him to have a drink with me on the terrace. I thought he would be cocky and self-absorbed, that he would try to impress me, but he did not, and that impressed me even more. He spoke of the woman he was about to marry, the children they would have, the life he envisioned for himself.
We spoke of our pasts, of where we come from, where we want to go. As I listened to him, I became afraid for him. I worry that he will not have that future, not if others have their way. I warned him to be careful. I don't think he understood, and I couldn't say too much. I hope Andrei Markov will have the life he dreams of. I'm going to try to help him if I can. I just don't know if it's possible.
Jax drew in a breath and let it out, reading the paragraph three more times, but every time the name stayed the same. His father, Andrei Markov, was in Natasha's journal. It seemed like an unbelievable coincidence. But it was there in black and white. His father had known Maya's grandmother. They'd talked at length, and their conversation had been important enough to Natasha that she'd written it down.
He didn't understand much of it, though. Why was Natasha worried about his father's future? Why had she warned him to be careful?
He set the book down, running her words around in his head. Natasha had been thirty-six when she died, and this had been written days before that. His father had been in his early twenties during this visit to the Russia House. He hadn't married his mother yet. And Jax hadn't been born.
He picked the book back up. He was only a few pages from the end. He couldn't stop now.
With a tight jaw and a tense body, he read through her final entries. But her words became even more cryptic. She'd told the Lark about her Doctor. She would make an appointment. The Surfer promised to get her a new board, but she didn't know when he was going to come through with it. Had Natasha surfed? It was her first mention of surfing. Dustin had asked her to go to the premiere of his new movie, and she'd planned to go but then Daniel had wanted to meet, and she knew he was having problems and needed a friend. She ran into Sylvia at the Russia House and saw her sneaking booze from the bar, which reminded her of Rex. Natasha was afraid of the road he was going down and she was determined to talk to him about it. Clearly, she'd been worrying a lot about Rex in the last few weeks of her life. Her last entry was about wanting to prove to Rex that she was a better person than he thought, that she would find a way to make him proud of her.
And that was the end of her journal.
He got to his feet. Brandon was still poring over the cypher and working on the computer he'd brought with him. Watching him work reminded him that the journals he'd read were probably not nearly as important as the cypher.
"Are you having any luck?" he asked him.
"I think that part of this is garbage and the other part is encrypted, but I haven't figured out which is which yet."
He nodded as Brandon got back to it. Hopefully, he could decipher the code, and they could finally find out exactly what Natasha had been up to, and all her cryptic comments in the journal would make sense.
If they found out that Natasha was a spy, what would that mean for Maya? What would that mean for his father?
His gut twisted. The truth was staring him in the face, a truth he'd never acknowledged out loud, but had always been lurking inside his head. Maybe that wasn't true. It hadn't always been there. When he'd been a child, he hadn't questioned anything, but as he got older, he'd started to wonder. When he joined the FBI, he'd scoured the files for any mention of his parents and their death, but he'd found nothing.
Now all his doubts, all his questions, were back.
He needed to talk to someone, and that someone was in his kitchen. He grabbed the journals, walked into the kitchen, and closed the door.
Maya didn't even look at him. She was staring at her computer screen.
He could feel the anger coming off her in waves. Finally, she