Masquerade: Her Billionaire - Venice

  “What? What did you say?”

  Ash sighed. “I said have you seen Anya Voronova anywhere?”

  Cal’s neurons stopped firing. It was like hearing someone talking from far away. “What?”

  “Anya. Voronova.” Ash’s voice was exasperated. “Anya. Come on, I know you know her. Didn’t you guys date, like, a billion years ago?”

  Cal’s lips felt stiff, wooden. He formed words with difficulty. “Anya is here?”

  Ash’s eyes were moving restlessly over the crowd. But now they honed in on his face. “Why shouldn’t she be? She’s deputy director of Peace and Jobs. Of course she’s here.”

  Peace and Jobs was one of a number of NGOs that had worked hard to secure the Accords, working under the umbrella Diplomatic Dossier. Peace and Jobs worked in the background, an organization with a sterling reputation. Cal had never had dealings with Peace and Jobs but he’d certainly heard of them.

  Anya was deputy director?

  “I only met her once back in the day,” Ash said. “Wouldn’t recognize her now. And all I have is this.” He held out his cell that showed an ID. Cal’s heart gave a painful kick in his chest. Oh fuck. There she was.

  Ten years older and about a million times more beautiful even though it was a work ID, face full on, harsh lighting, no makeup, hair drawn back from her face. Anya’s face was no longer girlish. It was a woman’s face — intelligent and determined.

  Cal stared at the photo, soaking in every pixel. In all these years he deliberately hadn’t looked for her, hadn’t tried to keep up, hadn’t Googled her, ever. Once he started, he’d never stop. His heart was already broken, no point in smashing it to bits.

  In his head, he’d convinced himself she’d left because he’d never have been able to give her the lifestyle she’d been born to, even though that was insane. Anya had never given any sign of caring that he had no money. But how else to understand what had happened in his miserable hovel on a snowy afternoon? The love of his life just walking out on him.

  In his head, he’d convinced himself that she was bound to marry some fourth generation rich guy and lead a pampered life. But the face he was looking at wasn’t pampered, wasn’t botoxed or surgically enhanced. It had lines and the hint of shadows under her eyes, as if she’d been working too hard.

  Well, yeah. If she was Deputy Director of Peace and Jobs she’d been working nonstop for years.

  Ash bobbed his head to indicate the crowd. There wasn’t a woman there who didn’t have a mask and wasn’t wearing a costume, most very elaborate. Some were completely hidden behind the classic Venetian porcelain masks. Ash tapped his cell screen. “My facial recognition app won’t work here. Not enough identifying data points.”

  Ash’s face tightened and he finally looked adult. A nasty adult, thoroughly grown up.

  Cal nearly did a double take. “Why are you looking for Anya? Is anything wrong?”

  Ash shrugged. “I came into some information today that she absolutely needs to know. Don’t know her cell number, the offices of Peace and Jobs aren’t picking up, she’s not answering email. But I know she’s here. She has to be. Larry Silver, her boss, is apparently out of town, won’t get here until the signing ceremony tomorrow, and she has to be here, to represent Peace and Jobs.” His eyes slid to Cal’s. “It’s really important. Think you can find her for me?”

  Could he find Anya in a crowd of strangers? Hell yeah. He could recognize Anya anywhere, even at a hundred paces, even after a hundred years, even dressed in a burqa. Though he’d tried to uproot her, cast her out, she was buried deep in his heart and he was sure there would be an instant recognition if he ever saw her again. Cal hated it, but his heart was beating triple time at the thought of seeing Anya again.

  Even more, he hated to admit to himself that any time he’d been Stateside in the past five years, he’d unconsciously searched every crowd for a cap of shiny gold hair and piercing blue eyes. He hated crowds and that was one of the main reasons.

  Because Anya was never there.

  Though he never knew what he’d do if by some miracle she actually was in that crowd. It had taken him years before he could think of her without a stab to the heart. And further years before a day or sometimes even two would go by without her popping up in his head.

