Page 14 of One Last Shot

What the actual hell is happening right now?

Aleksandr is at her feet in half a second, kneeling in front of her so they are face-to-face. “Remember how we talked about you going to bed early tonight?” he asks. His voice is soothing, not reprimanding like I’d have expected.

He has a freaking daughter?

“But I heard yelling,” she says.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to be so loud.”

“But,Dyadya,” the little girl—his niece, I assume, since she just called him Uncle—says. Then she looks at me, lowers her voice, and says to him, “She’s even more beautiful than you said.”

The air is sucked from my lungs—maybe from the whole room, based on how I can’t seem to catch a breath. Aleksandr told his niece I was beautiful?

He glances over his shoulder at me for a fraction of a second, then back to his niece. “Okay, time to get you back to bed.”

“I want Petra to put me to bed.” She looks directly at me.How does she know my name? They’ve obviously talked about me, but why? Does she know we’re married, too?

“How about I just put you to bed, Stella?” he says, standing.

“I’ll do it.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. I don’t even know what makes me offer. But I need a moment away from him to collect my thoughts, and maybe a conversation with Stella will help me figure out what’s going on here. She seems more likely to tell me the truth than Aleksandr.

She bounces on the balls of her feet, a beautiful and victorious smile spreading across her lips. Before Aleksandr can express any objection, she rushes over to me and takes my hand in her little one, pulling me toward the door.

I’m led back through the living room to the entryway, then down a long hallway. Her room is the first one on the left, and when we enter and I see the big windows out to the terrace, I realize that her bedroom probably shares a wall with the sitting room we were in.

She climbs in her bed, then pulls the covers up and pats the space next to her. I’ve never spent time around a child this age before. Holding my friend Lauren’s twin daughters, who aren’t even one yet, is the only experience I have with children.

I sit on her bed next to her, and she immediately grabs my hand in both of hers, holding it to her chest. “Dyadyasaid we need you to help us.”

I have no idea what she is talking about. This must be Nikolai’s daughter, but why is she here in Aleksandr’s apartment in a bedroom clearly designed for her? Does she stay with him sometimes? Does this mean Nikolai lives in New York too?

“Tell me how I can help,” I say, because I don’t know what else I can do.

“Dada said maybe you can help him adopt me.”

I give her a small smile, hoping it hides the way my entire body is reacting to these two pieces of information—the fact that she is usingDyadya, which means uncle in Russian, interchangeably with Dada, and the fact that he is trying to adopt her, which means something has happened to Nikolai. My heart breaks for her in this moment, so young and apparently orphaned.

This also means Aleksandr is being even less honest with me than I initially thought and he’s somehow put Niko’s daughter in the middle of this, which infuriates me.

I give her little hands, which fit perfectly in my palm, a squeeze. “I need to talk to your uncle about all this.”

She sits up quickly and wraps her hands around my waist and presses her head into my chest as she squeezes me into a hug. “Thank you!”

I don’t know what to do, so I pat her back in response. When she lies back down I tell her, “Okay, time for bed, for real. Should I turn out this light?” I nod toward the pink lamp on the dresser next to her bed.

“Yes. I have a special nightlight that keeps all the bad dreams away, so I don’t need the light on anymore.”

A knife twists in my stomach. What has happened to her that’s causing bad dreams? What happened to her parents?

I turn off the light and brush my palm across her forehead as I whisper goodnight.When I shut her bedroom door behind me, I stand in the hallways with my back to the wall and rest my head against it as I stare up at the high ceiling.

What have I gotten myself into?

There’s movement in the corner of my eye, and I turn my head to see Sasha standing in the entryway. His face is anguished, like the pain is seeping out through cracks in his tough exterior. I’ve seen this look once before, when Mama and Viktor were in a fatal car accident. The day he climbed up into my treehouse to comfort me through his own pain. We’d cried together that night, and it was the beginning of the three years where he was my best friend.

It’s easier than I would have imagined to put the anger and resentment aside in the face of his unimaginable loss. I don’t know exactly what he’s been through, but I can see in his eyes that he needs me like I once needed him.

My steps are quick and sure as I rush down the hall to him. I wrap him in my arms, and though his sharp intake of breath alerts me to his surprise, he wraps his thick arms around me in response. We stand there for a minute until he says, “What did she tell you?” His cheek moves against the top of my head as his words drift down my hair.

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