“You’re crazy!” Sveti had whispered back. “He hates me! He always hits me!”
Aleksandra let out a wheezing laugh and shook her head. “He likes you,” she repeated. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
Sveti, a sheltered twelve-year-old, had not known. So Aleksandra told her, in gruesome, exacting detail. Everything Yuri was going to do to her, with his thing. Everything he would expect her to do to him.
“It’s better to be prepared,” Aleksandra had told her sagely. “It’s just a matter of time. He’ll get to you. They always get to you.”
Sveti had been horrified, but Aleksandra had gone on to say that Sveti might as well get used to it, because probably all of them would be sold eventually. For that. That horrible thing that Yuri wanted.
“But we’re children!” she protested.
Aleksandra just stared at her, mouth hanging open, and then she started to laugh. She had laughed until she was sobbing on the bed, curled into a ball, her hair drenched with sweat. Shuddering.
Sveti had not slept for a week after that.
Soon after, doctors had come, and given them many tests. Machines. X-rays. Blood tests. No one would tell them why. It had taken days.
The next day, Aleksandra was gone. Sveti had awakened in the morning, and found the bed empty. The pillow still had the dent of her friend’s head.
Sveti cuddled Rachel tighter, till the baby wiggled in protest. She tried to breathe. The dark pressed down on her like a pitiless hand.
Chapter
6
Nick had noticed this phenomenon before. Momentous events that had been dreaded for years and had taken on colossal importance in his head—when they finally arrived, he found himself cool to them. As if he were watching an old movie that did not particularly interest or engage him. His father’s death had been like that. A series of details to attend to, a long look at the body in the coffin. The sharp-boned face so like his own, but wasted, sunken. Etched with the lines of sour disappointment that he’d worn ever since Nick’s mother had died.
The look he had then turned upon his son.
Nick had looked inside himself, searching for some emotion he could put a name to. He’d found nothing.
So it was with the arrival of Vadim Zhoglo.
The boat appeared with no warning. It was chance that he’d been monitoring the camera that watched the cove at 10:42 A.M. He’d had just enough time to scramble into some decent clothes, yank his hair back, splash his face. Then the superficial adrenaline rush had drained out of him, and he’d settled into this weird, sedated calm.
Too calm. Any man greeting Zhoglo who knew what he was capable of would be justified in losing his shit. Arkady Solokov, professional arms broker and general scumbag, should be terrified of fucking up in front of the Great Vor, and excited about advancing his criminal career.
Nothing twitched inside him as the man got out of the boat. He would have been able to pick Zhoglo out of his group of minions, even if he hadn’t seen the overly pixel’d long-distance photographs which were all that the combined police agencies on the planet had managed to glean.
The word for Zhoglo was blunt. Fingers like sausages, the heavy paunch of a gourmand. His silvering hair was buzzed short. His face was jowled, with heavy, pendulous lips. His iron-gray eyes were deepset in purplish, puffy bags. He exuded concentrated menace.
Nick studied him, figuring that his calm came from having nothing to lose. No wife, no kids. No unfinished business, other than finding Sveti. And avenging Sergei.
Sergei had still been alive when Nick had found him. Spread-eagled to the hotel bed, mouth duct-taped shut. Slit open, his guts pulled out and heaped onto his chest. Conscious.
Whoa. He usually managed to block that memory from slicing into him unawares. He averted his eyes as the men filed past. The only one he knew personally was Pavel. The man looked like shit, grayish and thin. He’d aged ten years since Nick had seen him.
Zhoglo went by. He didn’t appear to see Nick at all.
He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and fell into step behind the last man, an obedient dog who knew his place.
“Welcome, Vor,” he said, in Ukrainian. “I hope the voyage went well—”
“Shut up, cretin,” barked the last man in the line, a big, hulking blond. “You’re not here to make noise.”
Nick shut up and followed them up the walkway. The buzzer at his belt vibrated.
His stomach tightened with a chill premonition.
It could be an animal, blundering past one of the sensors. The men were ahead of him, spread out widely, almost to the house.
“The Vor’s hungry,” the last guy said over his shoulder. “Prepare a meal for him. And don’t fuck it up. Bad food makes him irritable.”
Nick froze for a second, letting the distance between them lengthen. Prepare a meal? Him? Pavel hadn’t said anything about cooking.
“What does he want to eat?” he asked.
The blond guy shot a contemptuous glance over his shoulder. “Ask him, asshole,” he said. “Your problem, not mine.”
What did he have in the kitchen, anyhow? His appetite was for shit these days. He choked down the occasional frozen dinner when the feeling of emptiness inside him became physically debilitating. He couldn’t cook worth a damn. He could barely use the microwave.
Maybe this was it. The stupid detail that would get his throat slit.
There was a chorus of rough, barking exclamations. Several guns jerked up simultaneously. Clickity-click, rounds were chambered.
“Who the fuck is she?” one of the guys snarled.
She? Oh, fuck. No, no, no. His artificial calm evaporated in an instant. He lunged through the clot of men to see…
Yes. Becca. Fuck.
Clothed this time, but she might as well have been naked, for all the diaphanous blue peasant blouse and the skintight jeans revealed.
Dead silence. The men stared at her, hungry-eyed.
She looked even prettier than last night. Her hair, dried, was a mass of brown curls. The color of the blouse made her skin look luminous. Her full, gleaming pink lips trembled. Unlike last night, she had good reason to be scared now.
Transfixed with dismay, he didn’t track the movement of the guy next to him before a hard clout to his face with the man’s pistol knocked him back. “What the fuck is she doing here?” the guy hissed.
Zhoglo turned to Nick, a smile curving his mouth. “Nice touch,” he said. “I appreciate initiative in an employee. A welcome gift? How kind.”
The bottom fell out of his gut, and tumbled down, down. He scrolled through the possible responses he could make, calculating how quickly—or, worse, how slowly, they would get her killed.
He swabbed the blood streaming out of his nose with his hand.
“Ah, actually…no,” he forced out, voice froggy.
Zhoglo’s smile froze. “No?”
Nick swallowed. Hot blood trickled down his throat. “She’s the, ah, cook.”
Becca stared at the guns. Feeling faint, she stared at the blood streaming from Mr. Big’s nose.
One of the men stepped forward. A short, fat man, in expensive clothes. He spoke, his voice low and cultured, in a language she didn’t know. Mr. Big replied in the same tongue. The fat man’s smile disappeared. He had not liked