me with the Kenins. That's one of the questions I have to ask them."
"I hope they can give you better answers than they did before. It's odd how we've both stumbled upon family secrets."
"It is," he said, meeting her gaze. "Watching you fight for the truth inspires me."
His words made her like him again, and she really didn't want to. "I'm sure you'd fight on your own."
"I haven't until now."
"You didn't know there was something to fight for." She paused. "Is there any chance your parents might not be dead? I know you said they never found their bodies."
"That thought has been running around in my head," he admitted. "I'm afraid to believe it. It will just bring a hell of a lot more pain when I have to face the fact that they're still dead. And they have to be dead. I'm thirty-three years old. They've been gone twenty-six years. If they were alive, they would have contacted me before now."
"I think you're right. I shouldn't have brought it up."
"You just said aloud what I was thinking." He took a breath. "I pushed them out of my head a very long time ago, but as soon as I stepped into the library at the Firebird, memories came back. The chess sets, the players—they reminded me so much of my dad. And when I played Bragin, I guess I used my dad's opening move. That's when he realized that I looked like him."
"That could be dangerous, Jax. If Bragin was involved in Natasha's murder or your parents' accident, and he figures out that you're Jack Markov…"
"I know."
She frowned, not liking the fact that he could be in even more danger. But there was nothing she could do to change that. "Your parents died twenty-six years ago, and Natasha died thirty-six years ago. What happened in those intervening ten years?"
"My father became a professor. My parents had me. I thought we were living a normal life, but maybe we weren't. Maybe my father was recruited by someone at the Russia House."
"And that's why Natasha was worried about him. She might have thought he was going down the same road she'd traveled."
"That's what I'm thinking."
Silence fell between them for a long moment. "Why did you become an FBI agent?" she asked curiously. "Did it have something to do with your parents' death, the mystery you couldn't solve?"
"It might have been at the back of my mind, but to be honest, I was drifting for a while. I didn't do much in college except party. I took Russian because I already knew the language, and I figured it was an easy A. My official major was political science. I thought about being a lawyer at one point, but that seemed boring. I eventually landed an internship in DC in the state department, and suddenly my language skills became very important. They hired me full-time, and four years later, the FBI came knocking at my door. I liked the idea of doing something with more action to it, so I went to Quantico and became an agent."
"You were looking for your roots, even if you didn't want to admit it to yourself."
"Probably. I can see that now."
"Do you only work on Russian cases?"
"No, I've done a lot of things over the years. But when there is a need for my language skills, I'm usually called in."
"Were the Kenins Russian?"
"I think Carol's grandmother was Russian. But she certainly didn't know anything about the culture or speak the language. She met my mom at a yoga class when they were all living in Alexandria, and they became best friends." He paused. "Even as I say that, I don't know if it's true. Maybe how their friendship happened was also a lie." He sat up in his seat. "This is ridiculous. The only way I'm going to get answers is to ask the questions." He started the car and pulled out of the lot.
She thought about his story as they got back on the freeway. She'd never thought her search for her grandmother's killer would tie into Jax's life. But then, she'd also never imagined that he was an FBI agent, that he was working undercover at the club, and that he was lying to her about everything.
She still felt angry and betrayed. Maybe he couldn't tell her in the beginning, but last night…after they'd almost died together—he should have come clean. Why had he let the lie continue through the night and into the morning? He