Page 23

I pull the duvet over my head and groan.

“She's awake,” Milana calls from somewhere outside my door.

“She's not,” I call back.

The door opens anyway. My sisters have never respected a closed door in their lives. Milana comes in first carrying two coffees, followed by Evaria, then Galana with a plate of toast, and finally Zhenya with her laptop tucked under one arm like she's arriving for a board meeting.

They arrange themselves on my bed like a jury.

“So,” Evaria says. “You came home late.”

I groan. “I went to dinner.”

“With Garick Lazovski,” Milana says, handing me a coffee.

“I needed to eat.”

“You had no lipstick on when you came in,” Galana says gently. “And you had it on when you left.”

I stare at her. Galana. Sweet, soft-hearted Galana, who cried at Papa's funeral for four hours straight, has apparently been running surveillance.

“I wiped it off,” I say. “With a napkin. After the khachapuri.”

“Uh huh,” Evaria says.

“Did he kiss you?” Milana asks, bouncing slightly.

“No.”

That part, at least, is technically true.

Because I kissed him.

I grabbed his shirt in the middle of a street and dragged him down and kissed him like I was trying to punish him for something, and he stood there and let me. He let me decide. And then he kissed me back like he'd been waiting his whole life to do it, and my knees did something they've never done for any man. Then I drove home with my hands shaking on the steering wheel.

I called it a mistake.

He smiled.

I sip my coffee and say nothing.

Zhenya, who hasn't looked up from her laptop once, says, “She kissed him.”

“I did not.”

“Your ears go red when you lie. They've done it since you were six.”

I put my hand over my ear before I can stop myself. Milana shrieks. Evaria throws herself back across the foot of the bed and laughs at the ceiling. Galana looks delighted and slightly scandalized.

“I hate all of you,” I say.

“It's fine,” Evaria says. “We're all in the same boat and going to have to kiss a stranger at some point in the next few weeks.”

That shuts everyone up. For a second, the room goes quiet, and I remember there are four more names in Viktor's folder. Names my sisters have each had to meet…apart from Zhenya who has been up all hours trying to find a way to break the trust.

Then my phone rings.

I frown at Pyotr’s name on my screen.