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“Right. Anyway, I met them in Little Russia. We’re hot on his trail.”
“Right now?”
“Literally as I speak,” Konstantin confirms. “He’s been hiding out with an immigrant family in an apartment complex in the heart of Little Russia. It’s nothing like his usual digs. No wonder he escaped our notice all these months.”
“Who are you with?”
“The Wolf,” he tells me. “The Tiger and The Bear are approaching from different directions. We want to try and corner him. Fucker is on the nineteenth floor of this shithole. Christ, though, the place is depressing. At least they put a shitty little balcony on all the units so it’s easy to jump when you’ve had enough.”
“Are you going in now?”
“I’m on the seventeenth floor. But—goddammit, I can’t breathe. Shitbox elevator got stuck halfway up. We had to pry the bastard open and take the stairs like peasants.”
His panting gets more labored to the point where I can only make out every third or fourth word, but I can’t make myself get off the phone.
I should be there with Konstantin.
This is my fight.
So why is my first thought that I’m mostly glad I didn’t miss that moment in the doctor’s office with Paige?
“Are you armed?”
“To the motherfuckin’ teeth. This isn’t my first rodeo, cuz. Up on the nineteenth now. Closing in.”
I hear a muffled voice, deep and confident and spooky enough to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It has to be The Wolf.
“We’re going in,” I hear Konstantin say, before there’s a crash that gets lost in the static. He must be kicking the door in.
I wait with bated breath, waiting for the sound of a gunshot, a scream, fuckingsomething.
There’s nothing.
Nothing.
Then: “Fuck!”
“What?” I demand. “What happened?”
“He’s… goddammit, he’s gone.”
My hand tightens around the phone. “What do you mean, ‘He’s gone’?”
“The kettle is still on the fucking stove. But it looks like he disappeared out the back window minutes before we got here. Shimmied down the fire escape and ducked The Tiger and The Bear somehow.”
“He knew you were coming,” I growl.
Konstantin curses again. I hear something bang on the other end of the line. He must be turning the apartment upside down. “Sure as shit looks like it. But how?”
“You know how,” I snarl.
I can practically hear his grimace as he comes to the same conclusion I have. “He had to have been warned. Which means…”
Anger boils in my veins. “We have a fucking rat.”
70
PAIGE
