Page 23 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

I swallow hard. She hasn’t asked me about the knife incident since that night, but she doesn’t need to tell me that she never slept with her hand around Daniel’s wrist. I guess part of me has been dreading this conversation. Because when she knows who I am, I’ll become someone different when she looks at me, and I can’t bear the thought of seeing the fear in her eyes.

“I don’t remember my mother’s face,” I say. “I remember her hands. They smelled of oranges. She peeled them for me in one long piece, without breaking the skin, and gave me the peel to hold while I ate.”

Vera is completely still.

“Sometimes when I come in here,” I say, “you’ve been zesting, and I smell it at the door.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Funny how a smell can do that, pick you up and plant you straight in the middle of a memory you never think about.”

Her fingers entwine with mine, and her eyes are bright and glassy.

After a while she says, “I haven’t heard from Daniel in a week. Maybe he’s got the hint.”

“Maybe,” I say.

My phone wakes me at one twenty.

Grisha.

Car across from the front. Engine running, lights off. Ten minutes so far.

I release my wrist from her hand, slowly, holding my breath so that she doesn’t feel me getting out of bed. I stand to one side of the front room window, where the curtain meets the frame, and look down.

A sedan is parked across the street, the engine breathing white into the cold. Behind the windshield, a phone screen glows, aimed at the windows below me.

My phone lights up again. The photograph is grainy and green with the glare of the streetlamp, but the driver’s face leaps out of the dark in the glow of a cigarette.

I recognize him instantly. Zorin’s night foreman, the tall guy who signed for our freight a week ago. The same guy who put a knife in me.

I stand at the window until two. Then the headlights come on, the sedan pulls out, moves slowly to the corner and disappears.

I type: Follow him. Don’t let him see you.

Somebody told him which street.

I know whose name I’ll start with.

9

VERA

My alarm goes off at four, and his side of the bed is cold.

He’s in the front room, dressed, standing near the window with the lights off. I know when he looks at me that he hasn’t slept.

I stand in the doorway in his T-shirt with my arms folded, because whatever this is, I want to be on my feet for it.

He doesn’t dress it up. A car parked across the street, engine running, lights off. A man in the driver’s seat holding up his phone at the shop. Then a lighter, and a face.

“He stabbed me,” he says.

The floor tilts a little under my bare feet, and I put my hand on the doorframe.

“He works for someone I’m investigating. I can’t tell you more than that, but they know I’ve been coming here.” He doesn’t look away from me while he says it. “This is my fault. Not yours.”

I make myself breathe in, and out, the way I used to tell frightened people to breathe on a gurney, and it doesn’t work. My head feels like a tornado blew in and left behind a war zone. I don’t know what to think. I can’t even process the man watching the bakery because one sentence keeps playing on repeat in my head: He stabbed me.

Nikolai crosses the room, folds his arms around me, and rests his chin on the top of my head. “I’m so sorry, Vera. I never meant for this to happen.”

I feel the rumble in his chest as he speaks, and tears sting my eyes. “What does he want?” My voice barely reaches my own ears.