That answer stopped me.
Vadim held the phone at his side. “Gennady wants your brother as bait. He wants you frightened enough to run toward him and me angry enough to walk into a public mistake.”
“What are we going to do?”
His gaze moved over my face, my bare shoulders, the sheet clutched under my arms, and came back to my eyes.
“We’re going to move your brother somewhere Kask can’t photograph him,” he said. “Then I’m going to make Gennady spend the rest of this day believing his message worked.”
A chill slid over my skin. “And tonight?”
Vadim stepped closer and touched my cheek with the backs of his bruised fingers.
“Tonight,” he said, “he learns what it costs to price my wife twice.”
My pulse hit hard.
I should have told him not to call me that while Gennady was threatening Petya. I should have told him wife was too large a word for a woman still tangled in black sheets with fear drying cold in her throat.
But Petya was alive.
Gennady was reaching.
And I was done being the door men used to get to each other.
I put my hand over Vadim’s.
“Your wife,” I said.
His eyes darkened.
“And myself,” I said. “Both.”
Vadim turned his hand under mine and held on.
I slid out of bed, keeping the sheet around me until my feet touched the floor. My legs shook once. Vadim reached for me, then stopped before his hand closed on my arm.
I steadied myself against his chest instead.
His heartbeat struck hard under my palm.
The phone lay on the bed behind us with Gennady’s message still glowing on the screen. In the bathroom, water ran hot enough to steam the doorway.
I picked up the robe from the floor and pushed my arms through the sleeves.
Vadim watched me tie the belt.
Then I took my phone, held it where we both could see Petya’s face, and stepped beside him toward the door.
Chapter Six
Nadia and I reached the bedroom door with her phone still open between us.
The photo showed Petya near the entrance of a brick building in a borrowed dark coat, one of my men visible behind him. It was blurry, taken through glass or from across a street, but Petya’s face was clear enough. The edge of the awning showed above his head, just as it had when I’d turned the phone toward Nadia minutes ago. My men had already moved him from that building before Gennady’s message reached her.
The messages sat beneath the photograph.
UNKNOWN:
