Page 113 of Sexting the Pakhan

Karina touches my arm gently. “Send it to me.”

I nod, still looking at the picture. “Yes. Wait.”

I tap share. The usual row of contacts pops up. Karina. My mother. The kindergarten parents’ group. Priya, because she just texted me the video. A few recent threads.

I mean to tap Karina, but someone bumps my elbow. Not hard. A father squeezing past with a paper plate of cupcakes and a toddler attached to his leg. He says, “Sorry, sorry.”

I say, “It’s okay.”

My thumb slips, and the screen changes.

Message sent.

For half a second, I don’t understand what happened. Then I see the thread.

Unknown Number.

The picture sits there in the message bubble. Delivered.

My blood goes cold. “No,” I whisper.

Karina turns. “What?”

I stare at the phone. The picture of my daughters, my beautiful, impossible, secret daughters, has gone to the one number I never should have trusted with anything real.

Unknown Number.

No name. No face. No idea who he is.

And now he has seen them.

16

RUSLAN

By eight thirty,I’m ready to strangle Lenkov for choosing a kindergarten.

Not because the place is difficult to enter. It’s not. Little Birch Early Learning sits behind a painted fence on the edge of Marrowick, forty minutes from the city, with a main gate facing the road and a service lane running along the back. The nearest house has curtains open and a television flickering blue in the front room. The mechanic’s shed beside the compound is closed, padlock on the shutters, no night staff.

Under different circumstances, we could be in and out in ten minutes.

But the kindergarten is full of people.

Cars line the narrow road outside. Parents stand near the entrance, talking in little groups while children in paper crowns run between their legs. Warm yellow light spills from the windows. Every few seconds, a door opens and the sound of small voices reaches the service lane where we’re parked in the dark.

Singing. Clapping. Laughter.

I sit in the back of the car and look through the windshield at the far side of the compound. Stepan sits beside me, one hand resting on his phone, expression closed. Pavel is in the front passenger seat, speaking quietly into his earpiece with Andrei, who is posted across the road near the main entrance.

The van is still there. So are Lenkov’s men.

That’s the only reason I haven’t left.

“They’re not moving,” Pavel says, lowering his phone.

I look at the back gate. “They’re waiting for the families to clear.”

“Probably,” Pavel says.