Asylum

Chapter 53: The Truth Shall Set You Free

Ivan was studying the wall as well. "Not until Saturday night. Until then, I was completely in the dark."

I turned back to the display, my emotions tumbling and crashing together and blanketing me in a deafening numbness. "Saturday night," I repeated.

I felt rather than saw Ivan's shrug behind me. "Just after you left Asylum, I left through the alley and caught a cab a couple blocks away ... so the police who were probably watching the club wouldn't see me," he explained. "By the time I made it to your apartment building, you were already coming out and getting back into your cab, dressed like you were headed to the ballet, so I followed you to your real home near the park and realized that you were ... not who I thought you were."

He hesitated, gathering his thoughts. "I followed you to your family's company the next day, then followed you back home again. I was there outside the church for your grandmother's funeral, and waiting in the cemetery where you buried her. And when I decided that it was pointless to follow you anymore, I stopped. But simply ... not watching you ... wasn't enough; I had to get away, get out of New York, go somewhere to clear my head."

His voice sounded strange, though I couldn't pick out the change, or the emotion, that was coming through his words. I was still too staggered to make sense of anything.

"We flew down here this morning, as you know, and I've spent all day holed up in this room, trying to get everything I'd seen ... everything I'd learned ... out of my head and in front of my eyes so I could try to make some sense of all of it, figure out what I was going to do. I was still trying to work that out when you showed up tonight."

My mind was chugging in place, like a motor trying and failing to turn over. Something was off, very, very off. I tried to focus my stunned brain on his voice behind me, but whatever it was slipped elusively from my grasp. I turned to face him.

"And what did you decide?" I asked, my words forced out in a strangled whisper as I searched his face.

He pushed off from the desk and paced slowly towards me, the light from the lamp gilding the muscles of his arms and shoulders and making a gleaming halo of his damp hair. He stopped when there was barely a hair's breadth between us, and I had to tilt my head up, baring my throat, to meet his eyes.

"I decided to tell you the truth," he said quietly.

And then it finally clicked, the little thing that was off – it was his accent. His sexy little Russian accent. It was gone.

"My name isn't Ivan Alkaev."

My head began to spin, and I was afraid my knees would give out as he leaned his face closer to mine, his warm breath caressing my lips. "It's Nikolai Ivanov, and I'm an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration."