With This Ring

Apparently, this causes the cheese to carry vegetal notes of smoke, herbs, toast, and barnyard that are balanced by an intense fruitiness and lactic tang.” He bobbed his head comically and shrugged as if he had no idea what he had just said, but it didn’t matter anyway because it was all just a bit of pompous nonsense.

I couldn’t stop my smile. I liked Gary. How strange that he would work with a cold, heartless monster like Maxim.

“There is more…” he added with deliberately widened eyes. “The… uh… bread is brushed with a mixture of white truffle oil and twenty-three karat gold flakes, which adds extra crisp, Then the sides are encrusted with sheets of edible 23-karat gold and it is served with a tomato sauce, which is basically a luxe version of tomato bisque filled with juicy chunks of lobster.”

He lifted his head and looked at me inquiringly. “Does it sound like something you would like to consume?”

“Get it for me. I’ll take it to go.”

Betraying no emotion at my request for take away, he exited the office. I turned around to face Maxim. His focus was still completely on the document he was reading almost as though I didn’t even exist. I knew the document was not all that absorbing. He was deliberately trying to make me feel insignificant.

“Do you ever feel bad? For what happened?”

His reply was curt and instantaneous. “No.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

He raised his gaze to mine. “Why?”

“You’re a horrible person,” I said truthfully, “but you’re also human. You can’t not have felt any remorse. That was a whole family you wiped out and for what?”

He stared into my eyes for the longest time and I waited, praying that he would say something that would redeem him. For those few seconds it seemed as if there had never been anything I wanted more than for him to show me he was not the monster I thought he was.

“What do you recall about my mother’s death?” he asked.

My brain was temporarily scrambled. The question had popped out of nowhere. “Uh…” I decided to play it safe. “Not much.”

“Well, she was my family, and Anna’s father wiped her out.”

I was even more confused. “What?”

“I didn’t go after Anna, or her mom. They were collateral damage as much as I was when they killed my mother. I went after her dad because I wanted to ruin him. His case with our company at the time was minor, but I took it for the chance to ruin him. My only regret is that Anna’s mother came in just as I was about to pull the trigger…”

He paused and I stared at him in amazement.

“Do you want to know what that good man did in the face of death?” he asked quietly.

“What?” I gasped, suddenly breathless.

“He used his wife, and the mother of his own child, as a fucking shield.” His mouth curled with the disgust he felt for the man.

“You’re lying,” I whispered automatically, even as I knew in my gut he was telling the truth.

He shrugged carelessly. “Believe what you want. I am not here to convince you.”

“So you shot them both?” I asked incredulous.

“What choice did I have?”

“Why did you want him dead so badly?”

He leaned back in his chair and looked away from me, his eyes on some distant point in the sky. “It takes a very strong woman to be an Ivankov and my mother was not strong. She couldn’t cope with being the wife of a man who sat and supped with death every day. When I was ten, her deep unhappiness made her turn to drink … and eventually into a desperate affair with Anna’s father.”

He swung his gaze back towards me. “But he had a different agenda. He wanted to hurt my father. At first he tried to turn her against my father, but she refused, so he sent some compromising pictures of her to my father. I think he expected him to turn on her, but my father is an unusual man. He can watch a man being flayed to death without flinching, but he could not harm a hair on my mother’s head. He remembered her as she had been… when he first found her in a little village in Russia, carrying firewood, her golden hair wild, her cheeks red with cold. Even after he lost her to confusion, sorrow and drink that was how she remained in his heart. He was about to burn the pictures in the fireplace when my mother came into the room and saw them. Seeing the pictures of her own betrayal in his hands completely destroyed her. Her guilt was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In less than a month she was dead from an overdose. Levan found her body. He was only seven at the time.”