Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [119]
She seemed to want to hurt him, and perhaps through him, herself.
“Because—” Her voice was so thin and cracked he had to pull her close to hear her. “—you’ll hate me, you’ll hate me forever.”
“Where did you get that idea? Why would I hate you?”
“Because I lied to you.” A dreadful fear seemed to come over her. “I lied, I didn’t tell you the whole truth.”
He closed his arms around her and said in her ear, “I could never hate you. I love you unconditionally.” Kissing her on her cheek, he said, “But I think you ought to tell me whatever it is that’s causing you so much pain. It isn’t healthy to sit with it.”
She snorted in tearful derision. “You say you love me, but that’ll all change the moment I tell you.”
“Do it then.” He held her at arm’s length so he could look her in the eyes. Her fists had uncurled, the fingers trembling against his chest. “Let me decide instead of you deciding for me. Trust me. Trust us.”
The light had gone out in her eyes, she stared at him as if without recognition, and he pulled her to him again, murmuring to her: “Don’t go away, Alli. Stay here with me, you’re safe, you’re safe,” just as he had when he’d rescued her from the black place where Morgan Herr had taken her.
Her head lay heavily against his chest, she seemed to be scarcely breathing.
“Alli, please, I won’t hate you, no matter what, I promise.”
He felt her sigh against him, a long exhalation that was as much resignation as it was a surrender. Her entire body seemed limp and frail, as if she needed to give up everything, even her physical presence, in order to make the terrifying leap he asked of her.
“I . . . I lied to you about what happened the morning Emma was killed.”
“What?” He had expected some terrible revelation about what Morgan Herr had done to her, not this.
“I knew it.” She squirmed in his arms, trying to pull away. “I knew I shouldn’t’ve opened my big mouth.”
“No, no,” he said quickly. “Go on. What happened that morning?”
Her voice was muffled, as if she were talking into him rather than to him, as if she wanted to speak to something inside him with which she desperately needed to connect. “I . . . When you asked me I told you that I wasn’t around, that I didn’t know what Emma was up to.”
“You told me in retrospect you thought she was going to see Herr.”
“That was the lie. I knew where she was going because she told me.” Alli’s voice was further clouded by guilt and despair. “I was there. She asked me to drive her, she said she’d been up all night and was in no shape to drive.” She was weeping again as she clung to him. “I told her I couldn’t, I gave a totally bogus excuse because I was scared, I didn’t want to get involved. And because I was so chicken-shit, she died. If I’d been driving nothing bad would have happened, she’d be alive now.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“IRAN,” PRESIDENT Yukin said, “is a topic of the utmost strategic importance.” He shook his craggy head. He had eyes like nuggets of coal that had been burned deep into his face. The bulb of his nose was pocked and cratered, possibly from a childhood disease. “I have said this before, President Carson, but I see that I must say it again in order to underscore the weight the Kremlin reserves for such matters.”
“You needn’t bother,” Edward Carson said. “I am well aware of the special status between Russia and Iran.”
“Special status?” Yukin mashed his fleshy lips together, as if he wished to grind Carson’s words to ash. “No, no, you misunderstand us. We have certain business dealings, yes, but as for—”
“Such as sending them nuclear reactor parts and refined uranium.”
That statement hit the room, or more accurately, Yukin’s ears, like a detonation. An awkward silence ensued. Carson, Yukin, General Brandt, and Panin, a high-level Kremlin apparatchik who had not been further identified, were sitting in a palatial room inside the Kremlin. The ceilings, twenty feet in height, perhaps more, were arched as in a cathedral, a comparison whose irony wasn’t lost on Carson.
“Since the debacle in Iraq your fact-finding spies have been notoriously inaccurate,