"Can you come with me?" My tone is so needy, I'm embarrassed, but my fingers clutch his jacket.
"I have to handle this first," he says gravely. "I'll be home as soon as I can."
"Yeah, okay," I whisper, my forehead against his chest. His heartbeat is steady, measured. How can it be when my pulse is racing like this? "Of course."
As I step back, Dmitri's face is set in stone. His jaw is square, his mouth a thin slash. I'm looking at thePakhan.
"Go home," he says gently, kissing my forehead.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In which betrayal cuts deepest when it's close.
Dmitri…
It's not a long wait. The crowd watching the game clears out as it ends and he has no one else to drink with, so he pays his tab and heads out, whistling. I knew he'd moved from The McManus in the last couple of months. I could find his address but my demon wants this, my SUV trailing his town car, stalking him through town. He's settled in a shiny new building in Little Italy, all blinding glass and steel.
"I'm taking the stairs," I say, watching him saunter into the lobby. "Roman, you follow him. Text me when you see what floor he gets off and meet us there."
"On it," he says, circling around the doorman as Kir engages the poor man with a raging litany about the terrible state of his non-existent apartment.
"There's no pizza oven!" Kir shouts. "I was promised the masons would add-" Roman puts his hands in his pockets, whistling and watching the elevator numbers climb.
My demon runs with me, purring as I stretch my legs, taking the steps two at a time, checking my phone on every landing.
I open the stairway door just as he disappears into his apartment.
I examine the lock. It's a good one, complicated. The door itself, though, is flimsy.
"Demid, we'll kick it in on the hinge side. Three… two… one." We both slam our feet into the door and it splinters and sags. I go through first, shoving the torn wood apart.
There's a girl standing in the hallway, holding a tray. She couldn't be more than eighteen. He's dressed her even younger in a little blue jumper and her hair up in a ponytail, barefoot.
There's a metal collar around her neck.
Her eyes flood with tears and she drops the tray with a crash, taking a step towards us and then a step back. I understand. Just because we're here, doesn't mean that we're here to save her.
"What the hell is that noise? Did you drop something again?" He walks out of the bedroom, pulling on a t-shirt, freezing with it halfway over his head when he sees us.
"Oh,shit,"Ilya says.
At a Morozov warehouse…
"What the fuck."
Roman's watching a sweaty, shaken Ilya through the one-way mirror. The room has two chairs, bolted to the floor and nothing else. Plain concrete walls. "His family. The Zaitsevs… they're our people."
"No one's been in there, correct?" I say.
"Not since we brought him in," Roman nods.
My demon is dancing again. Ready to tear and rend as we walk into the room. "You're going to give us everything you know," I tell Ilya. "Your family can't protect you here. The only way to get out of here alive is to tell us every name. Every location. Every fucking transaction."
"I don't know anything!" Ilya screams. "I just got a text telling me about the auctions. You don't know who you can buy until it opens."
My jaw tightens. This motherfucker talks about buying a woman - agirl- as casually as he would pull out his credit card to purchase a car.
"The auction, your funds verification. It was all handled online?" Roman asks.
