“I’m going to the pharmacy.”
“We can send someone.”
“I don’t want someone sent. I want to go.”
He glances down the corridor, then back at me. “Not today.”
Something in the way he says it makes my skin tighten.
I look at him more carefully. I have not seen him before.
That by itself is not impossible. Papa has brought in extra men. But most of them carry themselves like house security, old network, family payroll. This one feels newer. Less rooted. Like he learned the house layout too quickly and has not yet learned how to wear it like it belongs to him.
“I don’t know you,” I say.
His face stays blank. “I started Tuesday.”
“That was quick.”
“We all adapt.” He shifts his arm slightly as he speaks, and I catch it then. Just under the cuff, where his sleeve pulls back an inch too far.
Ink.
A tattoo on the inside of his forearm. Black lines. Not enough to read fully, just enough to know it’s not the kind of thing Papa’s older men usually wear where it can be seen.
My pulse picks up.
I make myself smile. “All right,” I say. “Fine. If I can’t leave, I can at least go back and suffer indoors.”
He nods and steps aside.
I turn away slowly, then pull my phone from my pocket as if I’m checking a message.
One quick motion.
One blurred photograph over my shoulder.
It catches the edge of his arm and enough of the tattoo to matter.
I don’t breathe properly until I’m back in my room with the door shut.
I stare at the picture.
It’s not perfect. But the mark is there, dark against skin, and my instinct screams at it before my mind has any proof to offer.
I need Roman. Which is a sentence I hate for at least six different reasons.
Unfortunately, I need his number first.
I do not have it. Because I’m an idiot.
No, not an idiot. Worse. A woman who spent four years avoiding a man so completely that she never once allowed herself the stupidity of keeping a way back to him.
But Vika has it.
Of course, Vika has it.
Which means I now have to steal Roman Sokolov’s number from my sister’s phone without being caught inside a house where everyone is suddenly suspicious and overprotective.
