The Giuoco Piano

Chapter 28 - В Россию с любовью (To Russia With Love)

Shane walks down the narrow Venetian Calle. It's little more than a passageway and it's nearly deserted. It's late evening and it's dark, cold, and raining. Given the weather and the time of the year, the city is largely absent of tourists, at least ones that are out and about in the ancient alleyways and chilly canals.

He knows there's something he needs to remember, but it is elusive, and he can't quite catch it. It's the fragment of a memory, a hint, or a whisper in the recesses of his mind. It's something about St. Petersburg. Something which might, in some way, be related to Marlena. If only he could capture it.

He pulls his coat closer around him and ignores the rain as it drips from his loose curls and trickles down his face. He is exhausted, his face pale and dark circles underneath his eyes. He's barely slept since the night of Moretti's ball. He feels responsible for the nightmare that unfolded in Moretti's apartments. He never should have let Marlena go to the ball, not knowing Moretti's reputation for brutality and retribution. Not knowing that there was some kind of history between them. He hadn't known the details. He still doesn't. Marlena had been resolutely silent on the matter of both her past history with Moretti as well as the details of what had happened in that room in the apartment before the mobster had been dispatched in a singularly accurate stroke of a knife.

He feels equally responsible for what happened at Da Ivo and the fact that Stefano has absconded with Marlena, as well as Roman's unknown whereabouts. Harper had come to him the night before Marlena and Roman had left the safe house and with a seriousness that was highly unusual for the psychologist, he had said that he was having serious misgivings about the choice to let Marlena continue to play along with DiMera's 'scavenger hunt'. It was, he said, psychological torture for both Marlena and Roman, and he was increasingly doubtful that she would be able to withstand the pressure that DiMera was piling on her. While the good Doctor Horton had determined that Grace could not be pieced together to reassert herself in Marlena's head, Harper wasn't so sure. He had to defer to Laura's professional opinion, she'd been in medical school when he'd been in diapers, but his experience told him that when it came to human beings and their brains, there were no absolutes. And this was an unprecedented situation. Who knew how Marlena would deal with it if she came face-to-face with her tormenter?

Shane had listened carefully to Alex, and his own misgivings had mushroomed, but still, he had allowed Marlena and Roman to leave the safe house. He had tried to talk them out of it, but he had known, even before he'd started, that it was a losing battle. Marlena had always been stubborn, but where her children and Roman were concerned, she was an immovable force of nature. There was no persuading her, no negotiation. She was going, and if they tried to stop her she wouldn't be responsible for what she did, she said. And Shane had believed her. She was beautifully scary in her intense implacability, and Shane had been sure she meant every word that she spoke.

And now, as far as he knows, she is with Stefano. Or at the very least, under his direct control, on his side of the chessboard, so to speak. She is trapped and not just metaphorically. He has to find her and get her away from that madman. Even if they can't find and save Carrie and Will, he knows they can find Marlena and he can at least get her out of Stefano's clutches and get her to safety. He knows she won't thank him for it, but the alternative is that they lose her as well and he knows that her family won't forgive him if that happens, and he could have prevented it.

He won't be able to forgive himself.

He picks through his memories as he walks, thinking about Leningrad in particular, about the time period when Marlena had been missing, presumed dead. It had been a difficult time, in the ISA, with communism and the Soviet Bloc slowly crumbling. And it had been a difficult time in his own personal life with the birth of both his children with Kimberly in that period, and the confusion around their paternity. And then there had been the arrival in Salem of Eve, and the revelation that she was his daughter.