Page 13 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

That night, after I leave her, I sit in the passenger seat of Grisha’s car across the street from Rosa’s Bakery and wait.

At eleven fourteen, he comes.

He walks down the block with his hands in his jacket pockets, not hurrying. He stops at the door. Under the streetlight his face is the face in the license photo, a little thinner, the smile gone. He tries the handle. He peers up at the dark windows above the shop as if he knows exactly what Vera is doing inside, then he takes his phone out of his pocket, types something with his thumbs, and stands there, waiting for it to be answered.

Nobody comes down.

After two minutes, he puts the phone away and walks back to the gray sedan.

“Do I follow him?” Grisha asks.

“No.”

For the first time, danger has taken on a different shape, one that is familiar to the woman I would give my life for. Because I have no doubt that Daniel Reed means something to Vera Belova.

The next evening, I’m there at ten to nine as usual, and Vera is behind the counter, wiping down a case that’s already clean.

She looks tired. Not the honest tired of four in the morning alarms and fifty-pound sacks. Something thinner. Her phone sits face up on the counter beside the register. While she makes my coffee, it lights up, and she turns it face down without reading it.

“Is someone bothering you?” I ask.

She doesn’t look up. She sets the cup on its saucer and slides it across the counter to me, the handle turned toward my right hand.

“No,” she says. “I’m fine.”

The phone buzzes against the counter, once, twice, and goes still.

Three nights running, a man has stood at her door after closing and tried the handle, and if he ever gets inside, he’ll wish he’d driven straight on past and found another bakery to frequent.

5

VERA

It’s the seventh message today.

I don’t have to read it to know what it says. Some version of five minutes or I just want to talk or you used to answer me, V. Daniel found a new number to text from on Tuesday, and on Wednesday he learned that I won’t answer that one either.

Nikolai drinks his coffee and watches me pretend I don’t hear the phone buzzing against the counter.

I wipe the case again.

At five past nine, someone knocks on the front door.

Not hard. Two light taps on the glass, the way you’d knock on a friend’s window at night so you don’t wake the neighbors. I know that knock. I knew it at nineteen through a bedroom door, and I hate that my body still reacts on muscle memory.

The sign says CLOSED. The man on the other side of the fogged glass tries to clear a patch with the side of his fist and realizes the white is on the inside.

“Hey, V,” he calls through the window, and my stomach clenches.

On the other side of the counter, Nikolai’s cup touches its saucer and stops.

I could leave Daniel out there. I almost do. But he’ll stand there and knock in that soft, reasonable way until I come to the door, and then he’ll make me feel as if I’m the one with the problem.

I unlock the door, open it the width of my body, and stand in the gap.

The cold air comes in around me. Daniel’s smile gets bigger as though I’ve given him something. Six years. He’s thinner. His hair is shorter and more expensive than it used to be, and his jacket is the kind that’s meant to look like money from across a street.

“Your hair is different,” he says.