Treizecisinoua || Rogue

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What in the world was happening? 

The room was tense and dead silent. Even the rythmic pacing of the grandfather clock faded into the background.

Mila sat flabbergasted, watching as Celine and Gerard interrogated Alec, or whoever he was.

"Where is my son?" asked Celine, her voice now holding an edge. Whatever pleasantries she'd put on before were long gone.

"We know he must be alive." Gerard said. "You wouldn't have access to--"

"We'd like to organize an exchange," Celine interrupted her husband. Gerard didn't mind, in fact he seemed used to his wife interrupting him.

Alec looked at them with a neutral face, but she could tell he was grinding his teeth. That's how she knew there must be truth to what they were saying. She could see it in his mannerisms. In the way he became more still. His words slowly formed, but when he spoke it wasn't the Alec she knew. 

"And what might you have to exchange?" he said, in a thick eastern-European accent.

Mila's jaw dropped. Celine and Gerard both pushed back from the table as if it were suddenly boiling hot. 

Their reactions amused him, and he interlocked fingers, waiting for them to gather themselves.

How dense was she to have never noticed? This entire time she'd been living with an imposter without a clue.

Celine and Gerard were as stunned as she was and hadn't managed to reply.

"And why would I consider this?" he asked.

Celine gathered herself and cleared her throat. "Because, if you don't, we are prepared to contact the FBI and tell them everything. We've noticed the interest they've shown in this new business acquisition of yours and think they will be interested in what we have to say. We know how you people work. In order to get our son back alive it's best to keep the authorities out of it."

He smirked. "What proof do you have?"

"DNA," said Celine. "Yours, to be exact. We've been collecting it. You might look and sound like my son, but you don't have his DNA. If you do not hand him over within the next two days, we are also ready to go to the media. You won't be able to make it outside of the city, and you'll never be able to go anywhere again without being recognized."

Mila looked back and forth between Celine and the imposter. It was bizarre and oddly satisfying to watch him in the hot seat.

"I don't enjoy being threatened," he replied. Though, it seemed he was mulling it over. "If I were to actually consider this, what would you have to exchange?"

Celine glanced her way.

"The location of the Black Family."

Mila froze.

"What do you mean?" Her adrenaline got the best of her, and she was now standing.

Her letters must have gotten to Cordelia. She hadn't heard from her family in a while, but she had no idea they'd been out of Alec's reach.

She thought back to early mornings in the office. How she'd managed to send two letters to Cordelia before Daniel got in. Getting caught the one time only temporarily discouraged her, and until now, she'd had no way of knowing if they'd reached her.

Cordelia was supposed to hide them so she could escape, not use them as leverage. Mila realized that once Cordelia found out what was going on with Alec, she must have made other plans with the Laurents.

"Fine," he said. "Deal."

"We want to do the exchange tomorrow, before the ball." said Celine.

"After," he replied. "To ensure you don't do anything stupid in front of all your friends."

"Fine." she said. "Tomorrow, after the ball."

*****

The Laurents were gone, and it was just the two them.

Mila sat opposite of him at the table. She wasn't budging until her questions were answered.

"You can drop the act." she said. "No more games. Tell me who you are."

To her annoyance, he didn't say anything.

"What's your name?" she asserted.

He got up and took two glasses from the liquor cabinet. He poured, then sat one down next to her before returning to his spot at the end of the table. She didn't drink it.

"Victor," he said, sipping the scotch. "My name is Victor Alesandri."

"Where are you from and why are you hiding, Victor?" she paused after saying his name. It felt wrong. Weird and foreign on her tongue.

"I'm from Moldova. It's a small, land-locked country next to Romania." he said, "I guess at this point, you might as well know. Since our survival will soon be put to the test."

What did that mean?

"We were sweethearts at university," he said. "You Americans call it undergrad, I think. Anyways, we were happy. Very happy."

"In Paris?" she asked. He nodded.

"I proposed and you said yes. Unfortunately, my father didn't approve of our union. He wanted me to marry a nice local girl and move home to become a politician. It didn't matter though, because after meeting my family, you backed out of our marriage, and moved home to America."

He finished his drink, and got up to make himself another. She'd never seen him drink so heavily.

"Soon after, my father was arrested. You see, my family's business isn't necessarily legal, and our assets were seized. I was forced into a labor agreement with our business partners in order to pay back the debt we owed for the delinquency. My family's business is part of a larger network, think of it like an international corporation. We have contracts, business deals to uphold, even quarterly revenue reports. With the authorities monitoring us and my father out of the picture, we had no way of upholding our end. When the Partners got their hands on me, my life as Victor Alesandri was essentially over. They decided our company was to be stripped and absorbed into the rest of the corporation, and I was to run things however the Partners commanded."

For some reason a lightbulb went off. "VA! The initials scratched into the side of the box." she said. "That was you?"

"Yes," he said. "They threw me in for weeks to break me down. To become their docile, emotionless puppet. I wanted you to feel the pain I felt. Maybe that way I could forgive you for what you did."

