Page 85 of The Wrong Monster

His eyes flick to my cheek. Shame washes through me as I think of Kevin again, of his fear.

I close my eyes briefly, feeling the nausea roil again, only this time because of humiliation and not fear.

“Oh, God.”

Vasily takes a step back, half-turning away from me. For the first time since we’ve entered this building, I see uncertainty in his face. Not mercy or forgiveness. I can’t expect either from a man like him.

He rubs a hand over his jaw. I don’t know what he’s thinking or whether he believes me. But then he strides to the door, undoes the bolt, and opens it. There’s a dark figure outside, a rifle worn across their chest. In the woods, it’s almost twilight.

“Take her back to her room.”

The figure nods. Vasily doesn’t look at me again when he steps out, letting the door close behind him, leaving me in the room to be collected.

I stand there for several seconds, shaking. I’m terrified.

But underneath it, buried beneath the adrenaline and nausea, is something else.

Relief.

I’m not Semiyon. I’m not his crimes. I’m not the Bratva.

At least, that’s what I tell myself as I reach for the door handle and follow the guard with the gun on his chest into the trees.

Chapter 24

Vasily

The rest of the night, I make people dig. The ordinary meeting room at headquarters, away from the secure room and its jammers, is busier and messier than it has been in a while. I’m involving more people in this than I did in Mikhail’s mistake. Mostly because I still don’t want my loyal men to know that we’re in jeopardy.

Possibly worse than jeopardy, thanks to the woman who has been locked in her room.

Ariadna watches me from across the conference table, ankles and arms crossed. She stands and saunters around to my side, murmuring, “Only you could manage to kidnap a woman directly related to your enemy’s Bratva.”

“Yuri is not the Bratva,” I bite out, a harsh reminder of who is in charge in this territory. “He’s a weak dog nipping at my heels. And if I have to physically hold her to it, Matilda Pierce will finish the job. She’ll get Mikhail off or end up just like her father will when this is all over.”

Ariadna is smart enough not to make any more comments. She steps away to supervise the men and women chipping away at Matilda’s background. I have them check her mother’s background and her stepfather’s too. I want all of it.

What I find is frustratingly incomplete. Her mother, Helen, has lived a remarkably quiet life. There are gaps around the period when she came to Lake Placid twenty-nine years ago, but nothing concrete enough to prove anything beyond what Matilda already told me. Somehow someone finds a lease from back then for an apartment in Rhode Island under Helen’s maiden name. So she didn’t marry Semiyon, at the very least, hers is the only name on the lease. Which means she likely lived there alone.

Still, the pieces line up.

Semiyon was here. Helen was here.

Matilda was born shortly afterward. Her birth certificate stares back at me from a too-bright screen.

There is no evidence to support that Semiyon ever had a role in raising her. No money transfers. No correspondence. No meetings. Nothing. Which doesn’t surprise me, knowing what little I do about the scumbag.

If he’s her father, he abandoned her before she was old enough to know what she was missing.

I should be satisfied. Instead, I demand that they keep digging.

I find photographs, school records, old addresses. A marriage certificate; Matilda didn’t lie about that. Helen met and married Ed Pierce not long after Matty’s birth. Ed’s long, impressive career was clearly a guide for Matilda to find her own calling. Overall, they appear to be a family that looks painfully ordinary.

Then I find Emma.

Her sister.

I stare at the screen. Emma Pierce married Ruslan Smirnov not too long ago; that is everywhere. The team finds magazine articles, tabloid photos.