Her mouth trembles again. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” I assure her. “Because you’re stronger than you think. And because that child in your belly? They need you to be brave right now.”
A long silence stretches between us, but eventually, Emily lifts her eyes to meet mine. She nods just once, her voice a whisper. “Okay…”
My phone goes off in my pocket, and normally, I’d choose to ignore it at a time like this with Emily still crumbled on theground. But there is only one reason anyone from my inner circle would be calling me right now.
I fish the device out with one hand, thumb swiping over the screen, Katya’s name flashing across the screen.
Answering it, I hold it up to my ear and step away from Emily and Roman. “Yes?”
“Facial recognition just pinged.”
My heart slams in my chest, mid-beat. “On?”
“Ivy,” she says. “Matvey’s tech-y shit scraped a public CCTV feed. Got a match two blocks from your current location. Timestamped ten minutes ago.”
For a moment, the blood drains from my face so fast I feel lightheaded. I stare at the far wall without seeing it.“What?”
There’s a shuffle on the other end before Matvey’s voice takes over. “Maksim, she’s wandering out on the streets right now. I’m sending you her coordinates so you can?—”
I don’t even bother listening to him finish.
I’m already out the door running.
6
IVY
The pavement is ice against my feet.
Or maybe it justfeelsthat way. I can’t tell anymore. Everything’s out of sync—my thoughts, my limbs, my heartbeat, even the rhythm of the world around me. I’ve been drugged enough to stay dazed, but not so much that I can’t walk. Not so much that I can’t put on the performance of a lifetime.
They wanted it to look real, the escape. Mikhail wanted me to be as disorientated as possible, to show that I’m nothing more than a trembling girl in the street wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a cheap gray coat tossed over her shoulders like an afterthought because she’s escaped with only the clothes on her back and nothing else.
My bare feet slap the sidewalk with each dragging step. I stumble once, then again, and catch myself with a hand against a brick wall that scrapes the skin off my palm.
I barely feel any of it.
The city moves around me. People glance in my direction before quickly looking away. Some even speed past me, doing their best to avoid whatever problems they’ve already perceived me to have while others pretend not to even notice my existence.
It’s a cruel world, I’ve come to realize in these few short decades I’ve been on this planet. Back when I had still been a teenager, I’d had the false sense of hope that under certain given circumstances, people would band together to help those in need.
Now I realize how naive that line of thinking truly is.
I must look like a psych patient, or worse, a junkie coming down from their high and desperate for their next fix. No one wants to help someone clearly out of it andno onewants to get involved with a junkie who looks more than willing to do whatever it takes to get another fix.
Pushing away from the wall, I trudge forward. Each step sends static through my brain. There’s no telling where Mikhail’s men dropped me or what they even gave me before I had been let go in the first place. After my negotiations had been settled, Mikhail had ordered one of the nurses to come in and give me some kind of drug to knock me out.
I had barely been coherent enough to lift my head by the time they shoved me out of the van and peeled off down a nearby alleyway.
Is this even the city I’m from? Hell, for all I know, they drove me hours away just to fuck with me.
Bastards.
But this is the plan that Mikhail and I ended up settling on. It has tolooklike an escape, even if I can’t see straight. Eventually, someone in Maksim’s network will catch wind of me. The hope is that they’ll get to me before someone else does.
The silver stud earrings I’m wearing are innocuous and plain enough to draw no attention, but each one contains a high-frequency receiver constantly transmitting back to Mikhail’s surveillance team. A steady stream of information directly to his own ear.
