Page 196 of Mile High Ruin

I nearly broke his wrist for it.

A fucking masochist. That’s what I’ve become.

I tell myself I keep coming because Petrov is careful and because one mistake could be enough to lose him again, but the truth is uglier.

I want to see her.

Even now. Even after everything.

The curtain falls back into place.

I should leave. Instead, I remain where I am all right and let my mind return to the same question it has circled for months.

Mila. We still don’t know where she is. That’s the part that keeps the rage alive even when everything else becomes too complicated to understand.

The footage from the road outside the estate was poor, but not useless.

Daniel was driving. Sloane was in the back seat. A woman sat beside Daniel in front, her face partially obscured by darkness and the angle of the camera, but I knew her anyway.

I knew the way she held her shoulders. The tilt of her head. The fall of her hair.

Mila.

My sister disappeared the same night Sloane did. Now Sloane is here, and Mila is not. That fact has lived inside me like poison ever since.

I let Sloane into my home.

Into my family.

Into my bed.

Into parts of myself I spent years making inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t blood.

I stopped watching her as a threat. That was my mistake.

I trusted her with Anya. With Mila. With the people I would kill to protect. Then the house came under attack, and Sloane disappeared with my sister.

The footage from Paris came later.

I still remember Iosef carrying the laptop into my study. He hadn’t fully recovered from Camille’s attack, though he ignored every instruction to rest and moved around the house as though stubbornness could repair blood loss.

He placed the laptop in front of me. “We believe Sloane knew Petrov before Bucharest.”

I looked at him. “What does that mean?”

“We found footage.”

“From where?”

“Paris.”

Something inside me tightened. “When?”

“When she was still flying commercial, we believe.”

I stared at him. “That’s not possible.”

Iosef said nothing. He only opened the file.