She gasped, and her face was deathly pale. He was shocked at how thin she was. The Prince was right. She looked terrible as she faced him with wide, frightened eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“I dropped by from New York to see how you are.” He tried to sound flip, but the way she looked told its own tale. She was beyond laughter, beyond love, beyond caring.
“Why did you come here?” She stood looking angry and very small, and it almost broke his heart. He wanted to take her in his arms again, but he didn't dare. He was afraid he might break her.
“I wanted to see you. I'm here for the peace treaty negotiations at Versailles.” They were still standing in the doorway, and he looked at her questioningly as Sava came to lick his hand. She hadn't forgotten, even if Zoya no longer cared to remember. “May I come in for a few minutes?”
“Why?” Her eyes were big and sad, but more beautiful than ever.
And he couldn't lie to her anymore. “Because I still love you, Zoya, that's why.” It wasn't what he had planned to say, but he couldn't stop himself from saying the words to her.
“That's not important anymore.”
“It is to me.”
“It wasn't six weeks ago, when you left.”
“It was very important to me then too. I thought I was doing the right thing for you. I thought you had a right to more than I had to offer.” He could offer her everything materially, but he couldn't give her youth or the years he had wasted before he met her. And that had seemed important at the time, now he wasn't so sure, in the face of everything Vladimir had told him. “I left you here because I love you, not because I didn't.” But he knew, as he had then, that she hadn't understood it. “I didn't mean to abandon you. I had no idea that so much would happen after I left.”
“What do you mean?” She looked up at him sadly, and sensed that he knew, but she was not sure how much.
“I saw Vladimir this afternoon.”
“And what did he tell you?” She stood stiffly away from him, watching his eyes, as his heart went out to her. She had suffered so much. It wasn't fair. It should have happened to someone else. Not to her, or Evgenia, or the Romanovs … or even Vladimir. He felt sorry for all of them. But more than that, he loved her.
“He told me everything, little one.” He took one step closer to her and pulled her gently into his arms, and much to his surprise, she didn't fight him. “He told me about your grandmother,” he hesitated, but only for a moment,“… and your cousins … and poor little Mashka …” She gulped on a sob, and turned her face away as he held her, and then as though suddenly the dam had broken, she began to sob in his arms, and he gently kicked the door closed and carried her like a very small child into the apartment and sat down on the couch, still holding her while she cried. She cried for a very long time, shaking horribly, as she told him everything she'd heard from Gilliard, racked by sobs, as she'd been then, and for a long, long time, Clayton held her. And then at last, the room was silent again, and there was only the sound of an occasional sniff. She turned broken green eyes up to his, and he kissed her gently as he had longed to do since he left her.
“I wish I'd been here when he came.”
“So do I,” she admitted, crying softly again. “Everything's been so terrible since you left … it's all been so awful … and Mashka … oh, God, poor Mashka … at least Pierre said that the bullets killed her quickly. But the others …”
“Don't think about it anymore. You must put it behind you.”
“How can IP” She was still sitting on his lap, and it reminded her of talks long ago with her father.
“You have to, Zoya. Think of your grandmother, think how brave she was. She took you out of Russia in a troika, to freedom, to safety. She didn't bring you here for you to give up hope, to abandon everything, to sit in this apartment and starve to death. She brought you here for a better life, to save your life. Now you must never, never