For one second, I just look at him.
Then I nod, get out, and run up the steps without another word.
The front hall is chaos.
Mama is there almost immediately, grabbing both my arms so hard it hurts. “Katerina?—”
“Where are they?”
Her face is wrecked. I have never seen her like this. Pale, crying openly, hair half fallen out of its pins.
“We don’t know.”
The words hit like a physical blow.
I stare at her. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“They were in the schoolroom,” she says, breathless, frantic. “The tutor left for ten minutes—ten minutes—to get Sofia’s reading book from the nursery because she said she wouldn’t finish the lesson without the right one, and when she came back they were gone.”
“Gone?”
Mama nods, crying harder now. “The back corridor door was open. One of the side cars is missing. No one saw?—”
“No one saw?” My voice cracks high and sharp. “What do you mean no one saw?”
Footsteps come from the hall. Irina.
She arrives already furious, already dressed for judgment, not grief. Her eyes go first to me, then behind me, and she stops cold when she sees Roman step into the house a second later.
That gives her all the ammunition she needs.
“Unbelievable,” she says.
I turn to her so fast Mama lets go of my arms. “You.”
Irina laughs once, bitter and disgusted. “Yes, me, apparently, because no one else in this house is allowed to ask where you’ve been while your children disappeared.”
Mama says, “Irina, please.”
Irina ignores her. “Where were you?”
I don’t answer immediately, and that only makes her surer of herself.
“We’ve been looking for those children for the last hour,” she says. “Your mother is beside herself. The whole house is in uproar. And you walk in like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like someone who has been somewhere she shouldn’t have been.”
I can barely breathe. “You think this is the time?”
“I think it’s exactly the time.”
That’s when Papa comes in from the study.
He still has his phone in his hand. Two of his men are behind him. He takes in the room in one glance: Mama crying, Irina furious, me standing there in my coat with my face probably telling on me more than I realize.
“What happened?” he asks.
