I want to tell Yuri what I’ve discovered, but he’d say I am crazy. I threw Tanechka off the side of a cliff into Dariali Gorge. She could not have survived.
After, I nearly died of heartbreak. I wanted to die. I should’ve.
Yet there she is. Alive. It has to be her.
I fall back into the picture.
Turn, dammit.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mira
I watch two of Bloody Lazarus’s men roll a massive plastic bag up around my father’s legs and over his bloody body. Body bag, I think dimly as they close it with a zip tie and haul him away. I mouth the words “I love you” only to look over and catch Lazarus’s cruel smile.
“Touching,” he says. “But it’s nothing compared to what I’ll do to your boyfriend.”
My heart thunders, but I manage to plaster on a smile. You never tell your enemies what’s important to you—Aleksio was right about that. “You mean the boyfriend I ran away from? Stole a car from and Tasered a guy to get away from? Maybe that’s how your girlfriends act toward you, but—”
Lazarus shoves me to the wall, hand on my throat.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I rasp.
“Show me your hands, then.”
I curl my hands into fists deep under my sleeves.
Lazarus laughs and tightens his grip around my throat. I cough and sputter. I start to claw at his massive hand.
He lets me go. “I already saw. You think I wouldn’t notice? Maybe you ran, but it wasn’t about getting away from him. Don’t lie to me again.”
My mouth goes dry.
He watches my eyes. “The sleeping king. Well, he’ll be asleep when we’re through with him, won’t he? And you’ll be our plan B. It’s good to have a backup plan, don’t you think?”
I sit there miserably and listen to their scheming. Lazarus has fifty men assembling near the day trader’s Stonybrook place. Killers. Hitters. They’re staging a mile down. Aleksio will be focused on finding me; he won’t see it coming.
At one point Lazarus looks over at me and smiles. I’m not just alive as plan B, whatever that is. He wants to see me suffer.
It’s then that Tito’s phone vibrates. Probably Aleksio again. Shit.
“They know she has the phone,” Ioannis says. “Has to be him.”
Lazarus hands it to me and presses a gun to my head. “Tell him you’re alone in the car,” he says. “You’re driving around to think. You’re coming back. Ask him to wait for you there. If you tip him off, you will die slowly.” With that he hits speaker.
“Hello?” I say before he can call me “baby” or anything like that. “Aleksio?” I say in as weird a voice as I can manage.
“Mira, where are you?”
“I’m driving around. To think.” I consider blurting it all out—they’re coming! But the men are already near. They’ll just rush him.
“Mira, what are you doing?”
“Aleksio—” I can’t focus. Lazarus is pushing the barrel of the gun harder into my temple, and it’s all I can see.
“Kiro really could be alive. We got an amazing lead on this social worker who’ll help us find him—”
I can feel the shock waves roll through the room. They didn’t think he was alive. Now they know.
“I found the folder on my mom—” I blurt.
“Mira. Baby—that’s why you left? I’m sorry—shit. I know you’re probably reeling—”
“Aleksio—” I suck in a breath. “Stay there. I’ll come back.”
“Of course I’ll stay.”
“It’ll be happy baby animals,” I say. “Okay?”
There’s a silence where I think I’ve shown my hand. Surely he’ll understand that by “happy baby animals,” I mean “blood and death.”
“I’ll wait for you,” Aleksio says. “Hurry, baby.” He cuts the connection.
“What’s happy baby animals?” Lazarus demands.
“That house is in the middle of a forest,” I say. “Baby animals frolicking around.”
“It’s fall,” Lazarus says. “Baby animals are born in spring.”
“Squirrels have two litters,” Ioannis says. “One in spring and one in fall.”
“Ioannis, you are such a fucking nerdboy.” Lazarus takes a bit of my hair and rolls it around his fingers, expression unreadable.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Aleksio
I set down the phone, heart thundering in my fucking ears. “They’re coming,” I say to Tito. I storm into Viktor’s room. “Nikolla’s on his way.”
He stands. “She told? She told where we are?”
“She warned us,” I growl. She sounded so scared. Her father wouldn’t scare her like that, would he? Shivers crawl up my spine. “It could be her father, but I think it’s Lazarus. He’s making his move, and he has Mira.”
“She told you this?”
“More or less.”
“What is more or less?”
“More or less means I know her. They’re coming, got it? They made her answer my call. She endangered herself warning us. They could be out there now.” And if they know she warned us? I can’t think about that.
“You trust her? One word and you trust her?”
“Yeah. I trust her.”
“Just like that.”
“We’re connected, Viktor. I need you to trust me on this. I just know.”
He seems to contemplate this. What is he thinking? Then just like that, he accepts it and shuts his laptop. “I understand, brat. We have that C-4. We rig the house to take them all down if they come. If not…” He shrugs.
“If we move on them like that, they’ll know Mira warned us.” “Happy baby animals” wasn’t the most natural comment.
“They’ll know either way. If we run or if we kill them, they’ll know.”
I scrub my hand over my face. “I need to get her out.”
A text. My tech guy comes through with a location—the Beverly Inn. Her dad keeps a suite there. I stand. “I’ll go in there and get her out before they realize what she did.”
“Brat,” Viktor says. “You can’t—”
“I love her.”
He looks surprised. Hell, I’m surprised.
“Just like that.”
“Always.”
“Aleksio,” he says darkly. Leave it to Viktor to see love and trust in a dark and tragic light. “Go, then. Take Tito. Brewer. Take all of my men.”
“Leave you?”
“Yuri and I will rig it. Then we’ll wait in the woods and pick them off. It’ll be bloody as hell.”
“Viktor—”
“We’ve done this many times. We could do this drunk.”
Mira would want to prevent more killing, to be neutral like Switzerland or something. Too late for that.
Yuri and Mischa get to work rigging the place, just like Lazarus did with the adoption agency. They’re like an Indy 500 pit crew, laying down cascading triggers. A lot of people will die. The three of them will snipe the survivors from the trees around. This won’t end the war—it’ll make it worse.