Crash Dive: An Alex Hawke Story by Ted Bell

before speaking.
    Hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face him, gazing directly into her lovely eyes.
    “Anastasia, listen to me. Kuragin knows we love each other. Surely he can comprehend that it’s natural that we want to be together. Raise our child in some seminormal environment instead of some bloody barbed-wire prison. Listen, I’ll return to the palace and find Kuragin right now. He and I will straighten all this out, as gentlemen. I’m sure he will see reason. Why would he not? Why on earth would he keep the three of us apart, keep us from the happiness we truly deserve and—”
    “Alex, please sit back down. There is something more I must tell you. Please sit. Now, before you say another word.”
    “I can hear quite well standing up, thank you.”
    She took a deep breath and let the dreaded sentence spill out all at once:
    “Nikolai and I are married.”
    “Married, you say? Don’t talk nonsense. He’s old enough to be your grandfather. It’s beneath you.”
    “Listen, please. I believed utterly and completely that you were dead, Alex. I saw you from my bedroom window, facedown in the snow. I watched you bleeding to death before my own eyes. I wanted to die myself. Then, in prison, Alexei was born. I knew I had to survive in order to protect him. The grandson of the dead Tsar was suddenly a threat to many inside and outside the Kremlin who—”
    “But how could you—”
    “There was a trial. I was convicted of treason and accessory to murder. A date was set for my execution. The night before I was to go before a firing squad, General Kuragin visited me in my cell. He had a signed pardon from the prime minister, from Putin himself. In the end, so Nikolai said, Putin could not let the son of the man who’d restored him to power be murdered by the Tsarists. Putin did it for you, Alex. He and Kuragin are the only reason we are both alive.”
    “So you fell in love? You married him?”
    “Oh, Alex, it wasn’t about love. Nothing like that. It was mere gratitude. That, and the security he offered us here. He’s an old man. He has been very lonely for most of his life. In his way, I think he does love me, Alex. And I’ve grown fond of him. Listen. I truly believed I had lost the only man I loved or ever would love. You. Late one night, when he’d had a bit too much wine and vodka, Nikolai got down on his knees and begged me to make his last few years happy ones. He was crying. In that moment, considering all he’d done, I felt I had no choice but to say yes. And, until I saw your face a few hours ago, I had no cause to regret it.”
    “And if I got down on my knees and begged? If I ripped open my chest and showed you my beating heart?”
    “Alex, my God. Please don’t do this.”
    “Don’t do this? Don’t do this?”
    “I mean—”
    “Don’t worry, Anastasia. I won’t beg you. My knees don’t work that way.”
    He looked away from her, staring at the distant horizon, peering in vain through the black curtain that had descended between them. A flash of memory from his childhood: he’d been given a puppy for his sixth birthday and called it Scoundrel. His mother had found him hugging the dog tightly to his chest, smothering it with kisses. “Don’t love it so well, Alex, or it may be taken from you,” she said.
    A man must never place himself in a position to lose.
    He should seek only that which he cannot lose.
    “Oh, Alex, my poor darling, I—I feel like my heart’s going to cave in. I don’t know what to say.” She reached up to take his hand, but it was like clasping a glove from which the hand has been withdrawn.
    “It’s because there is nothing more to say. I should never have come here. I’d almost come to grips with losing you, and now I shall have to start all over again. Although now”—he looked away briefly—“now I seem to have lost my son as well.”
    “Oh, my poor, poor darling. It is devastating to see you in so much pain. If only there were something