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She hitched a shoulder. “Sorry.”
“Thanks for lying,” I mocked, but I was smiling. ‘Adapt and overcome.’ I hadn’t been a Marine, but I lived by their motto.
"Weird that they'd be friends though," she mumbled out loud.
"No weirder than you and me being friends." I grabbed the bottle of juice Conor had brought with him and took a sip. “So, who was Belyaev and how do you know when Conor could barely find anything about him?”
“Because Jorgmundgander gave us his profile but in the aftermath, they tended to wipe their targets’ slates clean.”
“Why?”
“Easier to pretend they never existed that way. Jorgmundgander’s MO is skeevy as fuck. They make the CIA appear friendly. They don’t just kill someone, they eradicate them. Every part of their lives.”
At her long pause, I frowned. “Wait… Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“That you were probably dumped into the sex slave business because of your ties to your mother? Yeah. That your dad probably got dealt some shitty coke or something to kill him, yup. They go in and they clean up after themselves.
“You probably only lived as long as you did without interacting with them because of your dad’s status.”
“Fuck.”
“About sums it up,” she agreed. “If your grandfather and uncle were looking for you, that’s probably why you were impossible to find. That you were a commodity the Sparrows could use undoubtedly worked in your favor and stopped them from killing you outright. If you consider living to be a benefit, that is.”
We shared a glance. Snorted. Returned to staring straight ahead.
“Until Kat, I didn’t. After, now, with Conor, I’m even gladder to be alive.”
She hummed. “Never took you for a fool in love.”
“It gets us all,” I mocked. “So, Belyaev…”
“He was the key player in sourcing the women in the Baltics.”
“Didn’t stop them from having a steady stream once he was dead.”
“Course not. They shoved his younger sister’s husband in the hole he left behind, but he had a lot of power and his replacement didn’t.
“As I said, he had others believing he was a Romanov too. Where he was from, at any rate. It was why they took their daughters to him—they thought he’d give them a better life.”
“Bastard.”
“Yup. The dream career of most women in Russia is prostitution.”
“Bullshit.”
“Nope. You ask around on the ground, and it is. That’s what poverty and years under a communist dictatorship do to you. The families would pay him to help their daughters find work if you can believe that.”
“Didn’t they question shit if they never heard from their kid again?”
“The ones with families became brides. The ones who were on their own became slaves.
"The brides went with average middle-class Americans and, to people in the Baltics, that’s practically luxury living. Why wouldn’t they spread the news that Belyaev had the means of giving their children better lives?”
My brain whirred with the new information that wasn’t new. Alessa, Kat’s sister, had been on her own when she’d become a slave, whereas her mom, who’d left Alessa and her own mother behind, had become a bride.
I thought about Amara, another victim of this heinous market Belyaev and his ilk had exploited. “Why were some kidnapped?”
“Easy marks, of course.” The duh was silent.