  As a matter of fact, he’d welcomed these past five years of brutal, unremitting, dangerous work in Yemen, then a desolate part of Morocco, then Iraq and Syria. Getting up before sunrise and collapsing onto a cot long after the sun went down, falling unconscious rather than falling asleep. The work — physically and mentally strenuous — had scrubbed her at least partially from his heart.

  He wasn’t over her and he imagined that maybe he’d never be over her. He could see himself in some hospital in extreme old age, dying, and wondering whether she was in the same hospital.

  Sometimes Cal wondered whether his DNA had been changed by falling so deeply in love at such a young age. Whether his heart became a lock and only Anya had the key.

  And she’d thrown it away.

  He’d tried his best to think of her as little as possible, because at first a deep black pall and then years later a gray pall descended on him whenever he pictured her. He had wonderful memories of their time together. They’d done everything a young couple in love could do when there was no money. Well, Anya had had money, true, but Cal wouldn’t let her pay for anything. So it was long walks in the park and picnics on the Common and a lot of sex at his place. But what always popped up was the memory of that terrible day when she left. When she shattered his heart and he hadn’t understood why.

  He still didn’t understand why.

  But now — well now it looked like for the first time since that day, he was in the same building as Anya. Breathing the same air she was. Cal walked forward, aware that he’d been scanning the crowd since the moment Ash mentioned her name. Head on a swivel, Cal made his way through the crowd.

  All his senses were assaulted. There were three huge chandeliers casting a light almost as bright as the sun. Thousands of people were talking excitedly, vying with the small chamber orchestra set up on a podium at the far end of the ballroom. The perfume and sweat of a thousand people mixed with the scents of food on platters being circulated together with champagne. All the costumes were brightly colored, as were many of the masks.

  The entire reception was a riot of sound and color and smells and looking for one person in this crowd seemed like an impossibility. But Anya was somewhere here and he wasn’t leaving before seeing her, talking to her.

  If this had been anything but a party and he was looking for an object in a big space full of objects, he’d have divided the room into a grid and searched it systematically. But the place was crowded and people moved constantly in a speeded-up Brownian motion. Everyone seemed to be on the make, looking for another drink, another bite to eat, another person other than the one they were talking to.

  Everyone was restless, agitated, hyped up. It was an historic occasion and if you weren’t drunk on the champagne you were drunk on the moment.

  There was no way to search systematically so he just bulled his way from one end to the other, head on a swivel, watching carefully to his left and right. The costumes were amazing, mostly a reproduction of what he understood to be Venice’s heyday, the 17th century. So there were a lot of shepherdesses and elaborate ballroom gowns and men in livery. But there was a lot of cosplay, too. He saw several Wonder Women, two Batmen and a couple of T’Challas, the Black Panther.

  And that was just by the drinks station.

  God, how would she be dressed? What would Anya choose as a costume? When they’d been together, Cal could have confidently come up with a couple of ideas she might have, but now? It was ten years later. People changed a lot in ten years.

  He only hoped she wasn’t wearing one of those porcelain masks that completely covered the face except for the eyes. Her eyes were immediately recognizable but if she was wearing the porcelain mask and contact len
ses …

  Never mind. He’d recognize her by her stance, by her perfume, by the aura around her.

  He was dressed in the least costume-y thing he could come up with — as the Phantom of the Opera. He was wearing one of his designer tuxes and one of his engineers had 3-D laser printed the Phantom half mask that fit his face perfectly.

  Nobody gave him a second look as he scoured the ground floor of the immense Palazzo. He made his way across the enormous space once then back, like wading through a huge lake of costumed humans.

  She wasn’t here. But there were three other floors, a ballroom, and a bridge thirty feet in the air over a side canal led to another palazzo.

  It seemed like everyone who’d ever been involved in the multiparty, multistate Accords, thousands of people over the years, was here, ready to party.

