Close Up: Exposure Book Three Read online

  My mom and Stella were listening, but it was difficult to tell if their attitudes towards me were softening or not. My mom still looked hard and pissed, but Stella was looking more like she always did before the whole thing happened.

  “And, well,” he said, and then he looked at me. “CJ, I’m about to tell them something that you don’t even know. In fact, I don’t think that you even knew about your agoraphobia.”

  That was true – I didn’t know about the agoraphobia. This was the first I was hearing about any of this, and it was fascinating. It was as if everything that happened to me had actually happened to somebody else. None of it seemed real, so it didn’t really affect me to hear about it.

  Mom nodded her head. “Go on, Asher, tell us what else happened.”

  “Well, CJ had agoraphobia and she got help. She checked herself into New York Presbyterian and was there for about six weeks. The therapists there helped her recover from her phobia.”

  “CJ,” Stella said. “You were in the nut house?”

  I groaned inwardly. Real sensitive there, sis. “Yes, I was. And I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t call it that.”

  Stella just gave me a look. “Why not? You always called it that. Remember when Uncle Louie was in one? You didn’t have any problem calling that hospital the nut house then.”

  “Well, I do now.” I was bristling because I still didn’t remember spending time in a psychiatric facility, and I suddenly was protective over how Stella was talking about it.

  “Huh. Well, I guess it does run in the family then,” Stella said. She wasn’t joking, either, because she wasn’t smiling when she said that.

  Asher narrowed his eyes at her. “Stella, please be sensitive to what CJ went through. She was having a tough time, a really rough time, after little Nathaniel was killed. And the two of you didn’t exactly help.”

  And, with that, the tension between the four of us was thick. My mother and Stella had just met Asher, and he was already lecturing them. I loved him for that, though, because he was sticking up for me. But I could already tell that he wasn’t going to win any points for his candor.

  “Don’t lecture me, young man,” my mom said to him. And then she pointed at me. “CJ did a really stupid thing. A criminally stupid thing, and my son paid for her stupid thing with his life. He was the light of my entire existence, and all of that was taken from me through CJ’s stupidity. I can’t forgive her for that. I would think that you would feel the same.”

  “Regardless, she needed support, she didn’t need to be shunned. You’re her family. You should act like it.”

  At that, my mom started speaking Italian again, and Asher was listening to her.

  “No, Ms. Parker, I don’t think that you should be speaking about your daughter like that. Contrary to what you might think, she didn’t do that intentionally. She loved her little brother, and she would never intentionally hurt him.”

  My mom looked stunned. “You speak Italian?”

  “I do. So, you can’t get away with saying cruel things about CJ in a different language and hope that she won’t understand.”

  I looked at Asher, marveling that he spoke Italian. I had no idea.

  Then I looked at my mom. “You think that I did that intentionally? Why would you think that, mom?”

  She sighed. “Cordelia, I think that you wanted Nathaniel out of the way. You want me to be unhappy. I have no idea why you would want that, but I sometimes feel that you enjoy my misery.”

  I was stunned at the revelation. “Mom, for lack of a better word, you’re crazy. I’ve been there for you after all of your husbands dumped you. I’ve brought food to you for weeks on end because you couldn’t get out of bed because of depression. Why would you believe that I want you miserable, and why would you EVER believe that I would do anything to harm that beautiful little boy?”

  Mom crossed her arms. “I think that you better leave, Cordelia. And you, too, Mr. Sloane. You have some nerve coming over here and butting yourself into the family business.”

  Asher looked angry, but he just shook his head. And then he started to speak Italian, and my mom’s face turned to stone.

  I felt like things were surreal when the two of them started a heated exchange in Italian. Stella and I had no idea what they were talking about, but apparently it wasn’t good.

  Finally, after about ten minutes of the two of them going back and forth, Asher said, in English, “okay, we’ll leave.” Then he turned to me. “Let’s go, CJ.”

  He took my hand, and he led me into his Tesla. And then he drove off.

  “What was that all about?” I asked him as we drove through Brooklyn on our way to my apartment. At least, I assumed that he was taking me home. He might have been taking me to his home.

  He shook his head. “Your mother is a piece of work.”

  “How did you learn Italian so well?”

  He shrugged. “I have a knack for languages. I guess you forgot that about me. It’s been in my interest to learn as many languages as I can, for obvious reasons. After all, my company is international, and I negotiate with companies around the globe.”

  “Okay. Now, tell me what you and she were arguing about.”

  “It’s pretty simple. I told her that she wasn’t being fair to you, and she came back at me with her nonsense about you somehow wanting to get rid of Nathaniel. I told her that she wasn’t being rational, and she basically told me to butt out. And the argument just went round and round like that.”

  I sighed. “Asher, I don’t know what to say to you about any of this. I don’t really want to thank you, because I don’t want you getting the idea that it’s perfectly okay to just show up at places where you aren’t invited. In fact, I thought that I made it clear, when I left your DC hotel room, that I needed some space from you. Right now, you’re not exactly giving me what I asked for.”

