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AS I SANK DOWN INTO the seat of the plane, I wondered if I had any more tears left to cry.
I was pretty certain that I had sobbed myself dry, in the hours since I had left New York. I was exhausted by now, had no idea how I was meant to get through everything else that was left for me, but I needed to keep my head in the game – needed to remember what came next.
And why I was doing this in the first place.
I’d woken early that morning, before the sun had risen, and when I’d checked my phone, I’d found a message there waiting for me from Nikita. I had no idea how he’d managed to get my number, but he seemed insistent, and I knew he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
I didn’t know how he seemed to have found out I was with Andreas, but he wasn’t happy about it, judging by his messages. He was warning me, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to get away from the Italians – that they wouldn’t care for me or my father the way I needed them to, especially in light of my father’s new health issues. That he and the rest of the Serbians would do everything they could to look after us, because we were one of their own, and that he didn’t want to let anything get in the way of it.
“Let us take care of you,” he had told me in that message. “Your father has already agreed to it.”
My stomach dropped when I read that part. How did he know what my father wanted? I had no idea – but I was sure that he had found some way to him again. Whatever Nikita wanted from us, it was clear that he would be able to get it. It didn’t take much for him to twist everyone around his little finger, make it so that they all had to bend over backwards to play by his rules.
“Are you with my father right now?” I texted back, panicked, and within a few minutes, he had sent me a picture – a picture of him and my father together, my father asleep in bed. It didn’t look like he was in the same estate that we had left him at. Had Nikita broken him out? Had the Italians tossed him onto the street as soon as they had gotten the chance? He was in no state to be out on his own like that, thank goodness Nikita was with him to take care of him...
Even though there was a nagging part of me that feared this was all part of some play Nikita was putting on to separate us from the Italians, I couldn’t risk it. If he had my father, then I needed to play by his rules, no matter how hard it might have been. I was hiding in Andreas’ bathroom, and could hear his deep breathing through the door. He was still asleep. And I knew that it would need to stay that way if I was going to get out of there without him stopping me.
There was no way he would let me leave, not when he had just gotten me here. But he didn’t understand – didn’t understand how trapped I was between these two worlds, how hard it was for me to exist toeing the line between what was expected of me and what people needed from me. I wanted to be able to stay with him, of course I did, but I had no idea how to do if Nikita had my father. I had to make a choice between Andreas and my family, and I knew that it was hardly a choice at all.
My skin crawled as I replied to the message. Told him that I would come to them. I couldn’t believe I was doing this, not after I had just come all the way here, not after I had just come to be with Andreas and spent the night in his arms.
It had felt so right there, with him, so close to him, and I knew that this was going to be hell to run from. I didn’t want to leave him, didn’t want to be away from him. I loved him – I had never said the words to him, but I knew that there were true and I knew that he felt them just the same way that I did.
But I needed to go. I needed to get out, before he could stop me, before he could talk me out of it. I couldn’t abandon my family, and I refused to leave my father with nobody but Nikita to rely on. He might have been one of us, a Serbian, but I still didn’t know if I trusted him.
But I would have to enlist some help to make it happen. I went through Andreas’ phone until I found something, a number for someone called Mauro – it rang a bell. I was pretty sure he was Andreas’ second-in-command, the one who had been there for me when we had taken my father up to the estate to rest. I hadn’t managed to glean much about him, but I was sure that he wanted me gone, too. The way he had treated me, my father, it was clear that he wished that he didn’t have to handle the Serbians any more than Nikita wanted to deal with his kind.
I called him from the bathroom and told him as quickly and bluntly as I could that I needed out of there. I had no idea where I was going, what I would do when I got there, but I needed help to get out of Andreas’ apartment without him noticing.
“I’ll have a car there in twenty minutes,” he replied. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, and I felt a catch at the back of my throat. Where the fuck was I going? I had no idea, and that scared the shit out of me. How could this be happening? How could I be running again, just like I had when I had fled to Miami? It didn’t feel right, fair, but I knew I had to. Nikita had my father – wherever he took him, I needed to follow.
Mauro had the car for me there in a matter of minutes, and I heard its engine idling outside as I looked down at Andreas, asleep in the bed. Could I really leave him? I knew that he would be hurt, but I didn’t see that I had much in the way of a choice when it came down to it. I needed to get out of here, and if I woke him, he would find some way to make me stay.
I leaned down and brushed my lips softly over his temple, careful not to disturb him. I wished I could tell him that I wasn’t doing this because of him, I wished that I could stay – that I wished we could be together one more night so I could say goodbye to him properly.
But I knew that wasn’t how this worked. I needed to go. Nikita was practically chasing me out of here, and I knew he wouldn’t take kindly to being left waiting. Given that he had my father, I wasn’t willing to find out what he would do when he was angry.
I had scribbled out a note and left it in the kitchen, nothing too long or in-depth – just enough to tell him I was gone, and that I needed him to accept it. I could feel the tears pricking my eyes as I walked to the door, my feet dragging with every step.
I could still turn back. I could go to Andreas, tell him Nikita was insisting that I left, ask him to help me get my father out of the mess that he was in right now, but I was sure that it was too late for that – sure that I needed to accept that this had started, and there was nothing I could do to change it. No matter how much I wished I could. I should never have let myself get drawn into this relationship with Andreas in the first place. We were from different worlds, and I was only going to drag him down if I tried to spend too long in his.
I slipped into the car outside, and checked my phone to see where Nikita was sending me – to the airport, it looked like. Where exactly was I going? I wasn’t sure I had my passport with me.
But that didn’t seem to matter. When I got there, I was hustled through security, and to a lounge where I waited for my flight to leave. I scoped out the area, trying to work out where I was being shipped off to. The flight was headed to Berlin, and would take me most of the night to complete. I had no idea what I was going to do that whole time with nothing to distract me from the heavy weight of knowing that I didn’t have Andreas there to help me through it.
What would he say? I was sure that he would have begged me to remain with him a little longer, he would have done what he could to convince me that I would have been better off staying with him. Heaven only knew how right he was – I was going to find out in the coming weeks if I should have stayed with him, or if I had made the right choice going to be with Nikita.
And I hated not knowing. But I was certain I wouldn’t have been able to handle the guilt of dealing with being so far from my father, not knowing what was going on with him – he needed me, and he needed me more than ever now. That drunken rant that he had been on before he had collapsed had told me in no uncertain terms what he thought of my new relationship, and I was certain that he never would have forgiven me or himself if I had chosen Andreas over him.
And so, I travelled to Europe. The plane wasn’t very busy, mostly businessmen dressed in sharp suits dozing in preparation for their meetings on the other end, but I couldn’t sleep, not even if I tried. My mind was buzzing with questions, unable to find the answer to a single one. Where the hell was I meant to start? How was I going to begin my life over somewhere new? I felt like I had just begun to get the ground under me with Andreas, and now, that had been ripped away and I had to start all over again, and I – I didn’t know if I could handle it. I didn’t know if I could cope with the sheer, blistering nightmare of beginning a life that I had no clue how to manage from scratch.
“Would you like something to eat?” one of the hostesses, who had been watching me with an openly concerned expression on her face since the start of the flight, leaned over to ask me. I shook my head. I couldn’t have stomached something even if she had put it right there in front of me. She smiled, still clearly worried, and I hoped that she would leave me alone. I couldn’t handle talking to anyone right now. I could hardly handle thinking. Because when I thought, I found myself drifting back to him, to Andreas, and everything seemed to crumple in on itself when I imagined how he would react when he found out I was gone.
By the time the plane landed, I could hardly stand on my own two feet, but I managed to get myself through security and out the other side. I had to catch a connecting flight to Serbia in a couple of hours, but for now, I had some time to kill. I turned on my phone – and saw a flood of messages from Andreas waiting for me, calls that I had missed, begging me to get back in touch with him so we could talk about everything that had happened.
I closed my eyes. I wanted to hear his voice so badly that it hurt, but I knew I couldn’t give him an inch right now. He would find a way back in, because I didn’t have the strength to fight it, and I wouldn’t be able to keep him away. He would take me back to New York, take me back to his apartment, and my whole resolve would crumble as soon as he offered me a spot in his arms once more.
I blocked his number. It took everything I had in me to do it, but I knew I needed to. It was the only way that either of us were ever going to find the peace that we were looking for, even though I was certain he was furious with me right now. It didn’t matter – I was never going to have to handle it, not in real life.
I trudged across the airport, dragging my exhausted feet and praying that this would be over soon. One more flight, that was it, and then I could relax and try to recuperate after everything that had happened. I had no idea what was waiting for me on the other side of all of this, but as long as I could be with my father, then all of it would be worth it.
That’s what I had to keep telling myself, at least.
When I arrived at the terminal, I looked for a seat – it was busy, and there weren’t a whole lot free.
My eyes fell on someone close to the door – someone who was looking right at me. I felt my heart skip a beat. Who was it? Wasn’t this over by now?
But then, I realized I recognized him. I knew who he was. The same man who had come running to help my father when he had collapsed, the same one who had been there for me when I had asked for someone to get me out of Andreas’ apartment and on the road – the man who had helped me through so much of this.
And here he was. Somehow. So far from New York, from the home he must have known, his eyes pinned to mine like he was trying to convey a psychic message into my brain.
Mauro.
THE END
