Chapter 19

High Hopes Part I

"Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forward but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide"

"High Hopes", Pink Floyd

DPOV

The short distance from the car to the cabin was accompanied by a feeling of dread; it felt like I was walking the Green Mile. Life as I've known it for the last thirteen years was over, but instead of feeling hopeful and looking forward to the future, all that I could see was a past that was threatening to destroy us completely. Would there be anything left to live for when this conversation was over?

As I dragged my luggage in, I didn't bother having a tour of the cabin; I left my suitcase in the living room and asked for directions to the bathroom. There, I stood by the sink in front of the mirror, having an internal pep talk. When I'd boarded the plane, I had been convinced I wanted to know everything; after Rose's earlier revelations, I wasn't sure that was still the case, but thirteen years in the dark and one too many deceits have a way of making you paranoid.

Deciding that it would be best to find out the whole truth right now, much like ripping off a band-aid, I steeled my resolve. I washed my hands, splashed my face with some cold water and finally made my way out of the bathroom.

"Rose?" I called, not knowing where she was.

"Over here!" She appeared in the door frame to my left. As soon as she knew I'd spotted her, she got back to whatever she was doing, which turned out to be making hot chocolate. "Do you still drink that stuff?" I nodded, not trusting my voice. It was like taking a trip back in time – the scene so much like something she would have done in the past, yet so awkward. There was no comfort to be had in that hot chocolate, no casual chit-chat to follow, no kissing Rose and inhaling the scent of her hair after a long day or night.

"I don't know where to start, Dimitri, so I guess you should say something, anything. What do you want to know? What do you want me to begin with?" Her expression was somber, but she was looking at me expectantly, as if to say "It's your funeral".

Suddenly, I felt exhausted – the anger was all but evaporated, taking the rest of my energy with it. The need to know, however, was still strong. "What happened with Gregory? He told me he couldn't find you, but he spoke to you and you told him you'd met someone else and had moved on. You were never going to come to me and I should never try to contact you again." I ran a hand through my now short hair, then down my face and across my chin in an attempt to shake off the tiredness.

"He found me alright. Abe told him where I was. The Old Man thought I'd gone crazy and had hoped your brother would manage to knock some sense back into my head." She smiled sadly. "See how well that turned out?"

"Where were you?" I asked. "It was around six months after I left..."

"I was with Oksana and Mark in Baia. As soon as Abe got the cops to leave me alone, my medical record was taken care of and the doctor left to work in a hospital across the country, I left. No one could know I was pregnant."

"If you didn't want the baby, you could have had a termination, Rose!" I snapped. The thought of her hating being pregnant with our baby so much she wanted no record of its existence stung.

"I thought about it, but I realised I couldn't end the life we had created. That baby was my only connection to you. Our daughter meant to me more than my own life, Dimitri!" Rose cried out.

"How could you give her up, if she was so important? Why did you give her up, Rose?" My voice got louder, until I was almost shouting. The anger I felt earlier reared its ugly head; I wanted to walk around the kitchen isle, grab her shoulders and shake her.

"Because of your father... and Victor."

"What does Victor have to do with it?" My eyebrow went up; I really couldn't follow her reasoning.

"Did you know Robert Doru, the Strigoi leader, was Victor's half brother? I killed him, Dimitri! For you, for us, for everyone I loved and lost, for everyone and everything I had to give up. Victor knew the only person who could have made the connection was me. Your persuasion methods were effective, but sometimes brute force can't get the job done."

"You are telling me it was Victor who sold us out?" Rose nodded in agreement and all of a sudden I wasn't just angry but furious. "Then why is he still alive?"

"Because I had other plans for him. I convinced your father there was worse fate than death. We took everything away from him, Dimitri – his wealth, his family, his freedom. He was serving a life sentence in Tarasov for the murder of his daughter and his wife before he escaped."

"Fuck!" was the only response I had to that new information. No matter how much I wanted to hear about Victor and the Strigoi, the desire to hear everything about our daughter was stronger. "You can tell me all about that later. I want to hear about Dimitriya. Please!

"I don't know if I ever told you, but Oksana is Abe's sister. She and Mark had been trying for a baby since I could remember, but Oksana never conceived. I couldn't give Dimitriya to strangers. Giving her to Mark and Oksana was the only way to keep her in the family and close to me. So, long story short, I travelled to Baia as soon as I was able to and stayed with them for a year."

"Baia is a small town, Rose. What did you tell people? There is no record of you having a child."

"We told them I was Mark and Oksana's surrogate. The baby was never mine but theirs in the eyes of people. They treated me like a saint, Dimitri – the niece that would do that for her aunt and uncle. It made me feel so bad about all the lies."

"I'm guessing my mother was your midwife... But how did you fool Yeva?" My grandmother had had a special gift – she had dreamt of the future and knew things. I would be surprised if she hadn't known the truth.

"Babushka? Oh, the woman scared the living hell out of me when I first met her. I almost had a miscarriage after our first tête-à-tête." Rose laughed. "The old witch sure knew how to talk to people." There was fondness in her harsh words I was surprised by. Yeva used to terrify me when I was little, so I knew exactly what Rose was talking about from personal experience.