  He hung his head. “I’m sorry for that, but CJ, I can’t help it. I’m very protective of you. Especially now. You’ve gone through so much in the last year or so, and I know how you were. How much you suffered. You don’t have memory of a lot of that, but I do. I just didn’t want your mother and sister to devastate you more.”

  “I know that you mean well. But you have to let me fight my own battles, at least when it comes to my family. We’ll get through this, I hope, but it seems that you made things worse with your meddling.”

  “I know,” he said, looking straight ahead. “And I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. I should have had more control over the situation, but I let them get to me. That was my mistake, of course.”

  I was silent for awhile, trying to process everything that had happened. It all went awry. It might not have, if not for Asher’s meddling. I might have been able to persuade my mother to at least hear me out. I might have even been able to convince her to go to family counseling with me. But no…Asher had to show up and ruin everything.

  A part of me was extremely angry with him about that. Another part of me, though, felt that he meant well, and he did all of that because he cared about me.

  Still, I was feeling, even more than before, that I needed to be alone. Apart from him. He was suffocating me, encroaching on my space and my boundaries, and I just needed to get away.

  “Take me home,” I finally said.

  “Okay.” Then he took a deep breath. “But CJ, I would like you to know why I did what I did. Why I showed up like that, and why I let your mother get to me.”

  “I know why. You already told me why. You told me that you felt that I was vulnerable and you were worried for me. That’s great, but that doesn’t erase the fact that you’re crowding me. I feel that I can’t breathe.”

  “No, you don’t know why. I want you, very much, to get back with your family because I don’t want you to end up like me. I don’t really have a family. I mean, I have a twin sister and a father, but my brother was brutally murdered and my mother committed suicide over it. And, believe me, family is something that is supposed to b
e your anchor. My anchor is gone, and I don’t want that for you.”

  I blinked. Something about his words struck a chord with me. It was almost as if it conjured a memory in me. A memory of him telling me about all of that.

  I reached my hand over to him and he took it. “I’m so sorry, Asher, to hear about all of that. That’s horrible.”

  He nodded. “It is.” Then he sighed. “My father…I have a real hatred for him, but, at the same time, I know that he’s the only reason why I’m still alive. Why I am where I am. Without him, I would be on the streets of Russia right now doing God-knows-what. But I hate what he does, and what he stands for.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Asher came to a red light. “Okay. But do you want me to take you home? Or go to my place?”

  “Your place. I think that you need to talk about things, and Scarlett is probably around my apartment, so I don’t think that we’ll have the privacy that we need.”

  “Okay,” he said, and then he took a U-Turn and headed towards his place. “I think that you need to know more about my father anyhow.”

  We drove in silence until we got to his place, and then we rode the elevator up to his penthouse suite. We then walked into the den, and I sat down and Asher poured me a drink.

  Ah, finally, the drink that I was craving. I sipped the cool liquor, which was an Amaretto Sour. Asher knew how to make an amazing cocktail, that was for sure.

  Asher had poured himself a scotch, and he was sipping it while he stared thoughtfully out into space. Finally, he started talking.

  “I didn’t know my father until I was fourteen,” he said. “He had abandoned my family. It was just my mother, my sister and brother and me. It was quite a struggle to get by. Russia doesn’t have the same type of safety net as America does, so if you’re poor, you’re really, really poor. And we were.”

  I tried to imagine Asher being poor, and I just couldn’t. He carried himself so well, and was so well-spoken and intelligent. He didn’t come off as somebody who had ever had any want for anything.

  Asher continued. “My older brother Anton started to work for my father when he was fifteen. I didn’t know about that. I don’t know why my father chose to reach out to him when he did, or why. At any rate, he kept it all a secret.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was basically a soldier in my father’s group. He ran surveillance and sometimes rubbed out people who were threatening my father’s operation. That was why he was killed.”

  “A soldier,” I said. “Interesting choice of words.”

  “But accurate. I had no idea what he was doing, though. He lied to my mother, my sister and me and told us all that he was working for a local factory. We didn’t question it. It wasn’t until he was killed and my mother committed suicide that I found out the truth. And, in finding out the truth, I found out who my father was.”

  “And who was he?”

  “A very powerful man. He is the godfather of his syndicate, and that syndicate is one of the most powerful in Russia. He’s easily a billionaire in his own right, but he makes his money off of human trafficking, cybercrime and drugs. Personally, his operation turns my stomach. Especially the human trafficking. It makes me sick, and, what’s worse, my sister is involved with that too.”

  I shook my head and shuddered. A flash of memory came into the cracks of my brain, as I seemed to remember something about being held captive by somebody. But, as with all my memories, this one was hazy and unformed.

  “Your sister. How is she involved with that?”

