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“This is fucking stupid,” I said aloud. I reached out to grab my phone and wallet. I was not in the mood to work today. I needed to find Annie.
“Where are you going?” Marcel asked.
I was taken aback when he stormed into my office. Marcel had an issue with personal space, but it was odd for me to be seeing him so early in the morning, especially at work. “What are you doing here?” I asked, checking my watch. “I figured you’d be sleeping off a hangover.”
His face was grim as he looked at me. “We need to talk.”
“If you came to give me shit about the donations, I told you that I would let you know about the money after I talked to Annie.”
Marcel shook his head. “I’m not here about the money, and you should absolutely not run anything by that bitch.”
I was so shocked by Marcel’s words that I hesitated before I reached out and grabbed him by the lapels. “What did you say?”
Marcel pulled himself out of my grip. The fact that my desk was separating the two of us was the only thing that kept me from smashing my fist into Marcel’s face. Not that he seemed to care. He was smirking as he talked to me, almost as if he were enjoying my reaction.
“Chill the fuck out and listen to me,” he said.
I was breathing heavily as my anger heightened. Marcel made it clear that he didn’t like Annie, much like my mother, but he’d never been so brazen to call her names before.
“I’m not interested in whatever you have to say,” I told him.
He threw a folder down on my desk. It popped open slightly and a picture of Annie slipped out. Only, it wasn’t a current photo. I could tell because her hair was a light, almost white blonde, and her shape was slightly fuller.
“You might want to take a look at that before you blow a gasket,” Marcel said.
I grabbed the folder, shuffling through the paper without really seeing them. It wasn’t until I recognized the face of Nikolai Petrov that I stopped. I’d prosecuted Nikolai, a case that I would never forget. His psych eval had come back a mile long, and when you looked at him, I swore you could see the madness in his eyes.
This photo was different. He was younger and his eyes sparkled with mirth as he looked into the camera. What was more startling to me though was Annie. She was on his arm. Her now light brown hair was a light blonde color. Her face was fuller with youth, but when she looked in the camera, there was a sadness in her blue eyes.
“Odd, right?” Marcel asked. “I’m assuming that Annie never told you that she knew Nikolai Petrov.”
I started flipping through the documents that Marcel had thrown at me, ignoring his words. “What the hell is all of this?” I asked. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was looking at. All I could see was Nikolai Petrov and that bullet hole in Annie’s chest. I didn’t like the feelings that looking at that picture brought out in me.
“Nikolai had a girlfriend, didn’t he?”
My eyes drifted back to the picture of Annie. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen in the photo. I traced her face with my finger. It was both so similar and so different. “Anastasia Ivanov,” I whispered. My mouth was dry as I tried my best to talk through the tightness in my throat. Things were starting to fall into place, and I could barely stomach the picture that they were painting.
“It was suspected that he killed her on Katarina Petrov’s orders.”
My mind immediately went to the scar on Annie’s chest. “We never found a body.”
Marcel snorted, and the feeling of wanting to punch my best friend in the face intensified. I felt myself crumbling the photo in my hand as I read through some of the documents that Marcel had gathered for me.
“You didn’t find a body because she wasn’t dead. She’s been running all through New York City.”
I shook my head. “She’s been hiding,” I said. I was sure of it. Anastasia Ivanov had been born into fabulous wealth. Her father was even more wealthy than his former employer. If he knew that his daughter was alive and well, there was no way that he would have allowed her to live in that shit hole with Julia with barely enough food.
Marcel snorted. “Or she was a plant. Ivanov is the new head of the Bratva.”
“Allegedly,” I reminded him.
Marcel rolled his eyes. “Even if he’s not, he’s high up in the family. He was an enforcer for Petrov. He probably planted her in your office to keep an eye on you.”
I shook my head. I didn’t believe that. “You didn’t see him during Nikolai’s trial…” I closed my eyes as I recalled my one and only interaction with Ivanov. He’d come to my office a broken man and begged me to cut Nikolai a deal. “He thought that he killed his daughter. He begged me to find her body.” I shook my head. “He didn’t know she was alive. He didn’t send her here.”
Plus, I remembered how caged Annie has always been, and the inconsistencies in the stories she told about her family. The pieces were starting to fall into place, and I became more and more certain that she’d been hiding from her father.
“If he was so devastated, why would she hide from him?” Marcel asked, arching an eyebrow.
