Page 66 of Emerald

“Yes, and I was good. It was always my escape plan to get out of Russia. I had high hopes in coming to America and creating a new life for myself away from my family’s world.”

“You never wanted to be in the Bratva?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Never.” I let out a small huff. “Ironic isn’t it that the one thing I never wanted for myself has turned into my entire world? Guess sometimes you can’t escape who you were always meant to be.”

“You can’t think you were meant for this life, Ellie?” he asks.

“Doesn’t matter. I have no choice now.”

We continue running in silence.

“May I ask how you ended up where you are or is that on a need-to-know basis?” he asks.

I slow my steps, stop for a moment, and stare out over the turquoise water. “I thought we had made it. That all our dreams were coming true when we were offered a full-ride scholarship to New York to study at Julliard to become ballerinas.”

“We?” he questions me.

“Anna and I.” His brows pull together and I can see on his face he is trying to work out if he has heard me talk about Annabefore. I haven’t. It’s like a piece of my heart is missing. “Anna was like a sister to me. We did everything together ever since we were born. When we got the scholarship, we thought it was the start of a new life, a safe one, away from the world we lived in, that was controlled by the Bratva. What we didn’t know was the scholarship was a ruse by the government to get us out of Russia and away from our families so they could blackmail us into helping them. We didn’t know that we were never going to get a chance to live out our dreams. My life was always destined to be this.”

“You believe it was a setup?” he questions.

“I don’t have to believe it was. They told me when they took us. That was the first time I had died. They made our families believe we had drowned in the ocean at a college party.” Nash looks at me. “They took us to some underground base and separated us for days to disorientate us. We were then given an impossible choice to either become honey traps for the government or watch them put our families and us behind bars for the rest of our lives. We took what we thought was the right option at eighteen. If I could go back in time, I’d choose jail over this life.”

“You’d choose being locked up behind bars?” he asks, shocked over my confession.

“This life has bars, too, they’re just invisible.” We both remain silent as we stare out over the ocean.

“You spoke about Anna in the past tense, did something happen to her?” Nash asks carefully.

“I don’t know what happened to her.”

His brows crease together.

“When was the last time you saw Anna, then?”

“She went on our last training mission and never came home. I have no idea what happened other than she was sent deepundercover and that it was on a need-to-know basis where she was,” I explain.

“And over the years you never ran into her? Never heard about her?”

“Nothing. She vanished. I’ve searched every last bit of Europe, and she’s not there. I don’t think she’s in the States. She could be in Asia or maybe South America, that wasn’t my area of expertise.”

“But you speak Spanish fluently.”

“I was based in Spain for a bit, and I like languages. I can speak French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Russian also. It comes in handy,” I say with a shrug.

“Do you think she could be here? Is that why you are pushing hard to get inside?” Nash asks.

“No. I’m pushing to find Pearl. I owe her, her freedom. All those years of being on the inside, I could have done something to help her, and I didn’t.”

“You said you didn’t know, though?”

“I didn’t. I honestly thought they were like me, but finding out the true horrors those women went through, I can’t live with that. I will hunt down every last jewel and make sure they get the future they deserve.”

Nash remains silent for a couple of moments, kicking the sand beneath his feet. “I get it,” he says quietly as we start to jog again, but this time, we continue in silence.

25

NASH

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