The Hacker by Renee Rose

11

Natasha

I wake to the sound of rain. The clock beside the bed says I slept until 9:30 a.m., which is far later than it seems because the sky outside is grey with a summer storm. It’s incredibly cozy. I want to pretend we’re here at this beautiful, luxurious cabin on a weekend getaway. That we have to stay in and play games together today, but when the rain lifts, we’ll go for a walk in the forest and enjoy the scent of rain on pine.

I head downstairs. Dima’s in the office. I pass by to check on Nikolai, who I find awake.

Yesterday we video chatted with Dr. Taylor to show him Nikolai’s wound, and he said everything was progressing well.

“Are you wearing Dima’s boxer shorts?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I tug on the hem. It’s one thing tempting Dima, it’s quite another to be inappropriate in front of his twin. “Oleg and Story brought out groceries and computer stuff, but they forgot to send us with clothes.”

“At least yours weren’t cut off you.” Nikolai flicks his gaze down to his shirt, which was cut to the armpits for surgery. “So does that mean Dima’s free-balling it?” he smirks.

I ignore the question, but he starts singing the lyrics to Tom Petty’s “Free Falling,” replacing falling with balling.

I try not to smile, even though he is hilarious. “I guess you’re feeling better?”

“Just loopy from these drugs. So, should I just pretend I didn’t hear you screaming outside my room last night?” Nikolai says casually as I take his temperature. A strangled sound comes from my throat, and his lips twist into a grin. “Next time, you two could move a little farther away from the door, no?”

“Sorry. It wasn’t exactly planned.”

“No?” Nikolai lets disbelief ring in his voice.

My face grows warm.

“I’m not judging. I’m the opposite of judging, Natasha. I’ve been trying to get Dima to hook up with you since day one.”

“Hook up?” I echo, not sure I like the sound of that.

“Sorry. Did that offend you?” Nikolai winces as he tries to sit up more.

I help him lean forward and adjust the pillows behind his shoulders. I hate how frail he seems.

“May I ask you a question?” Without waiting for an answer, I ask it. “Why can’t Dima have a relationship?”

Nikolai shakes his head slowly. He’s still pale, and his face needs a shave. “Is that what he said?”

“Stop turning my questions into questions.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He said, I can’t be in a relationship. I don’t want to lead you on.”

“Blyad.’” Nikolai grunts and scrubs a hand across his face. “Then I suspect… he made a promise to a dead girl. And my brother doesn’t break his promises.”

I stare at him in horror. A dead girl. The ring he wears on his finger. Why had it never occurred to me that he wears it as a remembrance?

“Who was she?”

Nikolai shakes his head. “It was so long ago.”

I don’t know why I want to burst into tears—whether it’s for me or for him. I resist the urge.

“Natasha…” Nikolai’s blue gaze—so identical to Dima’s—rests on my face, and he sees what I’m trying to hide. He reaches out and takes my hand. “At some point, the pain of resisting you will become greater than the pain of betraying his ghost. I hope… I just hope you can forgive him for the mess he’s making in the meantime.”

I blink rapidly, the patchwork of bandages covering my heart loosening and peeling back. It’s not Dima asking for forgiveness but Nikolai on his behalf. It’s his twin admitting that Dima’s treated me unfairly.

It soothes the pain, but it doesn’t give me hope.

Now I understand, at least, what Dima’s hangup is. But I don't want to make him break a promise to a dead girl. I no longer want to play temptress.

Not with what’s at stake for him. His loyalty. His love.

It’s not fair to either of us to continue with this craziness.

I remove my fingers from Nikolai’s grasp and turn away. “Of course, I forgive him,” I say as my heart liquifies and leaks out of my chest.

I forgive everything.

And I need to move on.

Dima

I spend the morning solving Natasha’s student loan problem. My first instinct is to simply erase the digital existence of any such loan. But even though I’m one hundred percent sure of myself and my ability to never get caught, I know Natasha would not like the idea of having stolen her education.

So I transfer money from my savings to pay off her student loans—about forty thousand in all.

Next, I hack her email to find every place she applied to school to study naturopathy and then cross-check all the schools with a list of the best. Even though it’s summer and the application deadlines for this fall were nine months ago, I put together her application materials and start the process of hacking into the application files of the best schools around. I’m not sure how exactly to make it happen, but I hope I might submit the applications in a way that makes them seem like they’ve been there all along, then maybe send a few with choice emails from important Deans at the school or something to check on their status.

I have to make this perfect. She needs to not only get into all these schools but to get scholarships, too, because I doubt she’ll take another loan out. It’s not an impossible task. Her grades are good. Mostly A’s, a few B’s. I go into her undergraduate transcript and change the B’s to A’s. Her MCAT score is good.

