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And I’m going to find out exactly what happened on that yacht, whoever it burns.
26
LEV
Delaney’s neighbor watches me apprehensively through the narrow gap in her door. “She moved out this morning,” she stammers.
She keeps the chain on the whole time, clutching her robe, too afraid to shut the door in my face and too afraid to open it any wider for me.
“Was she alone?” I snap.
“She was not alone. There was a man with her, driving a black sports car.” She says it through the taut length of the chain, voice low.
It was Maksim at the hospital, and now Maksim has helped her move as well, a glaring sign I should’ve read sooner.
I take my hand off the door, and the woman shuts it abruptly behind the chain. My phone buzzes against my chest, and Yuri’s name sits on the screen in crisp white letters.
Yuri’s files are in at last, every detail that slipped through the cracks. Yelena doused herself with the water and framed Delaney for it in my own office. Yelena pushed Delaney off the yacht rail on purpose, and only then jumped in after her.
The words are like an arrow straight to the sternum, and the whole ugly afternoon fractures and rearranges itself behind my eyes. Delaney told me plainly, in that office, that it was not her. She stood there, her chin tipped up, defiant, with the empty glass in her hand and told me the truth, and I stood over her, devoid of any emotion, and made her apologize for it. I made her drop to her knees on the floor and clean up the water Yelena poured on herself, while Yelena wept prettily into my shoulder. I chose the performance over the truth, and I did it because the performance was easier to believe.
I remember swimming past her cries in the dark to reach the very person who planned the whole thing. She was reaching for me, body trembling. I saw her hand, and I passed it, and I gave everything I had to the woman who put her in the water. My guilt sinks its bruising teeth deeper into me with every line of the report.
The next message is worse than the first, and my stomach twists with nerves before I finish it.
Delaney is expecting. Two months pregnant.
The hypothermia and the loss of oxygen nearly forced a miscarriage, and mother and child are stable now, but they need weeks of quiet rest.
I almost lost my own child in that black water without ever knowing the child was there to lose. I keep wondering what she felt out there, treading the freezing sea with a life inside her, praying to a God she may not even believe in, watching me choose Yelena over her without a backward glance. She kept herself afloat alone until a stranger pulled her out, because the man who swore he would never let her die swam right past her.
The old urge to kill rouses inside me, clean and simple, the way it did in the warehouse with Fyodor. I could sharpen my soul into a blade and make Yelena pay for this tonight, before the sun comes up, and no one in this city would ever find the pieces. My hand is already reaching for the phone, for the one call to my lieutenants that would set it in motion.
But a weak, pregnant Delaney comes first, somewhere out there lurking in the shadows with my brother. It’s not even a choice worth calling one; it is over before it begins. It never was.
“Check Maksim’s car, all his properties, every airport and station,” I tell Yuri, calling the order out the second he picks up. “Pull the car rentals, every property rental, everything filed under his name. Have someone pop into every hotel he has ever used. Search all of it and bring it to me tonight.”
Leaving, I look up at her dark third-floor window with its curtains drawn tight and no silhouette moving behind them. I had assumed, without ever once thinking about it, that she would always be somewhere within my reach.
Back at the office I throw myself into the search, rummaging through every file Yuri sends. I only want two things from the world now, to find her and to apologize, and I want them fast.
The door opens, and instead of Yuri it is Yelena, leaning against the doorframe like she still belongs there. She has come to me on her own, dripping in gold and poise, and saved me the trip.
“I never meant to hurt her,” she says softly. My lungs fill with fire, and it drags rage up from my gut like acid.
“You pushed Delaney into the ocean,” I say, flat and accusatory.
Her eyes snap to mine, and the surprise on her face is real. She didn’t expect me to know any of it.
“She can swim,” Yelena corrects quickly. “I only wanted to scare her. Nothing could have happened to her with that many people around, without a doubt.”
“She almost died out there,” I say, flexing my hand.
“I jumped in after her, Lev,” she complains.
“You jumped in so that I would swim to you and pull you out,” I retort. Her breathing skips, a sound close to a mewl and a gasp, and that guilty little catch tells me more than any answer of hers could.
I stand, and she steps back, then forces her chin up, smoothing down the front of her dress, and rebuilds her prim, false composure over it.
