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“We can’t get involved in bringing her home — crossing state lines with a minor would bring down all kinds of heat — but we can probably figure out where they are,” Damian said. "Do you have an email address for your ex-husband?”
Ruby nodded.
“Give that to me before you leave — along with his name — and we’ll get on it,” Damian said.
“How long will it take?” Ruby asked.
“That depends,” Damian said.
Ruby looked up at him. “On what?”
“On how dumb he is. And how arrogant.”
9
RUBY
She was momentarily confused when she woke up. The room was dark, a faint glow coming from behind the closed drapes. It took her a minute to find the time and place — evening in her bedroom in Roman’s loft — in the vast emptiness of her post-sleep mind.
It had been that way since her kidnapping — falling asleep hard and fast, emerging from slumber confused, her mind feeling like it had been wrapped in cotton as she scrambled to place her current situation.
Her circumstances had changed repeatedly and dramatically in the past few months, from her simple life with Olivia to the storm that was Roman’s entry into it to her kidnapping and imprisonment at the grain terminal.
Her mind didn’t seem to know which way was up. Where once she’d had trouble sleeping, her mind overwhelmed with worry about bills and Olivia and the tightrope of her post-divorce life with Adam, now she tumbled into the vacuum of sleep all at once, a refuge from everything that was out of her control.
She’d returned from the city with Roman as confused as ever. When he’d said they were going to meet with the head of the Italian Mob in New York, she’d imagined a sprawling estate, or maybe even a restaurant in Little Italy, dimly lit and populated with mafiosos in suits.
Clearly she’d watched too many movies.
She hadn’t been at all prepared for the luxurious high-rise and she’d been even less prepared for Damian Cavallo, who seemed more likely to have stepped away from his trading desk on Wall Street than to be in charge of a criminal syndicate.
She thought about what Roman had told her the night they’d stayed at the Syndicate’s hotel — how crime was everywhere, even on Wall Street where it was just dressed in a suit and disguised as legitimate enterprise.
Now she was in danger of buying it hook, line, and sinker because the way he said it, the way he framed it, made sense. But every time she came around to thinking of it that way, to soothing herself with the knowledge that Roman wanted to remake the bratva into an organization with less violence and more twenty-first-century profit, she remembered her mother.
She sighed aloud and stretched, then wondered if Roman was home. She hadn’t wanted to have the conversation with her sister about him, but now that it was done she felt a kind of relief. Her life might be a shit show, her relationship with Roman a question with no answer, but at least she wasn’t keeping secrets from Brooke.
She sat up, suddenly anxious to see him. He’d obviously chalked up some kind of debt with Damian and the Syndicate, not just because of his request for information on Russians who’d come to America in the past three months but also because of his request for information on Adam.
Ruby didn’t know what those kind of favors looked like — money? violence? — but she was grateful Roman was willing to go into debt in the name of finding Olivia.
She stood and padded into the hallway, hesitating in front of the door to the room Roman had made for Olivia, tempted to go in and sit on the bed for a few minutes, then passed it by.
Although her daughter had never occupied the room, sitting in it brought Olivia close. Ruby had to steel herself against the onslaught of anguish that came along with the hope that Olivia would occupy it someday soon.
Ruby made her way to the living room, following the flicker of the TV. Roman was sitting on the sofa in jeans and a T-shirt, a glass, filled with a finger of amber liquid, in his hand as he stared at a stock market report playing out on the screen.
He’d muted the sound and the captions ticked by in a black box at the bottom of the screen.
He looked up when she entered the room. “I was trying not to wake you.”
“You didn’t.” The loft was impeccably engineered, the walls thick and soundproof from room to room. “I shouldn’t have slept so long anyway.”
He lifted an arm and she settled herself carefully against him, not wanting to hurt the healing wound on his chest.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You need the rest,”
She craned her neck to look up at him. “You’re the one who took a bullet.”