I find the essay she wrote last time. It was decent. A little plain. I send it off to Lucy, Ravil’s wife. Lucy is a brilliant attorney with top-notch writing skills. She might be able to retool the essay into something spectacular. That’s my hope, anyway. I send her my ideas for it—that it opens with a story about attending births with her mother and the miracles she saw and tie together that natural act with the body’s natural healing, or something like that. I don’t know—I can’t write in English past a sixth-grade level, but I’m sure Lucy can make it brilliant.

When I finish, I cancel every debit and credit card Alex has just to fuck with him.

He’s tried calling Natasha about a dozen times, and every time he does, I come back to my workstation to mess with him some more. His latest text says, I really did enjoy our time together--I wasn’t faking that.

As much as that makes me want to kill him in a hundred messy ways, it’s definitive proof that Natasha had no idea he was playing her. Something I can show Ravil if he questions her loyalty.

Natasha cornersme in the office in the afternoon. The rain that’s been pouring down all morning just abated to a sprinkle. “May I have my phone back?”

She’s in the same ridiculous fishing shirt and my boxer shorts, somehow managing to make the outfit look both chaste and pornographic at the same time.

“No.”

She lets out a surprised puff of air. “Why not?”

“I haven’t sorted things out yet with your boyfriend.” I’m being a dick. A total baby.

She said she hasn’t had sex with him. She told me she wore the dress for me, not him, and she’d brought him to force my hand. I shouldn’t still feel threatened by this guy.

Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t claim Natasha as my own that makes me crazy possessive of her. Knowing she’s fair game—or will be the moment we leave this cabin and she returns to her life—makes me want to commit murder.

Her jaw firms. “He’s not my boyfriend.” She puts her hands on her hips in a stance that unfortunately makes my dick hard. She’s so damn cute when she’s mad. “I need my phone, Dima. I have to cancel the massage appointments I had scheduled this week. And what if my mom called?”

Guilt gives me a twinge of pain under my sternum. I rub it. “She called yesterday. But I texted her to say you’d give her a call today.”

“What?” She throws her arms out in exasperation. “So when were you planning on giving me my phone to make that promised call?”

I scowl at her. “Well, I promised that before loverboy started lighting up your phone.”

She rolls her eyes and holds her hand out expectantly. “Give me the damn thing.”

I can’t decide if I love or hate that she’s figured out I’m no danger to her at all.

“Fine,” I grit. “But you make your calls in my presence, and then you hand it back.”

She shakes her head and sighs. “Whatever.”

I place the phone in her hand. “Stay in this room,” I warn her.

She turns her back to me but doesn’t leave. She leaves messages with three clients saying she had a family emergency and had to leave town, then calls her mother.

“Hi Mom,” she says when the phone connects.

I hear a stream of Russian from the other end, and then Natasha answers in English, “No, everything is fine…my date?” She turns and looks at me.

My nostrils flare.

“Not great. I’m not seeing him again.” She holds my gaze as she says it, like she’s trying to prove something to me.

As satisfying as that may be, I have no right to demand anything with her dating life. I’m not her boyfriend. I can’t be. I gave my heart to another.

I can’t distinguish Svetlana’s words, but her tone sounds coaxing like she wants Natasha to give it another try.

I turn away, so Natasha won’t see my glare, my fingers curling into a fist.

“He was using me, Mama. He wanted—” she breaks off when I whirl and give her a warning look. “We just weren’t a good match, that’s all.”

There’s a little more back and forth, Natasha asks after her aunt, her mom wants to know if she watered the plants, and then she hangs up.

She hands the phone back to me with a withering look. “Did I pass the test?”

An apology is on the tip of my tongue—I definitely owe her one, but just then her phone lights up with another call from Alex, and I grind my teeth, wanting to smash the damn thing.

My phone rings at the same time, and when I see it’s Ravil, I answer, watching Natasha sashay out of the room with her head held high.

“What have you found out about Alex Volkov?”

“Nothing I haven’t already told you.”

“What about his taste in women? Has he dated much? What kind of women does he like?”

“He had a couple of girlfriends in college. Look like nice, normal girls. One played soccer, one became a teacher. Why?”

“Do you think he has real feelings for Natasha? What has she told you about him?”

Well, fuck. I haven’t exactly gotten her to open up about their past dates since I was busy stomping my feet like a toddler at the fact that they even happened.

“Why?”

“He just showed up at the Kremlin—alone. Maykl stopped him from getting past the foyer, of course, but he was throwing a fit about needing to see Natasha. Said he’d come back with a warrant to search her place if we didn’t let him up there to see her.” Ravil pauses, and his voice softens. “Lucy went down and handed him his balls on a platter.”

I relax a little. “Good.”

