“Sergei.” I don’t take my eyes off Vera. “Perimeter. Now. Viktor, check our six. Everyone else, eyes up.”
My men move instantly, fanning out to create a wider barrier around us, but Vera doesn’t react to any of it. She doesn’t seem to hear me at all.
Her nails suddenly dig into my arm through my jacket and it’s hard enough to hurt, even through the leather. Her fingers are trembling—no, her wholebodyis trembling.
“Vera, you need to breathe with me.” I force my voice to stay calm even though my heart is hammering. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. Come on, just?—”
“Look.” The word comes out strangled, barely above a whisper.
“Look at what?” I ask her urgently.
“There.” She’s still gripping my arm, still staring past me. “Right there. By the boutique window.”
I follow her gaze across the mall corridor. Shoppers milling around. A woman with shopping bags. Two teenage boys shoving each other playfully. An elderly man examining watches at a kiosk.
Nothing unusual. Nothing threatening.
I furrow my brow and look back at her in confusion. “Vera, there’s no one there.”
“He was just there.” Her voice breaks. “Dimitri, I swear to God, he wasright there.”
The panic in her tone makes my whole body feel cold. I’ve never heard her sound like this, not during the car bombing, the pregnancy scare, or even the shooting at the meeting place.
This is different. This is primal terror mixed with disbelief.
“Who was there?” I ask carefully. “What did you see?”
She finally looks at me. Her brown eyes are wild, pupils dilated with fear or shock or both. When she speaks, her voice is shaking so badly I almost can’t understand her.
“Dimitri, it was—” she seems to struggle getting out the last word, “it was Alexei.”
The words don’t register at first. My brain refuses to process them into anything that makes sense. I blink at her. “What did you say?”
“I saw Alexei.” She’s crying now. “I swear to God it was Alexei. He was standingright there, looking at me, and then he—he smiled and he?—”
“Vera.” I cut her off as gently as I can, seriously wondering if Vera is having a break from reality. “Alexei is dead.”
“I know that!” She’s sobbing now, her whole body shaking. People walking around us stare at Vera in bewilderment but cower as my men glare at them. “Iknowhe’s dead, I know that, but Isawhim, Dimitri. I saw him.”
My first instinct is disbelief. Alexei is dead. I saw his body. I threw dirt on top of his casket as it was lowered into the ground. He’s been dead for two and a half months.
This is impossible.
But when I look at Vera—at the absolute conviction in her eyes, the terror mixed with confusion—I know she believes what she’s saying. She’s not lying. She’s not making this up to get attention or create drama.
She genuinely believes she saw my dead brother.
The question is, did she?
“Describe him,” I order, intending to poke holes in whatever person’s description. I know I would think I saw Alexei when out and about after he died, but it obviously wasn’t him. “The person you saw. Describe everything.”
“Tall.” She’s still gripping my arm, her nails digging crescents into the leather. “Lean. Blond hair under a baseball cap. Blue eyes—that exact shade of blue, you know the one. He was wearing dark jeans and a gray jacket and he was just—he was standing therelookingat me.”
My heart stops.
Every detail matches Alexei. Height, build, coloring. Even the way she describes him standing—casual, relaxed, like he had all the time in the world—that’s Alexei too.
But it can’t be. She must have just seen his doppelganger.
