Page 47 of The Wrong Monster

I simply... check that he's still alive.

The boy has become a habit I never intended to form. He reminds me of myself in some ways. At fifteen, he’s too young to understand how dangerous information can be.

Old enough to sell it anyway.

He always waits behind the old bait shop overlooking Mirror Lake, pretending to fish whether he has a rod or not. It's almost amusing.

I round the corner. Despite the near-perfect morning and afternoon, far off across the water heavy clouds are rolling in. Low. We’re in for a good storm tonight, and the air feels weighted with it. Then my eyes scan the edge of the beach, and the bench tucked back into the maples and pines.

It’s empty.

My footsteps slow.

Perhaps he's late.

Kevin is never late.

I wait anyway, hands in my pockets, watching families drift past with ice cream and shopping bags. It takes everything in me not to check the watch on my wrist, which feels like a boulder.

Five minutes. Then ten.

Nothing.

The unease I've been carrying all afternoon sharpens into something colder. Kevin doesn't miss meetings.

I take out my phone and dial Art. He answers immediately, as if expecting that something else has gone wrong because why wouldn’t it? And irritation burns in my throat.

"He isn't here," I bite out.

Art doesn’t respond right away. The tension from the conference room earlier today has disappeared—overshadowed by shared unease.

"You think Yuri found him?"

"I think," I reply, scanning the street one more time, "that if Kevin chose not to come..." My eyes settle on the empty bench. "...then he didn't get to make that choice."

For the first time all day, Mikhail's case slips to the back of my mind. If Yuri has taken the boy, then this has stopped being “just” business.

It's become personal.

Chapter 13

Matilda

The sound drags me out of sleep so violently that my heart is pounding before I’m even awake.

The door.

Someone is opening the door.

I bolt upright, my hand instinctively reaching toward the nightstand for a weapon that isn’t there. My apartment is hours away. There are no pepper sprays tucked into drawers, no baseball bat behind the bedroom door.

I’m in a Bratva lake house.

The digital clock glares bright red back at me: 1:23 a.m. The muscles in my thighs, back, and shoulders are so tight I’m half-off the bed already when I blurt out, “What the hell?”

The bedroom door swings open, and a young man steps inside without so much as an apology. Mid-twenties, maybe. Dark hair cropped close. Broad shoulders beneath a fitted sweater. He doesn’t even glance toward the bed. There’s a detachment about him that’s professional, and I’d be impressed if I wasn’t pissed.

Like barging into a woman’s bedroom in the middle of the night is as ordinary as delivering the mail.