Page 200 of Mile High Ruin

I never imagined this.

She looks at me as though the street has split open and produced something she thought she had escaped. Her face changes slowly, recognition arriving before she seems willing to accept it, and when her lips part I hear my name in a voice so quiet that it nearly disappears beneath the noise of traffic behind us.

“Vadim?”

I think about everything I had to face the last couple of months, how brutal Mila’s disappearance has been to my family. None of it disappears, but for one reckless second all of it becomes secondary to the fact that she’s standing in front of me and she is alive.

I take one step toward her.

She presses farther back against the wall.

I stop immediately. That movement cuts deeper than it should.

She’s afraid of me.

After everything I have done, perhaps she should be.

I look at her face, at the faint shadows beneath her eyes, at the exhaustion I’ve been watching from across streets and through photographs for weeks, and there are a hundred things I want to say. So many answers I want to shake out of her.

Instead, what comes out is quieter than all of that.

“Hello, Sloane.”

32

SLOANE

For several seconds, I can’t make my body understand that Vadim is actually standing in front of me.

He looks almost exactly the same and completely different at once, which shouldn’t be possible, but nothing about seeing him after all these months feels possible. His hair is still silver, his shoulders still too broad for the dark coat he’s wearing, his face still severe enough that strangers instinctively give him room, but there’s something harder in him now, something that wasn’t there when I left the estate.

Or maybe it was always there and I simply stopped noticing.

“Hello, Sloane.”

My name in his voice does something terrible to me.

Relief comes first. It’s so immediate and so powerful that I hate myself for it, because for months I’ve been telling myself that if I ever saw him again I would run, scream, call the police, do anything except stand there looking at him like some part of me has finally unclenched.

Then fear catches up.

Then anger.

Then everything else.

I remember the exact moment I saw the light go out from Camille’s eyes. Viktor telling me he would help me get home. Ethan lying in a hospital bed getting weaker by the day.

The baby.

The fact that Vadim is standing close enough that I could reach out and touch him.

My stomach rolls. I turn away so quickly my shoulder hits the wall. “Oh God.”

Vadim moves at once. “Sloane?”

I barely make it to the edge of the alley before I bend over and throw up.

There’s almost nothing in my stomach except tea and the miserable half slice of toast I forced down earlier, but my body doesn’t care. The nausea tears through me anyway, leaving my throat burning and my eyes watering while I brace one hand against the wall and pray the pavement will open and swallow me before I have to turn around.