Chapter 290: I hate you

Somewhere in the middle of the folder, a single sheet turned beneath his hand. It looked just like the rest, the same paper, same ink. Nobody noticed it. A quiet hand had slipped it in between the last two, and it had waited there all night.

He signed it without looking up. When it was done, the lawyer gathered the papers. He did it with great care. He squared the pages, and closed the folders, and slid them back into his case. He snapped the lock. Then he turned to Helena and gave her a very small nod.

It is done, the nod said. She did not smile. She did not move. She only inclined her head by an inch.

He bowed once more and walked to the door. The guards in the hall opened it for him. He went out without looking back. His footsteps faded down the stairs, small and tidy, and then only silence.

Helena let out a deep breath.

It came out of her slowly, from somewhere very low and very old. It was a breath she had been holding for twenty years. Her shoulders dropped. Her eyes closed. For a moment she sat perfectly still, with her hands on her knees, and she felt something huge and heavy slide off her back and fall away.

Now I am free.

The houses. The warehouses. The accounts. Every dark thing in the Don’s life had gone back where it belonged, into his own name, on his own signature. She had no part in any of it anymore. She would never have to answer for a single stone.

She did not have to pretend. She did not have to pretend with this man ever again. She stood up. She crossed the room, and she did something she had not done in years. She walked to the door and turned the key.

The lock clicked. It was a small sound, but it rang like a bell. On the bed, the Don blinked. "Helena?"

She turned around and leaned back against the door.

Her face had changed. The soft, worried wife was gone. What stood there was tall and cold and perfectly still, with eyes like winter glass. She folded her arms and looked at him.

"You know," she said, "I have wanted this moment for so long."

"What..."

"To tell you how much I hate you." The drowsiness was fading from his face. It was going slowly, like fog lifting off a river. His eyes cleared. He pushed himself up against the pillows. He stared at her.

"Helena," he said.

"I remember everything." She did not raise her voice. She spoke quietly and slowly, and every word fell like a stone. The guards outside the door could not have heard her not a sound in the hall.

"Everything, Konstantin. I never forgot a single thing." He did not move.

"I remember how you came into our home. How you shot my husband in front of me." Her voice did not shake. "How you took my baby girl out of my arms. How you forced me to love you."

His mouth opened.

"I remember the doctors. The white room. The needles." She took a step toward the bed. "You took me to them to wipe out my memories, and they tried. They tried for months. And I let them think it worked." A thin smile touched her lips. "I pretended. For years. So that you would stop."

"Helena..."

"And ever since then, I have been planning my revenge." The room was very quiet.

"And you hurt my baby girl." Now, at last, her voice cracked, just once, like ice under a boot. "You made her your test subject. Your little experiment. You looked at my daughter and saw a thing to be used." Her hands closed into fists. "How dare you."

The Don said nothing for a long time. He lay against the pillows with his bandaged arm across his chest, and he looked at her. He was pale. His lips were gray. His eyes were very bright, and they did not leave her face.

When he spoke, his voice was soft and tired. "I knew you would remember someday." Helena did not move.

"I think I always knew." He gave a small, strange smile. "I told myself I did not. I told myself it was a miracle. But I knew." He moved his head slowly on the pillow. "I am an old man, Helena. I can tell when something is too good to be true."

"Then why..."

"Because I did love you." She flinched, as if he had hit her.

"I did, darling. I do." His eyes were wet. "I loved you from the very first day I saw you. In my father’s garden, in a yellow dress, with your hair coming down." His voice shook. "I saw you first. I did. I looked across that lawn, and I thought, there she is."

His hand moved on the sheet. "And yet it was my brother who got you." Helena stared at him.

His eyes closed. He was very pale now, almost gray, and his breath came short. The sweat stood on his forehead in tiny beads. He did not look like a king. He looked like what he was, an old man who had waited all his life for something that was never his.

"Because he was a good man," Helena said. Her voice was very low. It shook, just once, and she steadied it.

"He was a good man, Konstantin. Nothing like you."

The Don did not argue. He lay against the pillows with his eyes half closed, and the light from the window fell across his gray face. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the soft tick of the clock on the wall.

"True," he said at last. "He was a good man. I was the evil one." He said it plainly, the way a man reads out a price.

"I knew it even as a boy. He was the one our mother smiled at. He was the one who gave his coat to the gardener’s son. And I was the one who counted the silver." A faint, crooked smile moved on his mouth.

"But I could lose anything, Helena. My family money. My brother. Our parents. All of it. I did lose all of it." His eyes opened and found her. "But never you. I could not let him take you the way he took everything else."

"I was never a thing to be taken."

"No. You were not." He swallowed. It seemed to hurt him.

"I love you," he said. "And so I loved Katalia. She was just like you. How could I not?" His voice dropped. "She had a heart condition, just like my brother. The same one. I saw the papers, and I knew. I wanted to save her. I never wanted to make her a test rat."