Page 149 of Sweet Ruin

Snow settles on my coat. Stepan waits at the curb with the engine running, wisely pretending he cannot see his pakhan staring at a pale blue door with a foolish grin on his face.

She’s a fucking woman in every sense of the word. I was rock-hard watching her tell her sister to get the hell out of her house. It was like witnessing the first time a bird learns it can fly. She spread her wings and soared.

Vivian, on the other hand, plummeted to earth.

My obsession is worsening.

I’ve only known Lilah for nine days. But she’s already gone from a sweet voice in a pantry to a sweet tongue yielding to mine.

Who wouldn’t I maim on her behalf? Her sister? Her husband? The photographer at the gala? A random saleswoman with a holier-than-thou attitude?

As far as I’m concerned, all of them are roaches underneath her heel. If she won’t crush them, I will.

She doesn’t see what I see. The fire. The innocence. Two things shouldn’t be able to coexist within one person—but with Delilah Dorsey, they do.

It feels like an eternity ago that Niko asked me which one I’m buying: the block or the baker.

I still haven’t answered him. I don’t intend to.

But I realize, driving north through the slush with snow smearing the windows, that I haven’t thought about the map once today.

The brownstone is lit up when we pull in. Every window on the first floor. That means Niko is here, and Niko being here on New Year’s Day at four in the afternoon means he found something worthy of my attention.

Anton opens the door before I reach the top step. “Your brother is in the back office,” he says. “Yuri, too.”

I hand him my coat. “How long have they been here?”

“Since noon.”

“And nobody called me?”

“Niko said not to.”

I make a note to have a conversation with my brother about who gives orders in my house. Then I walk down the hall and forget about it, because I see Yuri waiting in the doorway of my office with somebody else’s blood on his collar.

Damn. I was hoping this was a false alarm, because I wanted to spend the rest of my evening replaying about how fucking sexy it was for Delilah to dominate her sister so thoroughly.

The bloodstain says I’ll have to enjoy the memory later.

Anton follows me in and shuts the door. Niko is in one of the chairs with his boots on my desk, a legal pad on his lap, and a camera in pieces beside the lamp. Two memory cards are laid out in front of him.

“Feet off the desk,” I bark as I settle into my chair.

He takes them down.

I eye them all and sigh. “I assume the photographer is dead?”

Yuri glances down at his shirt and winces when he realizes just how much blood is on him. “Don’t think so. At least, he was breathing when I left him.”

“Did he give you anything useful?”

“Depends how generous you feel about the meaning of the word ‘useful.’“

“I feel no generosity toward him at all.”

“Then no. Not really.”

I remove my jacket and drape it over the back of a chair. A streak of white paint marks the cuff. Lilah must have put it there when she raised her hand to stop me from going after Vivian.