Page 49 of Pack Baby for the Bratva
"Artem."
I locked the phone. The screen went dark but I remembered Mac's furious newborn concentration. That scrunched-up look babies get, like they've just been handed the world's worst contract and they're already drafting revisions. Maeve had been half-asleep behind him in the frame, one hand curled around his tiny back, the other still wrapped in his grip.
It had been thirty-six hours since Gregor delivered him. And I hadn’t held him.
I was three thousand kilometers away, stepping out of an SUV into air cold enough to make my lungs feel like they'd been scrubbed with steel wool.
My father’s Russian estate hadn't changed since I was nine years old. That was the problem with it.
It had the same iron gates, repainted so many times the scrollwork had gone soft at the edges. Same floodlights bleaching the snow into something surgical. Same black cars lined up like the world's most depressing wedding procession. Same armed men smoking under the portico, collars up, pretending the cold wasn't winning.
One of them nodded at me. Viktor. He'd been working my father's security since before I could drive. His mustache had gone entirely gray and he'd developed a gut that strained at his coat buttons, but the rifle slung across his chest was spotless.
"Artem Petrovich." He stamped his feet against the cold. "Condolences."
"Thank you." I didn’t want to correct him for using our old name.
"He's in the morgue at St. Alexei's. Guarded. We've had three attempts already."
"Three?"
"Amateurs." He spat into the snow. "Didn't even get past the parking lot."
"Who stopped them?"
Viktor's mustache twitched. "Your father's dog."
I blinked. "Duke?"
"Took a chunk out of the first one's calf. Second one tripped over a flower arrangement. Third one ran." He shrugged. "The dog's still at the morgue. Won't leave."
Of course it wouldn't. That animal had hated everyone except my father and, inexplicably, the cook's eleven-year-old daughter who fed it table scraps. It had once bitten a federal prosecutor and my father had framed the incident report.
"Make sure it's fed," I said.
"Already on it. We've been giving it the good stuff. It earned it."
Ivan snorted behind me. "The dog did more for the succession than the entire council. Maybe we should take it back to England."
Viktor's eyes flicked to Ivan, then away. Smart man.
“Send the dog to England,” I called as we walked toward the house.
The cold had teeth. Not the polite, damp cold of London that seeped into your joints and made you grumble. This cold wanted a fight. The kind that made your nostrils stick together when you breathed in and turned the snow into powder so fine it squeaked under your boots.
Ivan's breath plumed in the dark. "I've always hated this place."
"You've told me. Every time we visit."
"Because it never improves. Look at that." He pointed at a gargoyle above the entrance, its stone face worn nearly smooth. "That thing has looked constipated since the eighteen-hundreds and nobody's done anything about it."
"It's a grotesque, not a gargoyle. Gargoyles have water spouts."
"Thank you, Wikipedia." He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets. "You know what I mean, though. This house eats people and shits out portraits."
I did know what he meant.
The entrance hall hit us with the usual assault: beeswax polish, wet wool, gun oil, and the staleness of central heating that hadn't been updated since the Soviet Union. Somewhere a radiatorclanked. The chandelier, which was a monstrosity of Bohemian crystal that my grandmother had imported at ruinous expense, threw fractured light across the marble floor.
