Page 36 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
Ivan came in behind him, the doorframe seeming smaller for a second because he was in it. Coat on. Phone at his ear. He was finishing a call in a short clipped voice, and he did not look at me, and I understood without being told that he was not looking because it would slow him down by the small amount he could not afford.
The three of them were at the hall table inside thirty seconds. The map between them. Alek's finger on one line of road. Ivan's finger on another. Mikhail talking low and fast, switching between English and Russian inside the same sentence. They had done this before. You could see they had done this before in the way none of them needed to be told where to stand.
Mikhail broke off from the map after a minute and came across the hall to me. The other two stayed bent over the paper.
"Stay here with the girls. We will come back with him."
"No. I am going with you."
"Chloe..."
"He is mine. I am going."
He stopped for half a beat. The half beat where a man looks at a woman and adjusts what he had thought she was. His head tilted a quarter inch. The gray-green of his eyes went from the soft of brother-in-law to the harder thing that he was the rest of the time. Then he looked past me at Lily.
Lily's voice was steady. "I'll drive. The four of us in my car behind you. We won't be in the way."
Mikhail looked at Alek. Alek did not stop reading the map. He nodded once without lifting his head. Permission granted.
Mikhail looked back at me. "Stay behind Yuri's car. Two minutes back. You do not get out of the car until we tell you the scene is clear."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I heard you."
We went in three cars.
Yuri leading. Mikhail in the passenger seat next to him, Alek and Ivan in the back. A second sedan of Sorokin men behind. Lily's small dark sedan third, the four of us inside it. Lily at the wheel. Sienna in the passenger seat with her phone face up on her thigh, the screen on, the screen dim, the screen on again every time it pinged. I was in the back with Jade. The seat was warm from the heater. Jade had not let go of my hand since the front step.
The parkway light was the morning kind. Weak and silver. The trees over the road were bare. The shoulders were strewnwith the brown of old leaves. No one talked for the first ten minutes.
Then Jade slid her hand fully into mine and laced our fingers and squeezed once, hard, and did not let go.
Then Sienna spoke over her shoulder without turning her head. "They are going to find him."
Lily drove.
I watched the trees go past. I watched the back of the second sedan. I watched the small red dot of a brake light on the lead car when Yuri tapped his brake at a bend. I tried not to think about the three days. I thought about the three days anyway.
We came around a long bend twenty miles up the road and I saw the Sorokin cars pulled onto the shoulder ahead of us before Lily had finished the turn.
Two black sedans, doors open. Men in long coats on the soft dirt of the bank. Beyond the bank, off the road, down into the trees, the Maybach.
The front of it was folded into the trunk of a tree the way a tin can folds when you step on it. The hood was up at a wrong angle. The driver's door was open.
Lily braked smooth and slow and pulled in behind the second sedan and put the car in park.
"Stay in the car until they wave us up."
I did not answer her. I was looking at the open door of the Maybach.
Mikhail came back to us after a minute. He bent to Lily's window and Lily lowered the glass. He said one short thing to her in Russian that I did not catch. Lily's mouth pressed flat. She nodded.
Mikhail looked past her at me through the open window. His face was the brother-in-law face again, but only barely.
"Come."
