Page 168 of Mile High Ruin

There are too many things competing for attention in the room—documents stacked in careful piles, a half-empty glass beside Vadim’s laptop, a map spread across one corner of the desk with several locations circled in dark ink—but the face in the photograph catches somewhere in my memory before I consciously recognize it, and I stop with my hand still resting against Vadim’s arm.

He looks down at me. “What?”

I don’t answer immediately. Instead, I move closer to the desk, leaning just enough to see the photograph properly without touching anything.

The man is dressed differently in the picture. He’s wearing a dark coat and looking away from the camera, his expression much colder than I remember, but there’s no possibility that I have mistaken him.

My stomach turns. “Who is that?”

Vadim follows my gaze. Something about him changes almost immediately, though his voice remains calm when he answers.

“Viktor Petrov.” He’s looking at me. “My worst enemy.”

I keep staring at the photograph. For one terrifying second I’m certain the reaction must show on my face, because there’s suddenly a roaring sound in my ears and the room seems to narrow around that one name.

I recover quickly, clearing my throat. “He’s the one who planned the attack on you?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Why?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, looking away. There’s something he’s not telling me. Or it could be just a simple matter of them being enemies. He’s a mob boss after all. And so is Petrov, I assume.

But he’s also the same man I met in a club three weeks ago. I remember the bar. The expensive jacket. The controlled smile. The way he asked what I did for work and then guessed flight attendant with such easy confidence that I thought he was simply observant.

I remember him asking about difficult passengers.

I remember refusing to tell him anything.

I remember his card.

My bag.

The tracker.

Every thought arrives at once, so violently that I have to force myself to breathe normally.

Vadim is watching me now. “What about him?”

I turn toward him before my silence becomes suspicious. “Nothing.”

His eyes narrow slightly. “You asked.”

“I just got curious,” I say.

It’s not technically a lie, and I cling to that because the alternative would require explaining everything right now, here, moments before Mila’s birthday dinner, while Vadim is standing beside me in one of the rare good moods I’ve seen him sustain for longer than several minutes.

He places one hand at the small of my back and guides me toward the door. “Come. Mila will assume we forgot.”

The warmth of his palm settles through the fabric of my dress, and for a few seconds I almost tell him. I almost stop in the doorway and say that I’ve seen Viktor Petrov before, that he bought me a drink after my first flight with Vadim, that he knew I worked in aviation, that he handed me a card I later put into the same bag somebody tampered with before the Bucharest attack.

Instead, I leave the study with Vadim.

And for the next two hours, I think about almost nothing else.

The birthday celebration is smaller than I expected, although I’m beginning to understand that small in this family still involves more food than twenty people could reasonably finish, candles everywhere, flowers arranged across the dining room, and Anya vibrating with so much excitement on Mila’s behalf that she nearly knocks over a tray before Nadia catches it.

Mila walks into the room and stops, and for a moment, nobody says anything. That alone tells me this was the right thing to do.