Chapter XIII

Three years later

Brynn Wydd, Wales

Heidi and Alex sat at the wooden kitchen table of the cottage, waiting for the phone to ring.

It was an unseasonably chilly September evening.

Although Heidi no longer lived at the cottage, but in the nearby village with her newlywed husband Philip, she decided to wait there that night with Alex.

It was the least she could do.

"What do you think Charlotte is going to do?" Heidi asked her.

Alex shook her head, eyes staring into space. "I don't know. I'm not sure."

Only a few hours before, Alex had returned from her latest assignment in Rome, and the moment she stepped into the cottage where Heidi had been staying, while Alex was away to look after Max, she had known something was terribly wrong.

It was one of the few times she had seen Alex lose her cool. She'd been visibly distraught.

"What's wrong?" Heidi had asked her then, putting a careful hand on her friend's shoulder.

Alex had looked at her, ashamed. "For the first time…I couldn't do it, Heidi. I couldn't kill him. He's a monster. He's killed dozens of people with a lethal nerve gas. But he has a son. And I saw him. He's the same age as Max…"

Heidi had taken Alex into her arms then and comforted her, but now as they sat at the table waiting, she wondered what the consequences of her failure would be. Whether it could mean the end of life as they had known it for the past six years.

"I'm sure you're not the first person who has failed an assignment, no?" Heidi suggested.

"Apparently there was an agent once…but he died trying," Alex told her.

"You can make up something, then. Some reason why it couldn't be done."

Alex shook her head, "Charlotte is not stupid. I'm not sure I can pull off lying to her. If she thinks I can't do this anymore…then she has no more use for me. And if she no longer needs me, I'm as good as dead. And where does that leave Max?"

Heidi watched as Alex kept staring into space, her earlier distress was now replaced with a frightening calm.

"Stop it. You're being paranoid. You're much too valuable for Charlotte to give up on you after one failure. You don't think she'll…." Heidi couldn't finish her sentence. She was interrupted by Max's arrival.

One of his school friend's parents had driven him home after taking him to a local soccer game and he'd come running through the door.

"Mum, you're back!"

He ran towards Alex, put his arms around her, and kissed her. He had such a fierce and unabashed love for Alex; Heidi loved observing them together.

"Did you miss me?" he asked her.

Alex smiled as she pulled him close. "Miss you? Why would I miss you, there's lots of little boys in Rome."

"Ah, Mum," he groaned.

"How was the soccer game?" she asked managing to pull him onto her lap. It took effort, now that he was getting almost too big to pick up.

Max's eyes lit up at the question, "Oh it was brilliant, Mum. You should've been there. Roger Bedford he scored the winning goal in the last few minutes of the game. His parents were so excited they were jumping up and down." He grinned as he went on, "And then Roger's dad almost fell over backwards on the bench."

"So you won then?"

"Of course, 5-4. Roger's mum bought us all ice creams afterwards."

"That was nice of her."

"She told me to say hello to you. There's another game on Sunday, are you going to come this time?"

"I…sure…" Alex was about to add something else when she heard the phone ring.

Heidi picked it up.

"It looks like I may have to leave again for a bit tonight," Alex told Max, "If you go upstairs and get ready for bed, I'll try to be back before you're asleep, ok?"

"Will you tell me about your trip then?" Heidi knew he loved it when Alex told him about the strange and far away places she visited, and most of all he loved it when she promised to take him, one day, to the ones she liked the most.

"If it's not too late I will." Alex kissed him on the forehead, "Love you."

He jumped off her lap and ran up the stairs, dragging his school sac behind him.

Heidi's expression was sombre after Max left. "It's Charlotte. She said she wants to see you."

Pine Valley Inn, Pine Valley, PA

Dimitri held the ring up against the light coming in through the restaurant window, in order to bring out its elusive blue hue, and to show it off to Bianca.

"Aha, I can see it now," she observed, her eyes squinting against the light, "A Marick Diamond, of course! It's absolutely beautiful."

"Like your mother and you," Dimitri added.

