"No, I know. They responded to the situation in front of them." Aleksio goes to the window and takes a breath. Worried about Kiro.

"You think Lazarus cares about anything besides finding my dad and me?" I ask. "He's not going to be caring about your brother."

"Lazarus's a fucking hyena, Mira. I think he cares about a lot of different things."

"We can't stay the night here," Viktor says.

"Agreed." Aleksio makes a call. I'm wondering whether it's Konstantin. I was always a little frightened of Konstantin-everyone was. He had a scarred face and a military attitude. A retired killer who ran the boys' bodyguard detail.

Aleksio makes another call and gets an investigator on the case. "I want the names and addresses of everyone who worked there-call me as soon as you get them-I don't care if the shit comes in at two in the morning. We get 'em and vet 'em."

He clicks off.

"Merry Christmas. We go at it your way. At least until Daddy wakes up. Not that we have any choice."

I turn and look out at the dark lake, wanting for him not to ever see my face again. Wanting to never give him any bit of truth ever again.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Aleksio It's just before dawn when we get out to the house we took off a Stockbroker who owes us. It's a place that was owned by one of our loan shark clients up until six months ago. A nice spread in the middle of a lot of trees maybe an hour out of the city.

A good place to lie low.

Best of all, nobody knows about it, which is good, considering the kind of firepower that's out on the streets right about now.

Our investigator checks in soon after. He's tracked down the retired Worland Agency director to a farm in western Illinois, and he's going out there. He feels sure this person has the key. He'll do what it takes. I send one of my guys to help him.

We give Mira the nicest bedroom-the master. It has a sliding door to a patio, and she's allowed to go out there as long as she behaves.

I go out for a run to clear my head. I should be getting new ideas to find Kiro, but all I think about is the feel of her mouth on my cock, and the way her hair felt in my fist.

I fucked her face, but I'm the one who got invaded.

I head back into the kitchen afterwards. Viktor's in there. He tells me Aldo Nikolla is still out cold, and the investigator is still in transit.

The sound of her laughter jolts through my chest.

I look out the kitchen window and see her sitting out on the patio with Yuri and a couple of the other Russians.

She's in jeans that are a size too large and a T-shirt knotted at the waist, thick hair in a ponytail high up on her head, cheerleader style. She and Viktor's Russian guys seem to be joking around. She smiles at one point.

"We should put a stop to that."

"She's under control," Viktor says.

Control isn't the issue.

But I don't have a good explanation for what the hell the issue is, so I turn away. "Did you offer her coffee? In the mug we brought from the mansion? And food?"

"She took coffee-in her mug. She says she won't eat."

"She needs to eat."

Viktor shrugs. "A person can go weeks without food and be just fine."

Of course he would say that. Even now, he sees three meals a day as an extravagance. "Not somebody like Mira."

"Yes, somebody like Mira." Viktor turns to me. "What a person can't go without is sleep. You need to sleep." He walks out.

Right. Sleep. A peaceful sleep for me is never going to happen. Not in this life. Every time I close my eyes, I'm right back there with Konstantin's cigar-smelling fingers sealing my mouth like my life depended on it, keeping me quiet. The way my mother screamed when Lazarus caught her. Her terrorized eyes, reflecting in the window. The flash of the blade in Aldo Nikolla's hands.

More laughter. They're teaching her Russian. She repeats a phrase, trying to get it right. Her eyes are so big-they sometimes remind me of those Egyptian drawings from those tombs, except not fucked-up and wrong. Her eyes are perfect.

I decide to make a proper breakfast. I inspect the refrigerator and identify all the ingredients for frittatas.

I dump paprika into the bowl, turning my attention to the meal I'm making, but she's still a ghost on my skin. The gouges she made in my thighs burned while I ran. A good burn. She almost seemed into it. An act, I know. The human animal will do anything to survive, to help its own kind.

I slice a lemon and squeeze it into the mix.

Viktor comes back in, and I know what he's going to say the second he looks at the meal I'm cooking up. "Seriously, brat? When I see all this-" He waves his hand around the kitchen. "-I do not think that this is a man who plans to show that video to a girl's father as she cries."

"Have I ever not done what I had to do?" I give him a hard stare. It's simple to do the hard, bad things. You learn to turn something off. Make yourself dense, like cement, and just do it. This is knowledge we share.

One nod. "Okay, then."

I go back to work. "And there'll be frittatas for you, too."

He watches me work. His silence doesn't fool me.

"What?" I ask.

He nods in the direction of the patio. "You can never have her. She's so far out of the game..."

I know he's right, but all I can think of is how she looked up at me while she sucked my cock. The tightness of her lips, the slide of her tongue, the way all that derision cranked the temperature to nine hundred degrees. Pure hot flame.

