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Hearing her recap the last few hours, I relive the trauma in rapid succession.

“How old is the child?” The woman asks, her voice less annoyed.

“He’s six.”

There’s silence for what feels like a lifetime. “How long have they been in there?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

“Do we know if they are still alive?”

Katya’s voice aches. “No.” Her eyes drift toward the floor.

I can hear Alana moving in her bed and groaning a little, sounds more out of annoyance than anything else. “So at best you need a rescue, but it could be a recovery.”

I squeeze Katya. She continues to look at the floor but she’s reading my mind as she says, “I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

Again, silence. “I want to keep Midge.”

“The cat? The cat I hate more than any living animal? Sure, I was going to tell you to keep her anyway.” Katya’s voice is light, and it creates the first lingering fragment of hope.

Silence again.

“I’ll have wheels up in six hours. I need to find a plane and get a crew together. Send me the coordinates. It’s a ten-hour flight, with on-the-ground recon and rescue, plus travel time to get to you… Give me twenty-four hours.”

“Done.”

Twenty-four hours.

That’s Uri’s ETA. Twenty-four hours, and everyone will be together. And our new life can begin.

Chapter

Twenty

Katya

Dimitri’s guilt sucker-punches him straight to the soul. “We were fucking and falling in love while my nephew is trapped in a panic room.”

Whoa. Falling in love. Yep, that’s something I need to unpack later.

He scrubs his face. “How can I be happy while he’s scared to death? And what about Nadia? Will she be able to get her meds? What kind of person am I that not once did I stop and think about Ian?”

The bed sinks under my weight as I press my body next to his. “There was a lot happening. We were running for our lives. It’s not bad that you didn’t think about your nephew who wasn’t anywhere near the massacre. Your subconscious assumption was that he’d be fine. Safe, and removed from the situation.”

He sinks lower, cradling his head in his hands. “You don’t understand.”

I have an entire dossier on him. I know the name of his goldfish when he was nine… It was Silver. There’s nothing he can say that I don’t already know or wouldn’t understand.

“He’s my son.”

Oh, yeah. Nope, didn’t know that. “Oh. So you and Nadia…” I make little gestures with my hands.

He pulls back like I’ve punched him in the face. “You think I fucked my brother’s wife?”

“Well, he was having an affair with your girlfriend, so I’m not sure about this whole dynamic.”

He stares off into space, pulling his arms close to his chest. “When my brother was a teenager, he got into some trouble. Didn’t pay the debts he owed to a rival who already had high tensions with Dad. My brother met with a car battery and, to make a long and graphic story short, he became infertile.