“Lev should have wanked you straight down the shower drain,” I said, without looking up.
“I can see how contentious these brotherly relationships can get,” Konstantin replied, as though he were commenting on the weather.
Ruslan sighed.
“How are we ever going to find your cousin if Sergei won’t talk?”
“I have a hacker working on it,” I said.
Well. Valentin had the hacker on the case.
I had to hold an immense amount of information on everyone and for the hacker’s protection no one could know their link to Valentin.
I checked my phone again.
Nothing.
She’d remember all my rules again soon enough.
??????
I woke to a banging headache and groaned when I sat up.
Iskra’s room. Her bed. Her scent around me.
I didn’t remember getting home. I didn’t remember coming here.
I glanced around. She wasn’t in the room.
Glasses and beer bottles on the nightstand. My clothes rumpled on the floor beside the bed. An empty vodka bottle lying on its side.
Where was she?
I glared at the bathroom. Door open. No sound.
“Bogdan,” I shouted, and immediately regretted it.
The door opened and he appeared.
“What happened last night?”
His eyes moved over the room—the glasses, the bottles, the clothes—with the measured assessment of a man cataloguing the evidence before he answered.
“You finished poker and came home, Pakhan,” he said, with a nod that suggested he was editing.
I nodded as though it was all coming back to me and waved him out. The door closed.
I sat there racking my brain.
Then—a fragment.
Iskra laughing.
I frowned and closed my eyes.
She handed me a glass.
We drank together.
