My what?
I clench my hands in the sheets, nausea swirling in my stomach.
Dimitri would never. No.
He raised me, trained me, protected me. Dimitri is my mentor. My friend.
In the shower?
A shudder creeps through my shoulders as I stare at the little black boxes in Max’s hand.
The shower, one in my bedroom, and…
I swallow down bile. “That’s not possible. He listens to me. And I insisted on no cameras in the safe house.” I also told him no guns, and that clearly wasn’t obeyed. My chest seizes. “He devoted his life to helping me get my mother’s locket back!”
“I find that highly unlikely.” Max tosses the pile of cameras to the bed, his proof trumping my denials. “There must be something else he wants. No one does all this for someone else’s necklace, not even your precious Dimitri. But they might do it for what the necklace can get them.”
What the locket can get him?
My mind races as I try to piece together memories and facts to form a solid picture.
Nothing fits.
Dimitri was a young man who found a strange child on an island after a disaster. Knew her family was alive and still took her in. Trained her to get revenge on her father. Spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to mold her into a killer.
Why? He’s never explained, and I’ve never asked.
I reach for the cameras, their cold plastic digging into my palm.
What else have I been blind to?
“You know the combination?” When Max enters the main room, I know what he’s looking at.
The wall safe.
I scramble out of bed naked to stand next to him by the safe.
I suck in a breath. “Zero. Four. One. Five.”
Max punches the code in. “Your birthday. Not very secure.”
“How—”
“Everyone in the Bratva knows your birthday. It’s one of four days never to approach Roman.” Once the safe beeps, Max swings the door open. “Your birthday, Lilia’s birthday, their anniversary, and the day you both died.”
He says it as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. A fact that everyone knows.
My mind spins, lost in a storm of uncertainty as I drown in new information.
Max pulls a laptop out of the safe, but I worry he’ll waste hours on the couch trying to hack into it.
I touch his arm. “That’s a decoy. This is what we’re really after.” Reaching past him, I grab a handful of leather-bound notebooks under the safe’s false bottom, each one identical save for the numbers on the spine.
Dimitri’s journals.
“He knows computers can be compromised remotely. That’s why he never trusts them. He records everything important on paper.” That’s also why I’m supposed to torch the safe if there’s ever a breach here.
I didn’t do that.