"What did she say to you?" I wouldn't have been happy with Yeva if she had cost us our daughter.

"I met your mother after you "disappeared". I was still in that numb phase when she came to the flat. It was... an emotional first meeting. We talked and we cried together, both for our own reasons. It was killing me that I couldn't tell her you were safe and well, but I was grieving myself. I had lost you... forever and my tears were real. Do you know the worst about it? She was comforting me, Dimitri! Me! When I turned up in Baia, she did the maths and asked me if the baby was yours. I told her the truth about Dimtriya but what I really wanted was to put her mind at rest about you. They had a memorial about you – there was no body, no funeral, just people from the town getting together to share their memories of you. Olena asked me to talk about you. I was hesitant at first – you were much feared and hated, but those people told stories about you in a different light. I listened and by the time it was my turn, I was so choked up, I could hardly find my voice. I... they treated me like your widow. It was so very strange, but heart warming at the same time, it made me sob out loud. That is how I met Yeva. She didn't really talk to me, just sat quietly with her eyes on me the whole time, watching my every move and soaking up every single word that left my mouth. Just before we left, she came to me, looked me over and nodded, as if she was having some internal dialogue and had finally reached a decision, then suddenly hugged me. She walked off after that, without saying a word. It was creepy."

My laugh interrupted Rose and she had a serious case of the giggles. "Yes, Roza, she was capable of making your skin crawl. What happened after that?

Rose smiled and shrugged: "A week after I met her, she called and said she needed some help bringing some dishes back to Oksana's house. Mark told her he'd help, but she demanded I was the one to go." Rose laughed again. "She didn't really need my help, she just wanted to get me alone. When I got to the house, Paul was the only other Belikov around. Babushka shooed him out in the garden as soon as he brought us tea and cookies."

"I bet Paul didn't want to get out. Did she have to use her walking stick, or did her glare do the trick?" I grinned when Rose started laughing again. God, I missed my mother and my sisters so much. I even missed Yeva. As I'd grown older, I had come to understand her. She hadn't been pleased with the road my father led me down, but it had been my choice – my life and my future in exchange for those of my mother and sisters. Anton Belikov had always been a cruel, vicious man and my mother had suffered the consequences of his volatile personality. At the age of fourteen, I had finally grown tall and strong enough to stand up to him and had given him a good beating in the name of all we had suffered. He gave as good as he got and I had managed to gain the upper hand by accident – I was taller and faster, but he was bulkier and stronger; what had saved me was a misstep on his behalf. He had lost his balance for a moment and I had taken full advantage of that. I had thrown him out of the family house triumphantly only to collapse as soon as I'd managed to close and lock the front door, hoping we'd never see him again.

Anton Belikov, however, had decided that he wanted to keep me with him. I was his only son, his only heir. When I had beaten him up, I had proven I could be ruthless and useful. He'd come back with a list of demands and in the end he'd left with what he wanted. He hadn't been interested in saving his marriage, keeping the house or any of his children but me. He had stopped supporting the family, threats and reminders of what he was capable of had started arriving daily. In the end, I'd gone with him because I'd been terrified of what he'd do to the Belikov women.

Life with my father hadn't been easy. I'd discovered as soon as he'd dragged me away from my mother's house that he'd had a mistress and Gregory was my half-brother, the same age as Sonya. I had quickly come to the conclusion that Mama had found out and, when she had confronted him, the beatings had started. What was worse, he'd married her almost immediately after the divorce was finalised, making the woman who had caused so much pain and devastation to the people I love my stepmother. I had never really called her anything but her name, but it had hurt when people had called her my mother. Their marriage didn't last long and Gregory and I were pretty much in the same position when wife number three came along – barely three years older than me – when I was seventeen.

Gregory and I banded together in an attempt to stay sane and had bonded in those years. When his third marriage broke up, our father never married again. He still "dated" but never settled, concentrating his attention on his two children, which only made life worse for us.

"She had to chase him out," Rose's voice, still holding a note of amusement, broke me out of my reverie. "As soon as he was out of earshot, she looked at me with those all-seeing eyes of hers and told me I did the right thing, regardless of how much it hurt me. She said that the darkness will last a long time, but my light will come back to me when I least expect it. I never understood what she meant until now," Rose shook her head, "but I guess she knew all along that one day we'll find each other again. You have always been my light, after all." Rose was looking at me, eyes wide, an expression of pain and regret mixed with relief on her face, as if she could only just now belief that I was real and here with her. Then she looked down at her hands, her fingers twisting painfully against each other, her features smoothing slowly into an emotionless mask.

I couldn't help it – I moved towards her, pulling her face up, so she would have to look at me – and then slowly, brushed my lips against hers, whispering "As you have always been mine."

I wasn't prepared for her reaction - the strength with which she pulled me down to her, or the brutality and vehemence of her kiss – but a moment later I was pulling her closer, sitting her on the kitchen worktop and getting lost in the feeling of Rose's lips, Rose's body, Rose's warmth, until it felt like I was melting and sinking into her and I ceased to exist as me, just a reflection of the blinding light she was.