“She told him we have footage of what he did, and she’d be happy to send it to every news station in the city, along with every supervisor at the FBI, and then she told him to lawyer up because we’d be filing a civil court case against him.”

“Did he leave?”

“He left. But you need to have Natasha call him. Maxim and I suspect he’s the hero-type, and he fears for her safety. I want her to call him off before he gets that warrant.”

Of all the fucking orders from my pakhan.

Dammit.

“I’ll have her do it now,” I promise, even though speaking the words feels like choking glass.

“Text me when it’s done.”

“Da, pakhan.”

I stalk out of the office in search of her. I suppress the urge to bellow her name in rage and make her come running. This isn’t her fault.

Actually, yes it is.

I find her in the great room, standing at the giant window like she’s watching the raindrops trickle down the glass.

“Natasha.” Damn. I need to dial it back. It already sounds like I’ve come for her head.

She whirls, her beautiful eyes wide.

I hold her phone out. “You have to call Alex.”

She makes a pfft sound. “I’m not calling Alex.”

“No. You are. Ravil’s orders. He showed up at the Kremlin to see you and threatened to get a search warrant for your place.”

She doesn’t reach for the phone, just eyes it suspiciously. “So what am I supposed to say?”

“Just let him hear your voice and know you’re alive.”

“Fine.” She snatches the phone from my palm and opens her contacts. When she enters Alex, it doesn’t come up.

“Oh yeah. I changed his name to douchebag in your contacts.”

She gives me a withering look.

I shrug. “You can change it back to loverboy when you regain your phone privileges.”

She glares at me. “My phone privileges? Seriously? When are you going to get over it?”

“When my brother no longer has an IV in his arm and can get out of bed,” I shoot back, which is a low blow because one thing I am certain of is her despair over what happened to Nikolai.

She gives me her back, which does nothing to hide her face since I can see her reflection in the windows.

“Alex?” She sounds a little breathless when he answers, and my molars grind.

“Natasha! Are you all right? Where are you?”

“I heard you came to my building.”

“Yeah, I did. Are you hurt? Do the bratva have you? What’s going on?”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” she asks coldly, and I’m suddenly able to breathe a little better.

“Can we get together in person? No funny business, I just want to explain everything to you. You definitely deserve the truth. Could we get coffee this afternoon?”

“This afternoon doesn’t work.” Natasha spins, her gaze seeking mine.

I frown and shake my head.

A crease appears between her brows.

I draw a line across my throat for her to cut the call.

“Listen, I really don’t want to get together with you, Alex. You shot a friend of mine. You used me for your investigation. I’m not okay with any of that, and I really don’t care to hear your side of the story. Have a nice life.”

She hits end. “Happy?” She’s mad at me, and I can’t really blame her. I’m acting like a jealous twat when I have zero claim on this woman. And yet I still feel like throwing a teenager-sized tantrum.

I take the phone back. “Am I happy that douchebag is obviously still trying to use you?”

She winces at the words use you, and I remember the wound inflicted by her childhood friend. Dammit. I hate Alex all the more for pushing her soft spot.

“Nyet.No. Not at all. I’m not happy he’s still breathing, frankly, and if he weren’t a Fed, he wouldn’t be.”

Natasha blinks, color draining from her face. She takes a step back, her chest rising and falling quickly.

Blyad’.She’s back to being terrified again. And I’ve confessed to being a killer.

“He could have killed Nikolai,” I tell her, pointing toward the bedroom where Nikolai is still suffering. “He is lucky I let him live.” I don’t know why I feel the need to defend my anger. The rational part of me knows I’m in the wrong here, but I just can’t seem to find him. And it’s all because of Natasha. What she does to me. To my sanity. “I still don’t even know what he was looking for, but you know what I do know?”

She takes another step back. The rain stops like my tirade interrupted its flow. Only the smattering of drops falling from the trees patter against the roof and windows now.

“I know he never would’ve been at that game if you hadn’t brought him. And I wouldn’t have given you the address if you weren’t playing your fucking games with me.” I smack my palm against the window, and she recoils.

I already hate myself for being so cruel, but I can’t seem to stop the rage and frustration from pouring out. Can’t reel myself back in. Can’t dial it back and apologize.

It takes her a couple of seconds to conquer the fear I just instilled in her, and when she does, it’s a beautiful sight to see.

Natasha draws herself up, lips tightening, anger blazing in her bright eyes. Her skin changes from pale to flushed. and she tosses her ginger locks over one shoulder. “I can’t change what happened.” Her eyes swim with tears and fists clench at her sides. “If I could, I would. And you obviously can’t get over it. So I think we’d better just keep our distance from each other until—” she breaks off, probably coming to the realization that she’s not running this show. I set the rules. I decide if and when she gets to leave and what happens while she’s here.

And that’s probably what makes her run.