Grabbing it, I rolled away from the bed and hugged it to my chest before opening the book in the middle and giving it a hearty sniff.
Briony. Robbie. Cecilia. Paul. My good old friends.
It took me a few minutes to bring my heart rate down. After which I glanced back at the manila envelope sitting not a few feet from me, staring back at me curiously. I’d gotten what I’d come here for. That much was true. But there was still a need in me, a seed of desperation, which bloomed into vengeance, demanded to get its pound of flesh. Getting back what was legally mine wasn’t enough. Christian had had leverage over me since the moment we’d met. He always dangled something over my head. My father’s trial. The book. The mystery that was him. Normally, I would never betray a person in such a way. Normally. But nothing about my relationship with Christian was normal.
Carefully, I reached for the manila envelope, dragging it across the pristine floor toward me. I sat up, propping my back against his nightstand, and pulled the thick stack of papers inside it out.
In the Superior Court of Middlesex County
State of Massachusetts
Civil Action
In re the Name Change of: Nicholai Ruslan Ivanov
Case Number: 190482873983
PETITION TO CHANGE NAME OF ADULT
The petitioner respectfully moves this Court to change his name from Nicholai Ruslan Ivanov to Christian George Miller.
A yelp escaped my mouth. Nothing could prepare me for the pain I felt in that moment. Like someone had reached into my chest, breaking my rib cage in the process, and clawed my heart out, twisting it ruthlessly in their fist.
Christian was Nicholai.
Nicholai was Christian.
Nicky wasn’t dead. He’d been here all along. Lurking in the shadows, planning his grand revenge for what my family had done to him, no doubt. The trial. The sentence. The conquest. The girl who’d turned into a woman, who’d turned into a tool.
Me.
I put together the jagged pieces. The way he’d spoken about my father . . . the hunger with which he’d fought for the case . . .
That first time I’d met him at the elevator and had that peculiar feeling. The air had been loaded with many more feelings than any two strangers could ever evoke in one another.
That strange notion in my stomach that I’d always known him, that he was somehow engraved into my skin, wasn’t a false alarm. He knew who I was and had kept his identity from me.
The man I’d put my trust in had broken my heart. Twice.
And in the process, he’d also managed to strip my family of everything it owned, lie to the world about who he was, and out us as an item.
Middlesex, Massachusetts. Christian had changed his name while he’d attended undergrad at Harvard University, or right before. Had he planned this all along? Becoming a lawyer so he could bring my father down, and me with him? Had he sought out Amanda himself?
I was too curious to fall apart. I’d have time for that later, once I left this man’s apartment. I continued rummaging through the folders in the manila envelope instead. All the paperwork for the change of name from Nicholai to Christian, his old and current passports, and the death certificate for Ruslana Ivanova.
Ruslana had died.
That was news to me. Then again, everything about this situation was. Now it all made sense. Why Christian had leaked our relationship to the press, and with perfect timing too. Right after my father’s trial. He’d killed two birds—or Roths—with one stone. He’d just never taken one thing into consideration—that I was going to find out his secret.
I took pictures of the damning documents of the name change with my phone, making sure they were clear and in focus. Then I grabbed my book and dashed out of his apartment.
My knee-jerk reaction was to take it to my father. To show him the evidence against Christian and start working toward an appeal, now that it was clear that Christian never should have worked on the case. He knew my family too well and had a vendetta against us. I slid into a taxi and was about to utter my parents’ address when I realized I didn’t want to do that either.
True, Christian was an asshole of gigantic proportions, but so was my father. Ultimately, they were as bad as each other. I wanted to use the information I had against Christian to ruin him, but not necessarily in the most straightforward way, in which my father got off the hook too.
Conrad Roth definitely deserved to be stripped of his reputation, money, and social standing. He’d done horrible things to people and used his power against helpless women.
I needed to think about it, long and hard. To come up with a plan.
“Miss? Excuse me? Yoo-hoo?” The cabdriver waved his fingers in the direction of the rearview mirror. “Not that it ain’t nice to sit here and watch you talking to yourself, but where to?”