Page 82 of Nine Months to Love

Taras snorts. “Short of following him night and day, I’m not sure what else to do. And before you say it, I’ve already had guys on him for a week. This is all they got.”

“Then we need better guys.”

“Stefan, please don’t say what I think you’re gonna?—”

“You’ll do it yourself. Follow him. Learn his patterns. Find the chink in his armor.”

Taras’s face falls. “You’re kidding.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

“I’m your second-in-command, not a bomb-sniffing dog, bro.”

“You’re whatever I need you to be.” I close the folder. “Start tomorrow. I want to know everything. When he takes a piss, what brand of coffee he drinks, who cuts his hair. Everything.”

“This is beneath me.”

“Nothing is beneath you if I ask you to do it.”

He glares at me but doesn’t argue further. He knows better. “Fine,” he mutters. “But you owe me. Big time.”

“I’ll buy you a new car.”

“I don’t want a new car. I want a vacation. Somewhere warm with beaches and curvy women with loose morals who don’t know my name.”

“After we deal with Iakov and my mother, I’ll buy you a ticket to anywhere in the world you want.”

“That could be months,” he protests.

“Then you better find something on him quickly.”

Before Taras can complain more, the door opens. Arkady walks in, and immediately, I know something’s wrong. His face is pale, his usual swagger replaced by nervous energy.

“Boss,” he says, his voice tight. “We need to talk.”

“What is it?”

He glances at Taras, then back at me. “It’s about that house. The one where your mother was spotted.”

I sit up straighter. “What about it?”

“I did the background check like you asked. Deep dive into ownership, history, everything.” He sets a folder on my desk, thinner than Taras’s but somehow heavier. “The house was owned by a woman named Vera Vladislav.”

“And?”

“When she died, she left the property to her two daughters.” He opens the folder, pulls out a photograph. “And I found their names. Mila and Mikayla.”

Suddenly, the rest of the world fades into irrelevance. “Did you sayMikayla?”

Arkady nods, his face grim. He pulls out another photograph, this one older, grainier. Two teenage girls standing in front of a house—the same house where my mother was hiding. “This was hard to find. Someone worked real hard to bury it.”

I study the photo. Two girls, maybe fourteen and sixteen. Sisters, clearly. Same dark hair, same sharp features. The younger one...

“That’s her,” I say, pointing at the younger girl. “That’s ourMikayla. Mikayla Santos.”

But Arkady shakes his head. “According to all the records I found, including the original birth certificate I managed to get my hands on, that isn’t Mikayla. That’sMila.” He taps the older sister’s picture. “Thatis Mikayla Vladislav.”

The office goes silent. I can hear my own heartbeat, loud and fast.