  “Natalia,” he said, “finds the girls for my father. She befriends them, makes them trust her, and then she leads them right into the organization. I don’t know how she lives with herself. I hate her as much as I hate my father, even though I shouldn’t. A part of me knows that she doesn’t feel like she has a choice. It’s either that or live on the streets. There is so much misery and depression in my town, you can’t even believe it. Natalia is only doing what she needs to do to survive, but that doesn’t make me feel any sympathy for her. I wish I did, though.”

  As I sat there and looked at him, more flashes were coming to me. “Yuri,” I said. “There was a guy named Yuri. He held me captive.”

  And then I vomited on the floor.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” I said to him.

  To his credit, he seemed not to mind having to clean up the mess. He simply got up and got a towel, and silently wiped it up. It was on the hardwood floor, though, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

  Still, I felt like I fell more in love with him as I watched him silently working.

  When he was finished, he sat next to me on the sofa. “Don’t worry about that, CJ,” he said. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes. It’s just your talking about the human trafficking is making me feel extremely anxious. And I remember something about that Yuri. I could see his face, and, quite frankly, it made me sick.”

  Asher nodded. “Well, now you know how I feel. My father is heavily involved with that trade. But, as I said, he protects me and he financed my way through Yale and Stanford for my bachelor’s and my PhD. Because I went to Stanford, I was able to get the kind of education that was necessary for me to discover and patent the alternative energy sources that have made me wealthy and has done good for the world.” He sighed. “I feel guilty, sometimes, knowing that I have benefitted so much from the wealth of such a despicable man.”

  I almost hated to ask the next question, but I knew that I had to. “What about you, Asher? You worked for him, didn’t you? What did you do?”

  “I was a soldier for him as well, but my father soon found out that I had a knack for computer hacking. I was able to breach any security protocol with really a minimum of effort, so my father put these talents to work. That was really the most innocuous part of the business, so I was relieved that I was given this job. Because if he forced me into the human trafficking part of the business, I probably would have literally killed myself before I would ever let that happen. I could never live with myself, knowing that I was responsible for the absolute misery of another human being.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I stole money from large overseas banks. I also was involved in quite a few other large thefts, some of which made the news. I’m not proud of it, but our group was able to obtain quite a few credit card numbers from some data breaches. I can’t go into all of that, but you probably have heard the news of some of the data breaches that my group was involved in. I played a large part in getting those credit card numbers.” He looked ashamed about that. “That was really an awful thing to do, because we were stealing money from people who couldn’t necessarily afford to lose it. I reassured myself that what I was doing wasn’t that bad, because, in the end, it isn’t usually the consumers who lose the money in data breaches, it’s large corporations. Either the credit card issuers end up paying, or the stores whose data was breached. So, considering all the other jobs that I could have done for my father, cybercrime was probably the most innocuous.”

  I regarded my drink, and took a sip of it. “Do you still feel that way? After all, you’re the CEO of an international corporation. Wouldn’t you be pissed if people stole from you like that?”

  I almost felt bad busting him like that, because I knew where he was coming from. If you’re given the choice between human trafficking, drug dealing or stealing money from corporations that probably wouldn’t even notice the money missing, then the choice should be easy. But I still wondered if his perspective had changed, now that he was firmly on the other side of the equation.

  “Of course I would be,” he said. “But, as I was telling my friend Nikolai, who asked me the same question, I wouldn’t be so upset about losing money to a hacker, but, rather, losing valuable information. My corporation has a great deal of confidential information that’s on our databases, and losing any of that would be devastating. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so vigilant, still, about
computer security, and why I still keep up on all of the security breach techniques that computer hackers use. I still have all the skills that I ever had when it comes to computer security, but I use it for defense now, as opposed to offense.”

  I bit my lip and looked at him. “So, then, your father’s organization is involved in the slave trade. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t look forward to meeting him. I have the philosophy of being non-judgmental of people, but that’s only when they’re not actively hurting another person or animal. But your father clearly crosses that line, so…”

  Asher looked hopeful, though, when I was saying this. “Are you saying that you are going to meet my father?” The unspoken part of this question was clear – if I was going to meet his father, then that would mean that I would have agreed to marry him.

  “No, I’m not saying that at all. I still haven’t decided.” I paused. “You have to admit that you’re a complicated man, and, I’m sorry to be so blunt, but you seem to have a lot of baggage. Your father, your ex-girlfriend. And showing up at my mom’s house seems…vaguely stalkerish.”

  Asher was hurt by my assessment of him, it was clear by his face. So, I put my arm around him. “But all of that doesn’t mean that I don’t love you. I’m just frustrated by my inability to remember anything about our past together. And, because I can’t remember all of that, I have to go by what I do know about you, and, let’s face it, it hasn’t exactly been great. It’s been just one thing after another coming at me.” I took a deep breath. “But I do love you. That much I know.”

  He just nodded his head and looked at his glass of scotch. “I didn’t mean to stalk you. I just thought that you needed me, that’s all.”

  “I did,” I said. “I really did need you, but, at the same time, I wish that I could just tell you what I need instead of you guessing and assuming.”