  Well, if Anya was here, Cal was going to find her. He’d stayed out of her orbit — never dreaming over the past years that they had been working on the same project, though far apart — but if she was here already, he couldn’t be accused of stalking her.

  Because fuck, he’d wanted to. He’d moved cross-country only because he’d had to, and almost every single fucking day for years, particularly after he started earning serious money, he’d wanted to board a plane and seek her out. Which would have been a disaster. He’d avoided Boston, he’d avoided the whole fucking east coast, as a result. He’d gone from Stanford, to Benford Labs, to founding his own company in California, to the Middle East, without ever setting foot in New England because if he had, the temptation to seek her out would have been too strong.

  And he’d stayed off the internet. He was good with computers and he’d written a little program that created static whenever he typed Anya Voronova in any search engine. Otherwise he’d have followed her every move and driven himself crazy.

  But hell. She was here, right now. And he had a reason to seek her out, a legitimate one, even if the reason was that asshole Ash.

  He started up the curving monumental staircase, with marble steps and polished teak balustrade, halting halfway up to look down on the revelers. From this vantage point he could see every corner of the huge hall. He was used to measuring, surveying, so he pulled up a mental grid of the room and quartered it, fast.

  No Anya.

  On up.

  The monumental staircase gave onto huge glass doors. He pushed through them into a large frescoed room. He could see another set of doors across the room. There were slightly fewer people on the second floor, though it was still crowded. He’d refined his search parameters and could literally not see the people outside them. Men — eliminated from his scan. Too short and too tall women — the same. There were still a lot of potential Anyas but fewer.

  Cal was tunnel-visioning now, barely seeing waiters holding out silver trays of food and champagne, noticing the string quartet at the end of the long hallway only glancingly.

  He powered his way across the room and pushed open the doors into what looked like a fantasy land. It was a large hallway with an arcade, ringed by torches, elaborate frescoes covering every inch. Cherubs and shepherds and shepherdesses and goddesses. Huge, antique, enameled vases lined the marble-tiled floor, planted with tall palms interspersed with flowering shrubs, deeply scented. The arcade gave out onto an inner courtyard where another string quartet was playing and the sounds of Vivaldi drifted up, as in a dream.

  There were fewer people in this room and Cal could see right down to the end. Nothing. Except …

  There was a hidden alcove to the right. Someone had been standing in the alcove and now emerged into the hallway. A woman, dressed as a 1920s flapper. A dress with jet beads, just above her knees. Black hair in a short bob, a velvet hat with a net veil covering her face. Anya didn’t have black hair, her hair was honey blonde, but …

  There was something about the way this woman moved.

  There was something in the air in this corridor. It was charged, electric. There was a scent in the air, a mix of lavender and citrus, fresh and sultry at the same time. A scent that intoxicated.

  Cal found himself moving faster and faster down the hallway. He’d worked in very dangerous places over the course of the years and he’d learned to move swiftly and very silently. It was second nature by now.

  He was more than halfway down when the woman turned and he saw the sky blue eyes that glowed beneath the black lace veil.

  His heart thundered and his breath grew short.

  Anya.

  Anya Voronova was sorry she’d come to the crowded masked ball. If her boss at Peace and Jobs hadn’t been detained in Cairo, she’d have cried off. Simply refused to go. Larry knew her well and knew what he was asking of her. But he’d had to stay a day over in Cairo and someone had to represent Peace and Jobs at the celebratory ball. Looked like that someone was her.

  She knew that it was a privilege. The Palazzo was an exquisite work of art, the food was amazing, the music was fabulous. Even the people looked intriguing — though she knew a great number of them and many were greedy, grasping bastards, when they weren’t violent monsters.

  But … peace had broken out. A few good men and women in a few good governments had worked really hard to create a system where it was worth everyone’s while to make peace rather than war.

  And a lot of people were going to make a lot of money, most of them reluctantly accepting wealth in lieu of thousand-year hatreds, but doing it nonetheless. Maybe their great great grandchildren would forget about the thousand-year-old hatreds.

