temporarily the sole leader of the Mikhailov family.
Things were starting to fall apart for the four families. It had started with the Leblancs, formerly the Campbells. The insiders knew of the changeover in family leadership from the moment it happened—when the Campbells were punished for their role in killing Nikolai’s family.
The agents had someone on the inside—a girl named Callista Campbell, the granddaughter of Charles Campbell, niece of the murdered Head of House Chandler Campbell. She wanted out when Chandler was killed, fearing for her life, but I guess they had convinced her to stay, took her away for some time and trained her in the art of becoming a trusted confidante to the new Head of House, Leo Leblanc.
Apparently, Callista was making waves. Though Leo was her first cousin once removed—the son of her great aunt and uncle—he had a thing for her. And Callista was using it to her advantage.
With the Leblanc family slowly unraveling and intel that Murphy and Stella O’Shea have started decommissioning some of their factories, the time for this group to act was now. And that meant they were willing to help me find Anya, which is exactly what they did.
It’s why I’m flying across the Atlantic right now.
Lidia’s name appears on my video chat and I click to bring her up.
“Hey,” she says, a little out of breath, “sorry I’m a few minutes late. Brandon figured out how to get out of his diaper and took a shit behind the couch before I realized it.”