The only ones who’d been fully behind her from day one had been her trio of close friends. Not only had they always been there for her and vice versa, no questions asked, they’d once been in her situation. Even if their stories had progressed toward ecstatic endings.
But when her family realized the price for any negative stance would be never seeing her again, they’d relented. Their disappointment and misgivings had gradually melted, especially her parents’, giving way to full involvement in her pregnancy and the preparation for her delivery. After the twins had arrived, they’d become everyone’s favorites and considered to be the best thing that had ever happened to Kassandra. Everything had worked out for the best.
She’d reclaimed herself and her stability, had become even more successful career-wise, but most important she’d become a mother to two perfect daughters. Eva and Zoya. She’d given them both names meaning life, as they’d given her new life.
Then Zorya had suddenly filled the news with a declaration of its intention to reinstate the monarchy. With every rapid development, foreboding had filled her. Even when she’d had no reason to think it would make Leonid resurface.
It seemed her instincts had been correct, for here he was, back on the scene with a vengeance. In one day, he’d taken the world by storm, a mystic figure rising from the ashes of oblivion like a phoenix.
Leonid’s disappearance had been the one thing left unresolved inside her. Everything she’d ever felt for or because of him had long dissipated. But wondering where he’d gone and what he’d been up to had lingered. Now explanations would be unearthed and any remaining mystique surrounding him would be gone, so she could once again resume her comforting routines, untouched by his disruption.
Leonid was a page that hadn’t only been turned, but burned.
“Mama.”
The tension clamping her every muscle suddenly drained at the chirping call of her eldest-by-minutes daughter, Eva. The girls had started calling her Mama two months ago. She hadn’t thought it would be that big of a deal. But every time they said it, which was often now that they knew it activated her like nothing else, another surge of sheer love and indulgence flooded her. Her lips spread with delight as she strode through her spacious, cheerfully decorated Bel Air house to their room.
It had been like this for months. Eva and Zoya always woke up an hour after she put them to bed. It was as if they loathed wasting precious playtime sleeping, or thought they shouldn’t leave her alone. But since she’d gone back to work after their first birthday almost six months ago, and they spent mornings with Kyria Despina, her late uncle’s wife and now her nanny, she welcomed the extra time with them.
As she approached the nursery, she could hear the girls’ efforts to climb out of their cribs through the ajar door. They were able to do it after a few trials now, but would soon be experts at it. She debated whether to go in or to let them complete their task and toddle their way to her in their playroom, as she’d been doing lately. It was why she’d been leaving the door ajar. She had childproofed every inch of her home six thousand ways from Sunday after all.
Moments passed and neither toddler showed up at the end of the corridor. Heart booming with the always-hovering anxiety she’d learned was a permanent side effect of motherhood, she streaked inside and found both girls standing in their crib, literally asleep on their feet.
The tenacious tots were obeying their regular programming even though their strenuously fun weekend at Disneyland had left them wiped out.
Scooping them up, she held one in each arm in the way she’d perfected, cooing to them, letting them know as they nestled into her and made those sweet sleep sounds that she’d come, as she always would, that they hadn’t missed that extra time with her they’d wanted.
Once she laid them down again, each turned to her favorite position and resumed a deep, contented sleep.
Sighing at that tremor of acute love and gratitude coursing through her, she walked out, closing the door completely now that she knew they were down for the night.
The moment she exited the room, the doorbell rang.
Frowning, she remembered that the girls’ play pals, Judy and Mikey, had again left behind some toys she’d found only after a thorough tidying up. It had become a ritual for Sara, their mother and her neighbor, to come by and collect her children’s articles after she’d put them to bed. They usually ended up having a cup of tea to unwind together after their hectic days.
Rushing to the door, she opened it with a ready smile. “We should establish rules about allowing only in-house toys...”
Air clogged her lungs. All her nerves fired, short-circuiting her every muscle, especially her heart.
Leonid.
Right there. On her doorstep.
She’d visualized this encounter countless times in waking trances and suffocating dreams. The perverse yearning had risen time and again for him to show up, look down at her from his prodigious height with eyes full of all he’d deprived her of, and tell her everything that had happened since his accident had been a terrible dream. She’d hoped for it until hope had turned to ashes.
And now...out of the blue, he was here...
Oh, God! He is really here.
Almost unrecognizable. Yet distressingly the same.
Observations accumulated in the white noise that filled her mind, burying her. The most obvious change was his hair. The silk that had been long enough to wind around her hands in the throes of passion was now severely cropped. It still suited him. It actually suited him better, accentuating the dominance of his bone structure.
The other major difference was his body. It hadn’t been a distortion of the video or his size relative to others. He was bigger. Broader. More heavily muscled. The leanness of the runner had been replaced by the bulk of a supreme fitness athlete.
His every feature and nuance, familiar yet radically different, felt like a knife to the heart.
But on the whole, he looked as if everything human about him had melted away, revealing a creature of polished steel beneath. Even the way he held himself seemed...inhuman. As if he was now a being of pure intellect and purpose, like a cyborg, an animate form of artificial intelligence.
An hour could have passed as she gaped up at him and he stared blankly down at her. He’d always had that power. Time had always distorted when she’d entered his orbit.
“Invite me in, Kassandra.”
His bottomless voice yanked her out of the stupor she’d stumbled in.
“I will do no such thing.”
“Your porch isn’t the place for what I’ve come to say.”
Her mouth dropped open at his audacity. That he could just appear on her doorstep after what he’d done to her, and without even an attempt at apology or even civility, not only demand but expect to be invited in.
“There’s no place where you can say anything to me. We have absolutely nothing to say to each other.”
“After the past two years, we have plenty.”
“The past two years are exactly why there’s nothing to be said. Even if there was, I’m not interested in hearing it.”
His eyes gave her a clinical sweep, as if assessing her response for veracity and judging it to be false. It made her loathe her weakness for him all over again.
“I don’t