I force myself to look at Boris one more time, open the camera on his phone, and take the picture.
Luca had mentioned the hotel before. The one his father uses for business.
It’s not certainty. It’s not safety. But it is a place to start.
I switch off the screen lock feature, pocket the phone and the keys, and shove myself to my feet. My vision swims for a second, the marble floor rolling under me, and then it steadies and I’m moving.
I cut through the back hallway and into the kitchen, every nerve in my body strung tight, listening for footsteps that never come. The door into the attached garage opens without resistance. Boris’s SUV is parked closest to it, black with dark tinted windows. I get in, jam the key into the ignition, and start the engine.
At the gates, the guard looks up as the SUV rolls toward him. I keep both hands on the wheel and my face angled forward, every muscle in my body locked tight. For one awful second I think he might step out, wave me down, make me lower the window.
But the windows are dark enough that all he really sees is Boris’s car coming back out.
He gives a lazy dip of his chin and reaches for the control.
I think I might actually stop breathing.
The gate opens. I drive through at a normal speed, not too fast, not too slow, and I don’t look at him as I pass.
My hands are white on the steering wheel as I pull out onto the empty street. My arm still aches where Boris grabbed me. Tears are drying on my face, and my mother is dead, really dead, murdered, and the man I love is somewhere in this city with my father and I am driving a dead man’s car to the doorstep of the family that was supposed to be my enemy.
I press harder on the gas.
38
NATALIA
By the timeI make it into the casino, I’m running on fumes, adrenaline, and pure desperation.
The place is all gold light and polished surfaces and the constant electronic chiming of slot machines. People laugh. Glasses clink. A cocktail waitress glides by in black silk and a sultry smile. Nobody here knows that Luca is somewhere in this city with my father and my brother, or that Boris is dead on my father’s marble floor, or that my mother was murdered twenty-three years ago and everything I thought I knew about my life has been ripped open like bad stitching.
I keep walking.
I catch my reflection in a mirrored column and do a double take. My hair is snarled, yanked loose from the fight on the stairs. There’s an angry mark around my neck from where Boris grabbed my collar, and my sleeve is torn at the shoulder where he hauled me backward. My eyes are red and swollen and a little bit feral.
I look like someone who just crawled out of a car wreck. Which, emotionally speaking, is about right.
A man in a dark suit steps into my path before I make it any further.
He’s huge. Not a bouncer exactly, though he could pass for one. Security, definitely. The kind that does more than escort drunks to the curb.
“Ma’am,” he says. His voice is polite, but only on the surface. “Can I help you with something?”
“Yes.” I hear the shake in my voice and stop to clear my throat. “I need to see Lorenzo Andretti.”
The man barely looks at me. “That’s not happening.”
“Tell him Natalia Kozlov is here.”
That gets his attention.
His eyes flick over my face again, sharper this time, taking in the wrinkled clothes, the messy hair, whatever is still written on me from the last hour.
“Wait here,” he says.
“No.” My pulse is a drum in my ears. “You tell him now. Tell him it’s about Luca.”
The man’s eyes narrow. Then he turns his head slightly, one hand lifting to the wire at his ear.
