“We used to have so many visitors. We used to go on trips. Then it all changed, one thing after another. Samara went to Paris. Mama died. Papa got sick. Cousins, uncles, aunts, they were all killed or moved away. Families are supposed to grow, but ours withered and died.”
She turned and looked at Nadia. Her eyes were still bright and luminous, but they were bulging again.
“You’re the last one left,” Rashel said. “But I think you’re too much like your mother.”
Nadia stiffened.
“What happened between you two?” Nadia asked. “I know you used to be close. Best friends, even. Samara loved you and trusted you.”
Rashel went pale. She clenched her hands into fists, and she trembled where she stood, looking up at Nadia.
She looked so angry that Nadia thought her aunt might hit her. That was what the old families had always done, to disobedient children who didn’t know their place.
But instead, aunt Rashel said bitterly, “She tried to use me.”
“How?” Nadia said.
Rashel looked suspicious.
“You already know,” she said, as if Nadia were trying to bait her.
“No, I don’t,” Nadia said. “But I want to know. I want to understand. That’s why I’m here—to finally understand my mother. What happened to make her change so much.”
But Rashel clamped her mouth shut into that flat, thin line again, shaking her head.
“You’re here to stir up trouble,” she said. “You have no respect for this family. I saw you out in the driveway with Nikolai Markov. You put yourself in the arms of the enemy.”
“He’s not the enemy!” Nadia cried. “That’s ridiculous. Just because our grandfathers didn’t get along, that has nothing to do with us.”
“It has everything to do with you,” Rashel hissed. “The Lebedev blood runs in your veins and the Markov blood is in his. The Markovs are liars and schemers and ever have been—you’ll see. And you’re just as weak and foolish as your mother.”
Nadia shook her head in disbelief. Aunt Rashel was becoming as crazy as Stanislav, locked up in this moldering old mansion.
“I decide for myself what I want and what I do,” Nadia said.
“There are lines of fate that runs through families,” Rashel insisted.
She really did look like a wizened old witch in her robe-like cardigan, with her dark, frizzy hair wild around her head, and her eyes bulging with zealotry.
“Do you want me to leave, is that it?” Nadia asked.
Rashel scoffed.
“You think I want to throw you out of the house?” she said. “I couldn’t make you leave even if I wanted to. The Lebedev house is as much yours as mine, whether you like it or not.”
Nadia tossed her head, about to say that she could just book a suite at a hotel in the city.
But she paused, considering what Rashel had said.
As much as Nadia found her aunt’s claim ridiculous that she and Nikolai were doomed to reenact the feuds of their ancestors, she couldn’t help but notice that there were certain parallels between her own experience in Moscow, and the events in her mother’s diary.
They’d both met an unsuitable suitor and become infatuated, quickly and unexpectedly. And Nadia suspected that when she translated the fourth entry in the journal, she already knew what would happen next...
Perhaps there was a tiny element of fate binding their parallel romances. If so, Nadia wanted to stay in her mother’s house, in her room, to see it play out.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said to her aunt.
Rashel squinted at her niece, even more annoyed by agreement than argument.
