“You don’t believe it, though?”
“He admitted to Nila he’d killed my mother. It’s common knowledge in the community now.” He swallowed visibly and looked down at the floor. “But even before that, I knew he’d murdered her. It’s my fault he found out about Nila in the first place.”
She wasn’t sure how to react. A part of her wanted to comfort him and ease the guilt she saw plainly in his body language. Another part wanted to throw questions at him. Instead, she kept working on dinner, giving him room to tell his story in his own time.
“I was visiting my parents in their home in Russia,” he said. “I was…out of sorts. My mother and I were always very close. I look a lot like her, which is unusual for tigers. Most of the time, sons resemble their fathers, daughters their mothers. There’s a little mixing but for the most part, tigers bear the strongest resemblance to the parent of the same sex. My father was very Russian looking, with blond hair and blue eyes.” He gestured at his face. “There’s very little of him in me.”
She couldn’t help but say, “I’m glad to hear it since he murdered your mother and tried to murder your sister.”
He tilted his head in acknowledgement of the point. “At any rate, the fact that his oldest son didn’t really look like him was always an issue between us. It tainted our relationship. He…didn’t like me as much as my brothers—all of whom look more like him than I do. Anyway, because my father and I had a cold and distant relationship, my mother tried to make up for it by loving me more. We were very close.”
“Oh, Vlad. Her murder must have really torn you up.” Rose couldn’t imagine losing her own beloved parents yet. She dreaded the day and was kind of hoping they’d live into their hundreds so she wouldn’t have to deal with it for a long time.
“Worse because it was my fault.”
“How?”
“On that particular trip to Russia, my mother pestered me until I admitted what was bothering me—that after four years, I still couldn’t get over you. I’d tried. I’d even done a few Mate Runs right after, thinking if I got a tiger shifter mate I’d be able to stop loving you.”
She kept her gaze on the vegetables she was chopping, trying not to feel hurt at that admission, but it still hit her in the chest like a punch. He’d left her and then gone looking for another woman, someone he could have children with. The thought actually brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them away so he wouldn’t see.
“I didn’t put much effort into the Runs. I never caught a female and really didn’t try. After a year of pretending, I stopped running. That pissed my father off. I’m his oldest and he expected me to get a mate and have children. He actually thought all his sons would get mates, which is ridiculous. That never happens. There just aren’t enough tigresses.”
He waved off the slight change in direction and went back to the topic. “When I told my mother I was still hung up on you, even though you’d cheated on me, and I was considering trying to get back together with you, she encouraged me. She said I should trust my instincts, and then she admitted that maybe it was possible for your baby to be mine.”
“She told you?”
“We both thought my father was out of the house and that we had complete privacy. We would have been able to feel him if he was in the house, or any other tiger for that matter, so she felt safe. Up until this point, the only tiger who knew about Nila was Elizaveta. My mom went to her when she found out she was pregnant, and Elizaveta helped her keep the secret.”
“Why did it have to be a secret?”
“Because of tigers like my father, my mother was terrified her child would be killed, terrified Nila’s father, Leo, would be killed, and Elizaveta wasn’t ready to make knowledge of hybrids public yet. She was still researching and didn’t want to get my people’s hopes up or start a war against hybrids. Especially if Nila’s conception turned out to be a fluke and not something we could duplicate. Elizaveta wanted time. My mother wanted Nila safe. So they kept the pregnancy a secret and when Nila was born, they left her with her father. My mother went back to the Mate Run to get a tiger mate.”
“Why on earth did she marry your father? Given the way he felt about hybrids.”
“She didn’t know about his extreme beliefs until well after their wedding. I asked the same question when she told me about Nila. She was pregnant with their second child—the twins as it turned out—before he showed her any hint of his beliefs. At that stage, she’d fallen in love with him and was happy with their pairing. She thought his ideas were just vague feelings, nothing too extreme, so she stayed with him.”
“When did she learn how…deeply he held the belief that hybrids were a bad thing?”
