No one needs to see Christian’s face to understand the swirling fury building on the other side of the phone.
“Ivan is already dead,” Yelena says, meeting Elijah’s eye.
Lennie grabs her husband’s arm.
“Killed by a Stuart no less,” Yelena clucks, clearly unimpressed by this death. “Do you really wish for Mazen to bekilled by a man who runs around in a mask they call the Ghost?”
“It is not wise to make an enemy of me, Yelena.”
“We have always been enemies. Since the moment you got your brother killed.”
Peter. She’s talking about Peter.
Yelena rattles something off in Russian, my rudimentary level of the language knowing it’s a goodbye. And a final one, if we all have our wish.
CHAPTER 33
Isolde
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Yelena says to Elijah. Or maybe it’s Lev she’s talking to.
“Ivan?” Dimitri strokes his goatee. “As in. . .”
“My son’s guard!” Lev roars.
Yelena stands, smoothing wrinkles out of her shirt. “Ivan and I had an understanding. You needed a friend,” she tells Elijah. Then she tells her husband, “And your son needed someone to pull him from the brink of being a madman.”
Lennie continues to hold onto Elijah, whose face remains blank.
“What happened in Kyiv?” Boris asks, handing a tumbler of liquor to Lev, who knocks it back.
Yelena pushes a tendril of hair behind her ear and shrugs. “I shot him. It was a bad shot.”
This last sentence is muttered like it pains Yelena to admit.
“You got into a shooting match with a Spider,” Dimitri says. “What? On the streets of Kyiv?”
Yelena sighs, pushing her hair back again. “Something like that.”
“When?”
She walks out of the room. “There will not be any time to waste.”
Lev grabs her arm. “What happened after Kyiv?”
He speaks quietly, but the Zimins are a nosy bunch. Yelena’s children wait with bated breath.
Yelena pulls her arm from Lev. “I went home.”
Lev doesn’t let her go when she tries to walk away.
She shrugs, slipping out of his grasp. “Where my father asked me if I wanted to marry the Pakhan’s son.”
His wife meets my eyes, jerking her head. I hurry to follow, Tristan and Ren on my heels.
Tris curses under his breath. His voice is low so only I can hear when he asks, “Where did Ian go?”
No one else has noticed because they’re all too busy following Lev. And wherever Lev goes, so does the Bratva. Dimitri’s got his phone pressed to his ear. Boris is a step behind, speaking to his daughters in Russian.
