Page 48 of Blood & Snow

Unknownnumber, which means either emergency communication from one of my soldiers or updates from the boss.

But what I find chills my blood and draws anger from deep in my chest.

The message contains a single photograph—Nadya entering her sister's apartment building, taken from across the street sometime today, based on the daylight and her clothing.

Below the image, three words.

Pretty little bird.

Hot and immediate rage floods my nervous system.

They're watching her, photographing her movements, sending messages designed to distract me and warn me.

The Brotherhood knows about her importance to my operations and plans to exploit that knowledge.

I swallow the tide of anger and force myself inward.

Fury is useless unless it is sharpened into strategy, yet this feels different.

The photograph is not a tactic—it is an intrusion.

Nadya’s face does not appear in the frame, but the implication is enough.

They have reached into my private hunger and turned it outward, making it a spectacle.

It is an insult disguised as a warning, and it gnaws at me.

Markov would tell me to sever the weakness.

He would remind me that the Brotherhood survives because they exploit sentiment, and that sentiment is fatal.

He would not be wrong.

If I kill her, the problem ends—clean, efficient, a solution buried with the others in the river.

But my mind refuses obedience.

I see her climbing that stairwell, the shape of her against the light.

I see her in my bed, hair tangled, eyes uncertain but alive.

I test the thought of her absence, and what it leaves in me is not relief but vacancy, a hollow wider than strategy can fill.

I tell myself the truth.

She is part of the war now.

The bird in their photograph is already caged, and I have decided she will stay and sing for me and no one else.

And anyone who approaches the cage will have their hands cut off, and maybe their heads too.

10

NADYA

The key turns in the lock and I step into the warmth of our small apartment, carrying a shopping bag that contains evidence of my secret life—the black dress Xander bought me and a pair of diamond earrings that I've not shown her.

After a few days with him, and wearing this little number to a club where I sat and talked with men who terrified me, I'm glad to be home.