Bianca smiled at the compliment. "So you're finally going to do it, Uncle Dimitri? You're going to ask Mom to marry you?"

He nodded, "Tonight at Wildwind, before we have dinner. But I wanted to tell you first because I wanted to have your blessing."

"Oh Dimitri, you know I adore you, and you've made my mom very happy over the past six years. This will be the icing on the cake for her."

"I know it's taken me a very long time to ask her."

Bianca looked at him with her warm, gentle eyes, "You don't have to explain that to me Dimitri. I know it's because you loved Alex so much. That only makes me love you more."

Dimitri kissed her on the cheek, "Thank you for saying that, and for your blessing and most of all, thank you for being a part of my life."

Bianca blushed. Even now, as she was on the edge of womanhood, she still had a natural shyness that, Dimitri thought, only heightened her charm.

"Ok, enough sweet talk," she told him "I'm starving, let's order."

Dimitri picked up the menu, "Good idea."

Brynn Wydd, Wales

Charlotte Devane's face was a mix of fury and disgust. She pounded her fist down hard on her desk, "Stop lying to me!" she told Alex, "If you don't start telling the truth, I will make you regret it."

Alex had spent the last hour listening to Charlotte's questions, mixed with occasional outbursts of livid anger, as she tried to make sense of what happened in Rome.

'Tried to pry it out of me…' Alex thought.

"I've been telling you the truth, over and over again," Alex was adamantly sticking to her story. Maybe, just maybe, Charlotte would buy it. "I told you, he was too heavily guarded. The opportunity for me to take him down simply didn't present itself."

Charlotte was equally adamant about unveiling her lie. "You didn't shoot him because you froze. You realized he had a wife and child and you couldn't do it, isn't that right, Sasha? You're the same spineless, gutless woman you were before you started working for me! And if you can't do this anymore, what good are you to me?"

Alex shook her head, knowing that Charlotte was waiting for her to break down and admit the truth. "If I had shot him and failed to kill him, I would have risked exposing not just myself but you and your entire organization. I didn't think it was a risk worth taking."

"That," Charlotte said, pointing an accusatory finger at Alex, "was not your decision to make. Your failure cost me an immense financial loss, and I've forever lost the trust of those who hired my services for this assignment. Worst of all, your single-handed failure marred the impeccable reputation of Brynn Wydd. That's something that will take years to restore."

It had been a long day since she left Rome that morning and Alex was hoping to finally put an end to this interrogation, "Look, I can't change what happened, or in this case, what didn't happen. But I came back to you in good faith and I've told you the truth, can you not even give me the damn benefit of the doubt after all I've done for you these past six years?"

Charlotte laughed out loud. " 'Came back to me in good faith'? You make me laugh Sasha. The only reason you came back at all was because your little brat is here and because Dimitri is still alive for me to make good on my threat. You failed because you're weak-willed and incompetent. You always have been and always will be. Your father used to say it was God's way of punishing me for taking you away from your real parents and sister. Instead of getting Anna, I ended up with you, the one who wanted to read and play doctor. What a cruel joke indeed."

Charlotte's bitter words stung Alex, even though she was convinced she'd long been immune to her mother's hatred. "If you get rid of me, you lose one of your best agents," she said finally, playing her last card. "It will take you years to find someone with my research background. Someone who can blend into all the scientific symposiums and conferences you've had me weasel into…"

Charlotte slumped down in her seat, and for the first time that night, Alex thought she saw a sign of weariness in her mother. "I'll tell you what Sasha. Euan has an assignment in Warsaw next week. I'm going to pull him from his assignment and put you in his place."

"What?" Alex stood up in shock, "A week? You can't be serious, there's no way I can prepare for an assignment in one week. You're setting me up for a fall!"

Charlotte looked at her with renewed disgust at her lack of gratitude, "What I'm doing is giving you another chance to prove yourself, as a sign of my 'good faith in you'. It's more than I would have done six years ago."

"But there's no way I can familiarize myself with my target in a week!"

