Page 69 of The Brutal Arrangement

On my way back up to my apartment, I slowed down at Saul coming the opposite way down the hall.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I smirked, annoyed that I was clearly wearing my expressions like this. I didn’t need the third degree from him, not now. But when he furrowed his brow and seemed more concerned than anything else, I knew he was only acting out of love to ask me that. He wasn’t pestering.

“Lucy told me why she agreed to marry me,” I said.

He motioned for me to walk with him. “That sounds like a development.”

I nodded, joining him as we strolled toward the back of the house. I filled him in on what she’d told me, leaving nothing out. He wasn’t surprised that she had gone along with this plan for the sake of her mother, someone she clearly cared about greatly. While he listened, he didn’t interrupt with more questions and throw me off track.

Once I’d told him all of it, including that I’d asked John to confirm all that she’d told me, the man himself came looking for us on the back screened-in patio.

“That was fast,” Saul quipped.

John nodded. “It wasn’t hard to find at all.” He took a seat under my prompting and reported what he’d found.

“Bethany Garrent, her maiden name, has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. She’s been in a nursing home for years now, and all the financial agreements and contracts have all been signed by Lucy. She’s made payments when she can, it seems, until about a month ago.”

“No one’s paid anything since she came here?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. Nothing paid into anything. Now here’s what’s interesting. I tracked back on the banking systems and one deposit was attempted. It came from a different source but wasn’t approved after it was placed. It seems like that was Katerina’s attempt to pay the bills.”

I glanced at Saul, who also had his brows raised, like I did.

Hmm.

John wasn’t done. “I asked around with neutral parties who sometimes tell us things from the Kozlov end. It seems that Anton has no clue what Katerina was doing. It looks like he wasn’t aware of her asking Lucy to come here, or that she was making payments. This stop on the payment seemed like an automatic redaction.”

“So Anton thinks that Katerina is here?” Saul asked.

John shrugged. “According to what I’ve heard, Anton’s been in Greece since the day of the wedding.”

“Wait.” I furrowed my brow, doing the math. “He thinks he just sent Katerina here and then left?”

John nodded. “It appears that way. Maybe he figured business was settled and he’d be out of town while any drama followed.”

“That wouldn’t make sense if he wanted Katerina to come here as a spy,” Saul said.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “He could be playing a long game and waiting.”

We wrapped up the conversation with more details about other facilities Bethany could be moved to. That state-run place looked terrible, not anywhere I’d want one of my loved ones to be.

Then again, Lucy wasn’t my loved one. She was my wife, but I refused to give too much attention to how much deeper I was coming to care for her. How much more I wanted to open myself up to caring for her outside of the bedroom.

I wasn’t familiar with letting my emotions seep in like this. I couldn’t let my emotions, especially vulnerable ones like love, control me. All my life, I’d gotten used to shutting my emotions down—both good ones and bad ones. My mother’s betrayal messed me up something fierce, and it wasn’t difficult to see how I might have developed a fear of being happy in case I’d lose the source of that happiness.

Relying on this mask was how I could be so angry like a demon or a beast in the torture rooms. When I refrained from letting myselffeeltoo much, I could be the cold killer my family needed me to be for the security of the Ivanov name.

But it was also the means by which I could be oblivious to the process of letting love in.

Of opening myself up to learn my wife and how much better she could improve my life.

27

LUCY

Isoaked in that tub until my fingers were wrinkled. I sat there in the water so long that it went cold. Numbness had already seeped through me from the news of my mom being moved into a crappy facility, though, so it wasn’t as if I suffered from the cooling bath.

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