"All of this just because I spurned you?" she asked. She thought of all the times he said she wasn't innocent, and how much she'd been through because of him. Her hand grasped hard on the drink. So hard, she thought she'd break the glass.

"I know I can be a lot, theatrical even, but I'm not nearly that dramatic." He laughed.

"The entire time I was in the box, I was trying to think of where we went wrong. Over and over I played in my head how we'd gotten in this position. Once I emerged, they told me it was you. You helped the authorities bring down my family by feeding them the information that got my father arrested."

He looked her dead in the eye.

So that was it. The reason for all this.

There was nothing she could say, and she still had so many questions. However, she let him continue talking.

"Of course, blood atonement was ordered against you, and I was in charge of carrying it out," he said. "At first, I couldn't believe it, so I had you tracked down in America. You want to know what I found?

He said it as if she knew the answer.

"You'd moved on. You were happy. Happier than I'd ever seen you. I was in your peripheral, part of the sad past you left behind. My life was in shambles, while you were off—" he stopped himself.

"So, I ordered the hit."

She shouldn't be surprised he was capable of having her murdered, but it still stung. It was most likely rooted in the fact that someone could hate her so much.

"Before it could be completed, I got cold feet," he said. "I tried to call it off, but it was too late. You were badly hurt, but at least you survived."

A thought sprung into her mind. "My accident?" she asked.

"Yes."

It felt like being hit by a truck. All this time, she thought it was her fault. Everyone blamed her and let her believe it was.

Finally, she took a drink. It was smokey, bitter and hard to swallow.

"I came to the realization that I wanted my life to go back to the way it was before. So, I passed off the death in the accident as yours and hatched a new plan. To figure out how to dig you, me, and my family out of the mess with the Partners. I had to achieve the impossible, and there was only one way: To buy ourselves out, and give them something they want."

"HSG," she slumped in her chair.

His eyes danced.

"They've wanted access to HSG's ledger for years because of its unique routes. The international smuggling business is getting more inundated by the day. It's harder to control even long established routes. If they had that, they could open new previously untouched territory for trafficking. It's worth billions. So, I looked into it and also found HSG holds a quarter of its earnings in cryptocurrency. I knew if I could get access to it, it could potentially be enough to make things right.

I knew they would never trust me enough to execute this plan, so I did what so many others before me have done. Dillinger, Fuentes, da Rocha. I escaped and changed my face to become someone else. Thanks to you, I met the perfect target at that art exhibit.

I scouted him for months, did background checks and sent pictures of him to my surgeon. Despite a few differences, we looked very much alike. Because of his affinity for hard drugs, it'd be easy to write off some of our differences in mannerisms as new, sober Alec.

No one had seen Alec sober since adolescence, which meant I could alter his appearance and body-shape under the guise of being into health and fitness. See, our physical appearances can be altered to a degree, but the things that make us distinctly who we are, are pretty much out of reach with plastic surgery. I still needed Alec's help for certain details, so I kept him around."

"Where is he?" she asked. He'd been forthcoming so far, so she figured she'd give it a shot.

"In a private storage unit. Henderson kept him company for a while."

She felt sick. She thought she'd had it bad. The real Alec was stuck somewhere probably unable to see daylight. Only able to communicate with the person who'd stolen his identity. What a nightmare.

"Did you really think you wouldn't be found out?" she asked. "That his family wouldn't know?"

"I only needed to pull it off long enough to achieve my objective." he said. "Then I could pay off the Partners, gain our freedom, and disappear forever. You have to understand something about these people. No matter how hard I tried to disappear they were always going to find me. I've been running on borrowed time since the beginning. My plan was to pay them back, then announce our move to a remote country at the party. That would squash all questions once we go off-grid."

"Sounds like you thought of everything." she said.

"Yeah, everything but his ex being such a thorn in my side."

"Love is a powerful thing." Mila said. "It's amazing so many people underestimate it."

"You think I don't know that?" he scowled. "The people you know as Olga and Raul helped me escape out of love and loyalty to my family. They changed their faces for me. They could teach you something about loyalty."

Now it made perfect sense why Olga hated her so much. She'd had to uproot her life and undergo painful surgery because of Mila.

She suddenly appreciated the fact that she wasn't dead.

"Are we in danger right now?" she asked.

"Very much so," he replied. "But less than we were before you accessed HSG. I'm calling a meeting with the Partners soon and giving them everything. But you need to know." he said. "They may kill us anyway."

A chill ran down her spine.

"What do we do?"

"Pray," he said jokingly.

She didn't think it was funny.

"Well, the most important thing right now is to make sure the Laurent's don't 'out' me before I've had a chance to square things away. This means keeping them quiet at the party, and giving their son back."

"But if you give him back, won't they immediately go to the authorities?" she asked.

"Yes, possibly. But that will take time. I'll need to be subpoenaed. The point is that it buys us more time than if I disagreed to the exchange."

A strange feeling was coming over her. Were they on the same side?

"Besides," he said. "It's not the FBI, or any government authority we have to fear. It's the Partners. They're big, they're bad, and there's no outrunning them.




































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