Page 114 of The Bratva Betrayal

27

Cady

Shopping is what I do when my head gets too loud, besides swimming at night.

Not because I need anything, but because expensive stores have a particular quiet that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

The carpet absorbs sound, and the lighting is always soft. The staff moves with a careful discretion that asks nothing of you except your credit card, and no one expects you to be anything other than a woman looking at beautiful things.

It’s the closest thing to peace I’ve found in the last week, and I’ll take it where I can get it right now.

I spend twenty minutes in Coach running my fingers over structured leather bags while Boulder and SB, my father’s two men, trail me again. Apparently, he’s decided I still need babysitters.

I’ve stopped noticing them. They’re just part of the room now, and I’ve learned to move around without thinking about them.

Prada is quieter, where the saleswomen don’t approach unless you make eye contact first. I pick up a pair of sunglasses I don’t need, hold them without trying them on, and think about Artem’s hand in my hair and the talk of “no expiration” said against my mouth in a dressing room.

I still don’t know how to manage being tied to him because he’s not as easily readable as Misha.

He’s… an asshole, but he’s good to me.

In the kind of good that doesn’t make me uncomfortable and cringey.

The department store is the last stop, large enough to get lost in, which is what I’m looking for.

I drift through the designer section on the second floor, past silk blouses and blazers, past a display of evening wear that slows my steps just enough that I’m still standing there when I feel it.

Not a sound.

Just a shift and the awareness that comes from being raised in a world where not noticing things can get you killed.

Someone has positioned themselves too deliberately in my peripheral vision, and it’s the deliberateness that I register first.

That careful, practiced nonchalance that isn’t nonchalance at all.

I move to the nearest rack and flip through it without seeing a thing on it, giving myself a few seconds to take in the intruder.

Baseball cap.

Ordinary clothes chosen to disappear into a crowd, medium build, early to mid-forties, handsome. He’s spent years being watched and knows how to manage what people see.

He’s not one of my father’s men.

He’s not Volkov.

He picks up a silk nightgown from the display beside him and studies it like he’s considering the purchase, but his eyes stay on me with practiced patience.

Lucas Manifold.

I’ve seen his face in enough articles and research to place it without the suits and the campaign backdrop.

He looks smaller without all of that.

More ordinary.

Which is, I understand, entirely the point.

I stay where I am and don’t signal my men. Across the room, Boulder has already noticed him. SB has too. Neither moves because I haven’t given them a reason to. Whatever he’s about to say, I want to hear every word, so that when I sit down with Artem and my brothers, I’m handing them the full picture.