  Good old greed, she thought, as she had thought many times before. It was better than hate.

  She and the small staff at Peace and Jobs, together with about fifty other NGOs, had worked tirelessly for the greatest diplomatic achievement in living memory.

  She should have enjoyed dressing up in something other than jeans and sweatshirt and ball cap, her uniform in the field. Enjoyed putting on a costume, mingling with people who didn’t have to be coaxed and persuaded to rebuild schools and hospitals in the rubble of their cities. Enticed into not hating their neighbors.

  She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose through the veil. Dressing like a 1920s flapper had been her little sign of rebellion since most everyone was dressed in 17th-century costume, maybe in a subconscious attempt to forget what the modern world was like.

  Wow.

  Was she in a sour mood. Maybe she was tired, that was it. What other reason could she have for not enjoying a brilliant masked ball celebrating something she and her colleagues had been working toward for years? Something that would have been considered impossible just a few years ago.

  Or maybe it was because she was alone here, though that was entirely her fault. Or rather — fault wasn’t maybe the right term. It was just that of the many invitations she’d had, none had appealed. Even her boss had made it clear that he’d like for there to be something more than friendship between them.

  But luckily he was also the sort of guy to step back as soon as she made her lack of interest clear.

  The others — not so much.

  What was wrong with her? She could have her pick of men and she never picked one. Or rarely did. The last date she’d been on was — she had to actually focus to remember — in Amman. The US Embassy trade attaché. Nice, not unhandsome, very interested and very boring. No spark there at all.

  She hadn’t been really interested in anyone since … her mind skittered away from that name, as it always did. But she was too tired to force herself not to think of him.

  Cal.

  Calvin Burns. Maybe the love of her life. Not the one who got away but the one she’d let get away. The man she’d tossed away years ago.

  There’d really been no one since and how pathetic was that? There’d been lovers of course. A couple where she thought they could fill the Cal-shaped hole in her heart, but they never could. At one point, crying on the couch after she’d sent away a perfectly nice but not-Cal man, she’d wondered whether she was cursed. Whether that
long-ago gesture, forced on her, spelled her doom. That she was destined to spend her years on this earth in solitude.

  But she was Russian in blood only. That was the kind of thinking of her ancestors — that our lives are fated to follow a pre-ordained destiny. That our blood determined whether we’d have happy or tragic lives.

  No, she was thoroughly American, convinced that people shaped their own lives.

  So why was she so freaking unhappy?

  Why did she look for him in every crowd? Maybe that was why she was up here all alone, so she wouldn’t find herself in the ballroom scanning for a tall man with sandy hair and light brown eyes like an eagle’s, as she had so many times before. Even though it was absurd to think of him being here, in Venice, at this celebration of the Accords.

  He was almost certainly back in California, with his wife. Nine years ago, the instant she’d been free to do so, she’d flown to Palo Alto, to see if he could forgive her. It had been crazy, she’d known it was crazy, but had been helpless to stop herself.

  She’d actually seen him in her first half hour in town, holding hands with a beautiful blonde sporting a huge diamond ring. She’d turned around and taken the first flight back to Boston from SFO. The internet told her everything she needed to know. Checking up on him, she read the announcement of his marriage.

  She took a vow then to never check up on him ever again, and kept it.

  She applied for a job with the new NGO Peace and Jobs that promised hard work and travel. Perfect.

  So why was she thinking so hard about Cal right now? Why …

  Her skin prickled. Sweat broke out on her back, though the hallway was cool. Her heart started pounding as some kind of band tightened around her chest.

  What the hell?

  Was this a heart attack? A stroke? She felt dizzy, as if she might stumble and fall at any minute.

  It was like the molecules of the air were charged with electric static. The hairs on her forearms rose, she felt pressure on the nape of her neck.

  Maybe it was danger. These past years had been spent in some very dangerous places and she prided herself on her street smarts. Maybe there was a threat to her and her body was letting her know.