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He seems to understand.

Or maybe he’s just returning to the man he knows how to be.

By the time I reach the top of the stairs, Vasily is all Bratva boss again, talking in Russian on his cell phone with those dark eyes appraising me from below.

And somehow, that makes it easier.

* * *

I don’t go to my room. Instead, I sit down in the office they gave me after I first met with Mikhail. I pull up the trial documents, but I can’t concentrate.

My eyes drift to another browser tab, still open from two nights ago.

Emma.

I stare at photographs of my sister with Ruslan Smirnov, many of them pulled from news articles. The two of them are everywhere in Santa Barbara and Colorado. Events. Charity functions. Photos outside restaurants. One picture catches me completely off guard.

Emma is holding her child. Ruslan stands behind them as they move through Denver, a hand hovering over her hip. Emma looks more relaxed than I’ve seen her in years. And though Ruslan is clearly almost twice her age, he’s dangerously handsome and clearly protective of her.

My chest tightens.

I miss her. God, I miss her. I’m happy for her, but also angry that she’s happy, and angry that she found happiness with someone who is technically the wrong kind of person. I don’t know how to reconcile all that. Isla is right; I’ve always seen things in black and white.

For months, I’ve been angry enough to convince myself I didn’t. But seeing her as the happily married mother she is makes something inside me ache.

She found happiness when I kept telling her, over and over, that she was failing. She found happiness in a world that should have killed her, but instead she’s thriving. And I’m falling apart in the mountains, thousands of miles away.

Maybe that’s what unsettles me most.

I lean back in my chair. My hand drifts absently to my stomach, trying to recall just what the nausea felt like.

And then I freeze.

The helicopter. Throwing up without feeling sick. The exhaustion. The nausea that comes and goes.

The way I’ve been feeling different for days, though I’ve been ascribing it to briefly losing Isla and being out of contact with my “normal” life. Homesickness? Or is it something else?

My breath catches.

No.

I stare at the screen, Emma holding a swaddled infant. Ruslan Smirnov, with his chin tipped down, looking over the tops of his glasses directly at the camera taking the photo.

I look back down at my hand.

My mind races, thinking back. Before last night, before the empty lodge, before he showed up in my apartment, then, to when we first met.

Think about the first time we met, Matilda. Do I strike you as the kind of man who doesn’t know how to treat a woman?

The words he said in the elevator, a reminder of the hotel where I was supposed to meet an informant. Instead, I met the man who tempted me into helping him.

The first night we slept together; about a month ago now.

My stomach drops. Oh, God.

I might be pregnant.

Chapter 30