Beautiful Revenge (A Good Wife #1) - Sienna Blake Page 0,5
Clothes. On and fucking on.
We still need more money. I can’t use the money I have saved to pay for heating this coming winter. We need it to leave, to make a better life for us both.
If Alena freezes to death there won’t be any life for either of you, you stupid boy, the sharp voice of my dead mother says in my head.
My heart cracks at the thought of losing Alena. I can’t. I would die. I grip her tighter to me, clinging to her as if it could stop her from ever leaving.
We’re going to have to take another risk. One more risk. One more score. One that is big enough to get us both out of here and to a better life.
4
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Alena
St Petersburg is a city of extremes. Grey blocks of communist apartments like prisons right next to cathedrals with soaring domes like fat rings on the end of fingers. Palaces built of solid marble peopled with kneeling virgins and weeping angels.
I wandered through the Peterhof Palace once on a school trip. The floors were inlaid with precious and exotic woods, the soaring hand-painted ceiling cast with enough gold leaf that gold dust shone in the air, making the streaks of light that came through the tall windows gleam. There is so much opulence in a city of the desperate that it makes me sick.
In summer, walking along the Griboedov Canal at night when the sun barely dips under the horizon’s surface like a seagull snatching up fish, the air takes on a magical light. It glistens off the jewelled domes of the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, dancing over the golden dragons that line the Bank Bridge. It’s on one of these white nights that I believe the world is full of magic. That wishes can be bought with the light of the stars. That dreams are more than mist and smoke.
Dimitri says I’m a romantic. He warns me, half-jokingly, that I live in the clouds, that my dreams are held together with wax. It will melt one day and I’ll come crashing down to the earth like Icarus.
In winter, the city is suffocated by the low-hanging grey woollen sky. The air is as sharp as daggers. The thick layer of snow covers the patches of ice underneath lying in wait to send you to your knees. I envy the couples walking hand in hand, wrapped tight in their real mink, sable or polar furs and valenki felt boots. My clothes are all second-hand and ill-fitting. I want to sit in one of those plush chairs in a warm, glowing penthouse and lift a glass of sparkling wine in a toast to my charmed life.
As I walk into the bar of the Kempinski Hotel, a luxury riverside hotel set in a nineteenth century mansion, my stomach tumbles with nerves and bitterness. The smell of spiced wine and money doesn’t help. Nor does the sombre Russian rock ballad humming from the speakers in the ceiling, “My Heart” by KIT-I.
Part of me doesn’t want to take this risk again. The other part thinks that it’s one little way that Dimitri and I can tip the unfair balance a little towards us. Our desperate lives have been so unfairly dealt to us.
I’m wearing a simple black knee-length dress and black stockings under an overly large fur coat, both stolen. As are my black boots, two sizes too large for me so that I have to wear three pairs of thick socks just so they don’t clomp when I walk. I’d never get into a place as fancy as this if I wore my own clothes, another bitter thought. I don’t own any makeup. I’ve smudged ash around my eyes to make them pop and pinched my cheeks to make them rosy. It’s the best I can do.
I shrug my coat off my shoulders and drape it over one arm. They’re so generous with the heating in here that I have a small bead of sweat on my upper lip.
I spot Dimitri, making my breath catch in my throat. He is stunning in a dark grey suit, also stolen. Luckily for him, the suit is his size, showing off his broad shoulders and slim waist. His dark hair is pushed back off his strong forehead, his blue eyes like chips of ice against the dark frame of thick lashes.
He’s leaning against the bar, chatting to a woman clothed in a white tailored pantsuit, a daring choice of