Bohdan.
He isn’t in his seat because he’s right here. Our eyes meet, and he smiles at me and then he lifts his arms and lets some leaves fall.
Oh shit, he’s going to make me cry. He’s sprinkled some magic dust, the way he used to when I would dance and twirl in the woods for him.
I sniff hard, which isn’t remotely Prima Ballerina like, and realize I’ve missed my first two steps. Damn. I get my head in the game and start the dance.
I dance like I’ve never danced before. Every single move, every tiny nuance, is all for Bohdan.
When I’m finished, it’s not the rapturous applause of the crowd, the standing ovation, or the flowers thrown onto the stage that matter to me. It’s Bohdan’s open arms as I run to him, and he holds me close.
“Come home,” he says.
Two such simple words, but they mean everything to me.
“Yes,” I answer. “I’ll come home.”
He kisses me and the crowd are roaring for an encore, but I don’t care. I’m right where I need to be.
I’m home.
Epilogue
Bohdan
Corfu
The plans for the school are coming along nicely. Dasha will have room for twenty children, and each intake will be able to stay for six weeks. She’ll run two six-week dance camps. One in the spring from May to mid-June. The second from September to mid-October. She doesn’t want to run the schools in the height of the summer heat. Even with air conditioning, she says getting young children to dance daily in that kind of heat won’t be healthy.
Most days, I still can’t believe she’s here. Most days, I still can’t believe I am either. Mere months ago, I was beating people up on the regular for K and plotting with Vasily. Now, I’m spending my days in the sunshine, helping Dasha build her dream, and helping Andrius build something new.
The best bit, though, is that where Dasha and I are building our house, there’s land to grow food and keep chickens. K jokingly calls me The Farmer now. I don’t give a shit. There’s no more honest days’ work than growing your own food. I’ve got a ton of books on small holdings, and I’m looking into it. Even better, the land we’ve bought has an old olive grove on it, and there’s a local olive oil producing factory. I’m going to bottle our own oil.
Dasha’s mother is living in St. Petersburg now, thanks in part to Ilya, who has hooked her up with a lot of old society dears. She thinks she is someone important there. I don’t give a shit so long as she’s not in my hair. I’ll never forgive her for what she did. I’ll always welcome her here cordially, for Dasha, but forgiveness? Not on the cards.
She’s fucking lucky I love Dasha the way I do because the last person who betrayed me in half the way she did, I broke their legs.
Dasha knows it all. I told her. I was worried she had some sort of rosy picture of who I was, and I wanted us to move forward being totally honest, so I told her. I explained that I was basically a fixer for K and that it entailed me using violence to protect his, and my, interests. She took it surprisingly well. She asked me if I’d be doing any fixing moving forward, and I told her other than the wonky shelves in the house we were staying in, no.
She’d laughed and said okay, and that was that.
It still all feels too good to be true.
She’s out walking with Mr. Bojangles while I finish up some work on my portfolio. I’ve also been asked by K to look at some of his investments, and Cassie asked me yesterday if I’d start investing a portion of her wage for her.
K is paying Cassie three hundred thousand euros a year to run the office. Now, call me stupid, but I’m pretty sure that’s not an office manager’s salary. When I causally mentioned it to K, he said he wanted Cassie to be financially independent, and with that wage, she could save, seeing as she has no outgoings. Within a few years she’ll have enough money to do what she wants.
It surprised me. K’s a control freak, and I thought he’d have wanted to ensure she relied on him financially. I kind of put that out there. He told me that he knows she’ll stay, and then he smiled a dark smile and told me she relied on him. Needed him, but he didn’t want her to need him financially. He wanted her independent in that sense at least. He also added that with the life he’s led, who knows what might happen to him in the future, and if anyone ever got to him, he wants Cassie to have enough of her own money, in her own name, to start over. So now, Cassie has a stupidly high wage, and no outgoings, and I’m going to build her a portfolio.
I don’t know how Violet and Andrius organize that side of things, but he’s clever and shrewd himself when it comes to investing. He’s got a lot of money in property. Now he’s building this new venture, and it should make us all extremely well off, even though that’s not his motivation behind it.
I stretch and crick my neck side to side. Glancing out the window, I see the sun high in the sky and decide to go look for Dasha.
I find her in a clearing in the woods, dancing. The sun is dappled through the trees, and Mr. Bojangles is dancing around under her feet, yapping. The scene is pure magic.
Not wanting to disturb her, I don’t speak; instead, I stand there watching as she finishes the dance. She has headphones in, and when she does a final turn and sees me, she starts.
Hand on her chest, she narrows her eyes. “Don’t sneak up on me.”
I laugh. “I didn’t sneak up. I walked up, no sneaking at all, and then stayed here watching you. You’re magnificent when you dance,” I tell her as I go in for a kiss.
She wraps her arms around my neck and tilts her face to me. “Only when I dance?”
I smile. “Okay, all the time, but particularly when you dance.”
“Right answer,” she tells me with a soft laugh. “Right answer, Bohdan.”
This time when she says Bohdan, unlike in Paris all those weeks ago, my name falls from her lips in shades of gold and yellow. Warm, happy colors.
Wanting to be near her, I take her hand in mine. “Walk with me,” I say.
Her divorce lawyer called this morning, and she told me he says that Jasper is going to give her what she wants. Neither Dasha nor her lawyer know that Jasper was found at Paris airport waiting for a flight to Athens. Found by a man I hired to watch him and keep tabs on him. I know the bastard was coming here to come after Dasha. To do what I don’t know but I wasn’t taking the risk. My man followed him into the toilets, smacked him around a little, and threatened him with death if he boarded the plane. He also threatened him with exposure for some of the shady shit he’s done and told him in future Jasper better be squeaky clean, or there’d be reprisals. One of those threats worked and Dasha has her offer.
She doesn’t know that Jasper was coming after her, but Dasha knows I’ve had him threatened if he does the same thing to any other young women.
I think she’s going too easy on him and giving him far too much, but she says she wants him out of her life. Gone. Exorcised.
I can exorcise him for her, and I’ve told her as much, but she says she’d spend years terrified I’d go to prison for harming him. I decided not to tell her quite how many people I’ve harmed in the past. There’s a limit to being truthful with her, and that limit is when it is going to cause her sleepless nights.