Charlotte didn't let her finish, "Get out. I'm tired of looking at you, it's making me ill."

"I need more time than that…"

"I said 'Get out!'"

Alex glared at Charlotte, before turning her back and leaving.

As soon as she left, Charlotte picked up the phone to call Justin Black. "I want you to set up a surveillance team on Alexandra immediately. I don't trust her anymore."

When she returned to the cottage, Heidi was still there, waiting for her.

"Thanks for staying with Max. Is he asleep?" she asked.

Heidi nodded, "He is. He tried hard to stay awake but he was so tired. How did it go with Charlotte?"

Alex sat down on the sofa, exhausted. The meeting with Charlotte had left her with a pounding headache. "She wants to send me on another assignment next week."

"Well, that's good news, isn't it? It means she still trusts you, doesn't it?"

Alex shook her head, "No, she knows I can't do this anymore. There's no way I can do an assignment in a week's notice. She is setting me up to fail. She probably even has a back up agent in place"

Heidi was becoming upset, "Then prove her wrong."

Alex looked at her sadly, "No. I think it's a sign Heidi…that it has to end. No more killing and justifying it by saying I'm doing it to save Max and Dimitri. I'm a doctor, Heidi. I took an oath to save lives and all I've done in the past few years is take them. It's starting to turn me into a person I no longer recognize, and it has to end. A long time ago, I remember standing on a beach with Edmund and you know what he told me Heidi? He thought my love for Dimitri had killed him, he said 'You're not a healer, you're a death sentence.' If he only knew how correct he was."

Heidi had started to cry, "That's not true…! You had no choice but to do what Charlotte asked. If she no longer needs you, she will kill you!"

Alex felt very calm again; "I have exactly a week to get Max away from here. To get him to safety and to his father in Pine Valley, and to do that I need your help."

Wildwind, Pine Valley, PA

Dimitri looked at Erica's engagement ring once more before putting it back into its box for the final time. Then he glanced at his own wedding band and did something he hadn't done in eight years. He took it off.

For a moment, he felt naked, as though he had removed a part of himself.

"I never thought I'd do that," he told the photograph of Alex that sat on the mantle of the fireplace. "Please don't think this means I love you any less, or that I'll stop thinking of you. It's just that, well, you know Erica, marriage means the world to her. If I continued seeing her without it, it would break her heart, and she doesn't deserve that. She gave me so much hope and then love, since you've been gone. I want to give something back to her. I hope you'll understand. I know it won't be the way it was between us, I don't expect anything ever will be, but I love her now and I pray that that will be enough."

He took the photograph and removed it from the mantle, placing it inside a drawer, along with his wedding band.

When he walked into the hallway towards the door, he saw that, Erica was already there. "Stella let me in, I hope you don't mind." She wore a tiny, black, silk top that was cut low enough to show off most of her bare, tanned back. As always, she looked radiant.

Dimitri kissed her cheek, "Of course not."

"I'm famished, Dimi. Tell me what do you have in store for us tonight? It will be hard to top the garlic escargots wrapped in the phyllo pastry we had to start last week…"

Dimitri paused, catching his breath. "Before dinner, there is something very important I have to ask you." He bent down on his knees and opened the ring box, much to Erica's shock.

"Erica…you've been there for me these past six years. You've loved me unconditionally, even when I wasn't always an easy man to love and in turn, I've grown to love you so very much. Erica, I've asked you this before and I'm asking you again, will you marry me?"

For once Erica Kane was speechless. "I…oh my God…I don't know what to say. This is so completely…unexpected!"

"How about 'yes'?"

Erica's eyes filled with tears, "Why yes, of course! Of course, I'll marry you Dimitri. I thought you'd never ask!"

She laughed and cried all at once as he slipped the ring on her finger.

"Thank you," Dimitri said before kissing her, "For accepting and for loving me."

Erica couldn't stop the tears from flowing, "The pleasure was mine Dimitri, all mine."

He took her hand in his, smiling, "Now, it's time for a feast to mark the occasion."