Are You You?
1231 Words
I stared at him.
"Excuse me?"
He said nothing else. He just watched me, his expression completely unreadable, like he was waiting to see what my face would do.
"I don't know what you mean," I said, my voice coming out thinner than I wanted it to.
Mr. Volkov reached into the top drawer of his desk. He pulled out a single photograph, old and slightly bent at one corner, and slid it across the polished wood toward me.
I looked down at it.
My stomach dropped straight to the floor.
It was a photo of me when I was maybe sixteen, standing in front of a house I had spent three years trying to forget existed. My hands started to shake so badly I had to press them flat against my tablet to keep them still.
"Where did you get this?" I whispered.
"I ask the questions right now," he said. His voice was calm, almost bored, which somehow made it worse.
"I don't understand what this has to do with the company," I said, forcing steel into my voice even though my knees had turned to water. "If you called me up here to intimidate me, it isn't working."
A small, cold smile touched the corner of his mouth. "It is working. You're just too stubborn to admit it."
"Mr. Volkov, with respect, I have a crisis to manage downstairs."
"Sit," he said, before I had even tried to stand. "I am not finished."
I sat back down, gripping the tablet in my lap like it was the only solid thing in the room.
"I have known for exactly eleven days," he said. "I have not told anyone. Do you know why?"
"No," I said.
"Because I needed to decide what to do with what I know first." He walked slowly around the desk and sat down in his chair, folding his hands in front of him.
"I have a problem, Sue. A very specific problem that is exploding across every news channel in this city right now. And it occurs to me that you might be the only person who can solve it."
"I can solve it," I said quickly. "That is my job. Give me the team, give me twenty-four hours, and I will…"
"Not that problem," he said. "The other one."
I felt my pulse in my throat. "What other one?"
He studied me for a long moment, the way you study something you are deciding whether to keep or throw away.
"I am not going to explain everything today," he said. "You have not earned that yet. But I will tell you this much. I need something only you can give me. And in exchange, I am prepared to make sure that photograph, and everything behind it, never finds its way to the people who are looking for it."
My mouth had gone completely dry. "What do you want?"
He stood up, came around the desk, and stopped directly in front of my chair, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to keep looking at him.
"I want you to be my wife."
The words hung in the air between us.
I stared at him, waiting for him to laugh, to say it was some kind of test. He didn't. His face stayed completely still.
"You're insane," I said. "I don't even know what that photo has to do with anything. I don't know what you think you know about me. But I am not marrying you to find out."
"Serafina Moretti."
The name hit me like a slap. I felt every drop of blood leave my face at once.
"Don't," I said, my voice cracking.
"That is your name," he said, watching me closely now, like he was finally getting the reaction he had been waiting for. "The name on your birth records, in a city you have not set foot in for three years. The name your family used before you disappeared."
"Stop." My hands were shaking so hard the tablet nearly slid off my lap.
"I am not going to stop, because you need to understand exactly what is at stake." He leaned against the desk again. "Rocco Marchetti is the man behind the leak that is destroying my company this morning. I know that name means something to you. I can see it on your face."
My throat closed. I could not make a sound come out.
"He is also the man you ran from," Volkov said. "The man who forced you to bury your name and hide in this city working under a fake identity. I do not know all of it yet. But I know enough."
"How," I finally managed. "How do you know any of this?"
"Because when your name showed up in my investigator's report, I did what any careful man would do. I looked into the woman I was about to ask something very large of."
I stood up so fast the chair scraped against the floor. "I am not agreeing to anything. I don't care what you think you have on me."
"Then walk out," he said simply. "Go back downstairs and finish your press release. I will make one phone call this afternoon, and by tonight, the people looking for Serafina Moretti will know exactly which city she is hiding in."
I stood frozen in the middle of the office, my chest rising and falling too fast.
"Why me?" I said. "You could marry anyone. Models. Actresses. Some senator's daughter. Why would you do this to me specifically?"
Something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone so fast I almost missed it. "That is a conversation for another day."
"No. I want to know now."
"You are not in a position to make demands, Sue." He said my old name like it cost him nothing at all. "You have until the end of the day to decide."
I grabbed my tablet off the floor where it had fallen and walked out of his office without another word. I did not go back to my desk. I walked straight past my own department, past Marcus calling my name, past the crying associate and the ringing phones, and I did not stop until I reached the elevator.
I quit that same hour. I typed the email standing in the lobby, my thumb shaking over the send button, and I hit it before I could talk myself out of it.
I walked home instead of taking a cab. I needed the air. I needed to think of a plan, any plan, that did not involve marrying a man I had known for exactly one terrifying hour.
My apartment door was open when I got there.
I knew I had locked it that morning. I always locked it.
My first thought was David. Maybe he had come back for something he forgot.
I stepped inside carefully, my heart pounding, and found a large bouquet of red roses sitting on my kitchen island. Beside it sat a plain white envelope with no name written on the front.
A feeling of dread spread through my chest before I even touched it.
I opened it with shaking hands and read the single line written inside.
My knees gave out. I sank straight down onto the kitchen floor, the envelope still clutched in my fingers.
They had found me.
- Writer