And then I made it ugly.

"You can never have her," he continues. "If you let yourself think it, it is only pain."

"Are you questioning me here?"

"I am watching you make frittatas."

I made them for him once when one of his top guys was killed. I told him it was my magic meal.

Viktor takes his gun and cleaner out. "Princess in the castle. Her father took our things and gave them to her. She does not deserve anything good. You should tell her what he did. What you saw."

He saw it too, of course, but he was just two. "We're taking enough away from her," I say.

He starts taking apart the action.

"Not near the food," I say, waving at Viktor's gun oil. "I don't want it picking up the smell." I slice the cherry tomatoes into halves. They're easier to eat that way.

"She is the enemy."

"Your guys out there are chummy enough with her."

He snorts. "They're teaching her lines from Russian gangland movies. They think it is funny."

I go near where he works. They're all out there twirling their weapons now, teaching her how to do it. "What the fuck are they giving her a weapon for?"

"Relax. They would not give her something loaded."

Of course not.

"They're teaching her to be Sergei Kazan. In the movies, he twirls his gun like that and says, 'You go ahead and try it, baby, and I'll fill you so full of lead it'll be coming out of your ass.' It's funny if you know Sergei Kazan. Very brutish. Teaching her these lines. Like teaching a cat to talk." He smirks. "What? They're bored. You want to let them fuck her instead? I'm sure they would like to make a movie for her father, too."

In a flash my fists are on his lapels. I drag him out of his chair and push him against the wall.

"You see?" he says, panting. "You let yourself think you can have her."

My blood races. I watch myself being fucked up, putting him against the wall, nose to nose with my brother.

His gaze is steady.

Fuck. I lay off.

He stands, not bothering to straighten himself back up. "Konstantin did some things very wrong, I think. He should not have shown you so very many pictures of that girl. You watched her grow up."

"So?"

"She ate when you starved. Laughed when you cried. Kept safe while you hid. But I think that's not what came through."

"Maybe I was jacking off," I say.

He smiles. "You are good at that."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You are good at answering a question with a question. That's what you did just now. Like a fighter. Slipping the hit."

But he's wrong. His questions were, in fact, a direct hit. I spent long hours watching her, wondering how she was faring. If she'd found other friends. Trying to remember what it was like to feel good. Safe. To have people who care for me. And more, people like her to care about. I owe everything to Konstantin, but we weren't like a family. We were more like weaponsmith and sword.

A call comes in. The investigator has tracked down the old Worland director to a yoga class. "I'll have him within the hour," he says.

Viktor is back at his gun cleaning. I pull out the tomatoes and parmesan. Then I get an idea. I call Tito. "That accountant old man Nikolla used-Ligne. Go back at him." I give him instructions-he's to act like we got something new. Try to shake him that way.

"We decided Ligne knows nothing," Viktor says once I get off the phone. "That he was kept in the dark."

"I want to look at all the angles again. We have these few hours."

Viktor holds part of the action to the light. He tends to channel his passion into weaponry, just like Konstantin. He fucks women now and then, but he's indifferent at best. "You really think the old accountant holds something back?"

"I don't know."

"You don't want to show the movie to the old man," he observes.

I let the chopping fill the silence.

"Don't let the breaking game break you, brat."

She's lying in a deck chair when I go out there with the plates. Book in her lap, face to the sun. Even from feet away you can see her lashes, dark and thick.

The Russians are invisible around the perimeter now, but she knows they're there. Growing up, Mira and I were always aware of our bodyguards. Our distaste for them bonded us. Slipping them was a game. Mira would be laughing and running, same as me.

I set two plates down on the table and pull out a chair. "Come on."

"Any word about my dad?"

"Not awake yet. Come on."

She looks out at the forest perimeter. "Any leads on who can give us the key to the code?"

"Our guy's in pursuit. He tracked him to a yoga class."

"Thank goodness."

"It doesn't mean he has the code. We might still go with plan B."

"Dad gave you everything he could. He wouldn't gamble me."

It's on the tip of my tongue to tell her she's wrong, to tell her she's letting her optimism keep her stupid. Such a Mira thing to do, believing in him like that. Her optimism burns like a taunt.

I yank her chair out another noisy inch.

She gets up. Comes over and sits. She eyes the food. "You gonna shove this in my mouth, too?"

She stiffens when I touch her glossy ponytail. Even her hair feels impossibly smooth. All those pictures. The smiling girl in the perfect life. I pull her ponytail aside and touch the spot at the back of her neck. Soft and secret. Sensitive. It's a good spot. A spot I love. "I bet you'd enjoy that."

Red floods her cheeks and the back of her neck.