“I was about fourteen and my father announced to a group of powerful tigers that he’d kill any hybrids he found. That’s when the true depths of his fanaticism started to show. She stayed with him at that point to protect Nila. She didn’t want him getting even a hint that she disagreed, because she was afraid he’d try to find out why. My father is…was very smart and cunning. I’m still surprised she kept her secret as long as she did. Just goes to show how smart she was.”
He paused and Rose watched a range of emotions move through his expression, most of which were difficult for her to see—a lot of pain and bleakness.
He sucked in a breath and continued. “Anyway, we had this long talk where she admitted all this history to me, swore me to secrecy, but said I should consider going to you and trying to reconcile because it was entirely possible your baby was my child. I was both thrilled and devastated. I went for a run to consider it all.”
He gripped the counter, and Rose saw his knuckles go white. She heard the granite crunch and gasped. “Vlad?”
He released his hold and flexed his fingers. “Sorry. This…” He shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “When I got back, I could tell my father was home, but I couldn’t feel my mother anymore. I didn’t think that was a big deal until I came into the living room and saw my father standing over my mother with blood on his hands, glaring down at her dead body.”
“
Madre de Dios
.”
“He’d ripped her throat out. Her head was barely still…” He swallowed hard. “And when he saw me, he didn’t show any signs of guilt. He didn’t even hesitate when he said she’d killed herself.”
“How the hell would she have ripped out her own throat?”
“He said she’d slit her throat with a knife—even though there wasn’t one around. He explained the blood on his hands by claiming he’d tried to put pressure on the wound and keep her from bleeding out before her body could heal. But the wound was clearly not from a knife slice, and the blood on his hands was
not
from trying to save her life.”
“What did you do? What did he do?”
“He said we had a problem to solve. My mother had committed a crime—which was why she’d killed herself, out of shame—and it was up to me and my brothers to fix her mistake. When I asked what crime, he said she’d given birth to a half-breed abomination and that disgusting offspring had to die.”
“Oh, my God. Vlad, what did you say? How did he know?”
“Later, after he’d rallied my brothers to his cause, I went through the house, trying to find out how he’d heard us. He was definitely
not
there when we were talking. He had the fucking place bugged. I don’t know why. Paranoid. Or maybe he already suspected my mother of something. Can’t ask him now. Didn’t dare ask him then.”
She flinched a little at his curse and glanced toward the living room. To her relief, Zoe was still asleep. She looked back at him. “Did you go to your authorities?”
“I pretended to be on his side.”
“How could you do that when you knew the truth?”
“He asked me about you, Rose. With my mother’s blood still on his hands, he asked me if your baby could possibly be mine.”
The knife she held clattered onto the granite countertop. She snatched it up and stared at him. “You lied to him to protect us?”
“Of course. Even if Zoe wasn’t mine, I couldn’t risk him thinking she might be.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I knew for a fact you’d had an affair because I’d tracked down the man in one of my ‘grief stricken’ periods. I even told my father I came close to killing the man. Poured enough real emotion into my lie that he believed me.”
“You’re sure?”
“If he hadn’t, he would have sent someone after you and Zoe while he was hunting Nila. Tigers can…sniff out lies. Scent gives away a lot of emotion. But I’ve spent my entire life learning how to hide who I am and what I really feel from my father. I am very good at deception now.”
That comment made her more than a little nervous, but she pushed the worry aside for later. “If he believed you, how did your brothers get suspicious?”
“They found out I was planning a trip to see you and with that trip coming only five months after we discovered Nila… It’s not hard to see why they might have gotten suspicious. I tried to keep my plans to myself, but obviously, I’m not the only one spying on my siblings.”
“You have a very dysfunctional family, Vlad.”
He snorted.
She started to say more, but noise from the living room stopped her.
“Mommy?”
“In the kitchen, baby.” To Vlad, she said, “We’ll have to finish this later.”
“Not much more to tell, just thought you should know before our trip.”
