Page 5 of Captive Promise
I grin. “Second time,” I say cheerfully. “And I already checked. She’s stable.”
“Mm-hmm.” Dawn has been a trauma nurse for twenty-six years and has earned the right to that mm-hmm. “Go home, baby. Eat something that didn’t come from a vending machine.”
Damn Dawn and her eagle eyes. She knows I have a weakness for cookies and candy. “Yes, ma’am.”
In the elevator lobby, an older man in a rumpled Mets hoodie is asleep upright in a chair, a teddy bear with a balloon clutched in his lap.
Either a new father or grandfather, I’d bet my license, waiting out the hours between visiting windows.
The vending machine hums its blue glow over him like a nightlight and I gaze longingly at the brown sugar pop tarts I know are there.
Instead, I fish my phone out as I wait for the elevator and thumb through the day’s accumulated life: a text from my best friend with a recipe I will never make, three memes from Priya in cardiology, a reminder that my dry cleaning has been ready for nine days.
The small, dumb, lovely administration of an ordinary life.
My phone rings before the elevator arrives.
Nikolai.
My heart does a little leap, exhaustion momentarily forgotten, because there’s only one reason I can think of for my cousin to call this early—Aria.
Maksim’s wife is due any day now, round and radiant and so over being pregnant the last time I saw her that she threatened to evict the baby by sheer force of will.
I’ve only met her a handful of times, but I liked her instantly—the way she rolls her eyes at Maksim’s brooding, the way my terrifying cousin turns soft as warm butter when she and Daniel walk into a room.
I’ve been quietly praying for a girl because Maksim and Aria did not want to know the baby’s sex.
God, I hope it’s a girl.
The Sokolov family could use more estrogen.
I answer with a grin already forming as I fantasize about all the baby clothes I’m going to buy. “What’s up, Kolya? Am I a cousin again? Please tell me it’s a girl—”
“Where are you?”
Two words, and the grin dies on my face.
I know my cousin’s voices like the back of my hand. There’s boardroom Nikolai, smooth and cold. There’s family-dinner Nikolai, dry and almost human.
And there’s this one—flat, clipped, and stripped of everything but command—the voice I’ve only heard a handful of times in my life, and never once when things were okay.
“I’m at work,” I say slowly. “I just finished my shift. Kolya, what—”
“Are you safe?” Nikolai demands. “Is anyone with you?”
“I’m in the middle of Columbia Presbyterian, there are about four hundred people with me.” I pull the phone away to check the screen, as if it might explain something. “I’m fine. I’m about to head home. What is going on?”
What comes next comes fast.
Too fast, his words tumbling over each other in a way that is so profoundly unlike my measured, deliberate cousin that my stomach drops before I’ve even processed the content. Dinner at Maksim’s.
The families together—Brennans, Santoros, all of them.
A breach. A child.
“Wait—wait, slow down.” I press my free hand flat against the wall, grounding myself the way I do before I tell a family bad news. “Someone took Seraphina? Leo Santoro’s daughter? She’s—God, Kolya, she’s what, two?”
“Not even three,” my cousin confirms, his voice like ice which means he’s irate. “They breached the perimeter at Maksim’s estate during dinner. In and out in under thirty seconds. They managed to evade Maksim’s worthless guards and snatched the girl when Danya’s back was turned while the children played in the backyard.” Nikolai growls in anger.
