Chapter One
Maxim
She watches me with cool black eyes and the hint of a smile. It’s shadowed and knife-sharp and embittered, that smile—nothing like the one she gave me three years ago in a Moscow dive with a view of St. Basil’s. That first smile led us back to my hotel, a nicer place than I’d ever stayed in, all veined marble walls and bubbling fountains and blown-glass lamps.
That smile led us to chilled vodka and a view of the city below, aglitter against a frosty black December night. It led us to bed.
More than once.
More than twice.
Annika Destry—did she think changing her name would keep her hidden?—is said to have blood colder than the black waters of the Moskva. She’s a notorious beauty; snow-white skin smooth as alabaster, glossy black curls and matching black eyes, and cheekbones sharp enough to cut.
Killer, I’ve heard her called.The Daughter of the Snake.
But that night three years ago, Annika Destry, then Annika Desyatova, was just a girl to me. Her blood was hot, her smile dazzling, her eyes wide open and beautiful and fathomless. She was small and strong in my arms.
She wasn’t the daughter of my enemy.
“Otsyuda?” she asks.From here?“My dear Maxim.”
A prick of anger at that, the way she says my name—but I push it down. I give Annika a smile I hope looks half as poisonous as hers. “Now, we wait.”
“I was never one for waiting.” Her long deft fingers find a loose thread at the hem of her black velvet coat. When her eyes meet mine, they are full of warning. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
She’s threatening me, I realize. Beneath her scarf, glitter-threaded and the color of blood, I see the thick, pale ridge of scar I traced with worshipful fingertips three years ago. She didn’t tell me then what it was from, and I remember thinking it strange, a beautiful young woman with terrible scars…
In the time since, I’ve learned Annika Desyatova has not always been Daddy’s perfect little girl—the Snake’s daughter, his right hand, his black-eyed servant. Rumor has it she chose to defy him in her younger years, that a string of criminal exploits led to her being locked away in a brutal penitentiary far outside the city.
She killed a girl with her teeth, in there. She strangled a prison guard with her bare hands. She escaped—got all the way back to the city and was found drinkingkvassin a café by the river. They say she drained it to the dregs, stood up, and walked to the car without handcuffs.
I don’t know what’s true or false. I get the feeling Annika isn’t going to be any more illuminating now than she has been in the last three days. When I found her, in the US of all places, she was working as coder for some low tier cyber-hacking startup out of Seattle.
The girls—two little babies, exact ages unknown—were already gone. Annika smiled when I asked where they were.Look all you like. You will never find them.
I was lucky to get her on a plane. Lucky she didn’t scream her head off or fight me all the way. It was immediately clear that she knew I was coming for her—someone, somehow, had tipped her off. Presumably that same person, or gang, or organization, had also spirited her twins to sanctuary.
Maybe I will never find them. Maybe it’s best this way.
I’d brought some muscle with me for the extraction, a few of my closest guys, but it turned out I didn’t need them. The notorious fighter, the scarred and beautiful Annika Desyatova, was not going to fight me.
Why?
I look at her now, prim and almost delicate in a studded, wing-backed leather chair far too big for her. I’ve pictured her in my office before, but as the girl I’d spent a passionate night with once, long ago. Not as the daughter of Viktor Desyatov—not as collateral damage. A hostage.
A hit.
She watches through the window behind my massive desk, Moscow faint and shimmering in the snow-pale night. “He won’t come,” she finally says. “Rabota ne volk—v les ne ubezhit.”
Work is not a wolf—it won’t run into the woods.
“Your Russian is good.”
“You say so because it wasn’t my first language. Hardly a compliment.”
“Your mother was American.”
“Yes.” Annika’s face shutters. “Was.”