Zoe wandered into the room then and they switched subjects, but the conversation had left Rose with many more questions. Not the least of which was…if Vlad could lie so well he could fool his own father, would she ever know if he was lying to her? Her trust was already tentative and shaky at best. How could she trust him if she couldn’t believe anything he told her? All that talk of a house in Alaska, a ring hunt, his intentions to propose, had any of that been true or just a lie to make her feel better about their relationship?
And would she ever know the truth?
Chapter Thirteen
Rose was putting dinner on the table when Alexis slammed into the cabin. She looked flushed and anxious.
“Vlad, your brothers found out about this place. They never left Arizona, and they’re on their way here right now. We need to leave tonight.”
Vlad held up his phone. “Just got the word.”
“What? How?” Rose asked. “It’s impossible. This cabin isn’t linked to my family at all except through a friend.”
“Fuck,” Vlad muttered.
“No cursing,” Zoe corrected him.
He gave her a little smile. “Sorry.” To Rose, he said, “They’ve been searching. They must have come across the link and are heading here to check it out. Thought they were checking
my
homes first after Yuri booked the flight to Alaska.”
Unfortunately, it looked like the flight was a diversion. “What now?” Rose asked.
“If they found this cabin, they know more than I thought they could so soon. They likely know about our flights tomorrow,” Vlad said.
“Does that mean it’s not safe to go anymore? Not that it was safe anyway.”
“Still the best way to protect you and Zoe is to get you in front of the elders,” Alexis said. “But we’re going to have to get there by a different route. Can’t afford to follow a plan the Dubrovskys might know about.”
“Mommy, what wrong? Thought we were still on vacation?”
“We are, baby, but we have to change our plans a bit. You sit down and eat. I’ll go get our bags.”
Alexis sat with Zoe and helped her put together a plate, while Rose hurried to the bedroom. Vlad followed.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked as she pushed the rest of her and Zoe’s gear into their mostly packed bags.
“Drive to Colorado and take a flight from there.”
“Why Colorado?”
“Not tiger territory. There’s only one tiger in the entire state and he’s a Chernikov.” He frowned. “Actually make that two tigers, now that he’s got a mate.”
“Chernikov? Related to Elizaveta?”
“Her grandson. He’s one of the men Alexis considers a brother. It’s his youngest brother who’s engaged to Nila.”
“Ah, so he’s not a threat. Why no other tigers there?”
“The state’s traditionally werewolf territory.”
“Werewolves? Are we going to run into werewolves?”
“No, no. It just means we won’t accidentally run into any tigers, and my brothers won’t have extensive resources there—no reason to.”
“How about your resources there?” She went to the gun cabinet to get her father’s rifle. She held it a moment, considering. She couldn’t take it on the flight and she didn’t want to abandon it. She should leave it here so her father could collect it.
“Skimpy, too,” Vlad answered her question.
“Can we get a last minute flight? That’s gonna cost a fortune.” She locked the gun back in the cabinet. She was going to feel a little naked driving all the way to Colorado without it. After seeing how fast Zoe and Vlad could move, she wanted more than her own fighting skills if they had to face any other shifters along the way.
“Money isn’t the problem,” Vlad said. “Space on a flight might be. And my brothers waiting at Yeager is a definite problem.”
“They’re coming here. They can’t be in two places at once.”
“There are three of them. They split up before, they’ll do that again. And if they think Zoe is a hybrid, they won’t be working alone to get to us before we reach the compound.”
“So we fly in somewhere else and drive a little farther than planned.”
He smiled. “My thoughts exactly. We’ll take whatever we can get that’s close but not directly there.”
“We still have time to pick up the guns from my father’s friend?”
“We’ll make time.”
She nodded, but a slight tremor shook her shoulders. “That cabin in Alaska sounds good about now.”
“Except my brothers know about it.” He pulled her into his arms. “We’ll take care of this. Zoe will be okay. I promise.”
She kissed him, quick and hard, then finished getting her bags together. By the time they were done, Zoe was halfway through her dinner. Rose was too worried to eat, but she forced down a little to keep up her energy and cleaned up as Alexis and Vlad loaded their gear into the cars.