Page 55

“Then you'll catch him.” Her thumb moved once across my knuckle. “And if you miss something, I won't.” Her confidence exposed how badly I wanted to deserve it.

The clinic occupied the fourth floor of a renovated warehouse near the river. Our lead team met us inside the underground service entrance and escorted us up a freight elevator that smelled of antiseptic and machine oil. Maksim walked ahead of Anika. Kirill covered the rear. I kept close enough to feel her coat brush my arm with each step.

Dr. Reznikov waited in an office large enough to impress wealthy patients without making them fear the bill or ask questions about the shit location. His beard and heavier frame changed the face from Nora's birth record, but not his habit of pushing his glasses up with one finger. He stared at Anika and stumbled backward into his desk. “Which one are you?”

She stopped across from him, head tilted at an angle. “The one you cut open. Unless you also performed a C-section on Alina. Which reminds me…Were you there when Mikhail was born?”

“I…Well…no.” His gaze dropped to the floor while Maksim checked the adjoining treatment room and Kirill closed the office door. I moved a chair for Anika, but she remained standing. Reznikov noticed the refusal and swallowed hard enough the gulping sound echoed around the room.

“Sokolov owns this clinic.” I placed both birth certificates on his desk. “Six months after Nora's birth, Anton Reznikov resigned, emptied his accounts, and vanished. Lebedev appeared here two weeks later with new credentials and a salary four times higher than the one he left behind.”

“I didn't have a choice.” He held up both hands like the show of surrender might help him. “You don't understand the kind of man⁠—”

Kirill leaned against the door, favoring the shoulder he'd bruised in the fire. “We understand him. We're having difficulty understanding you.” Reznikov flinched at the bored, cold tone.

To my surprise, Anika didn't. Perhaps she was more okay with us than I’d anticipated. Then again, this man was partially responsible for her trouble. It was a wonder he still had his eyes from the way she kept curling her fingers into her palms. She’d left little crescent moons on her skin from the pressure.

“Who ordered you to change Nora's name?” She slid the false certificate closer to him. “When I woke up the next afternoon, my sister claimed the hospital corrected a mistake, and you let me take my baby home without telling me she'd been registered under another identity.”

“Sokolov controlled the maternity ward that night.” Reznikov's voice dropped until the rain against the window nearly drowned it out. “The administrator, the charge nurse, security. Everyone who could alter a record or stop someone from asking questions belonged to him.”

Maksim shifted closer to the glass, scanning the roofline across the street. “Including you.”

“Including me.” The admission bowed Reznikov's shoulders. “My son owed money. Sokolov bought the debt, then he bought me. Before the delivery, I received instructions to falsify every document connected to the Petrova twins.” He blinked, his watery blue eyes skipping around the room. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Anika caught the edge of the desk. I moved toward her, but she lifted one hand without turning around. She wanted the space to stand on her own. Giving it to her required more control than taking the doctor apart would have.

“Why issue two certificates?” Her grip whitened around the wood. “Why Belova first and Petrova later?”

“The first identity kept the birth from appearing beneath your name while you were still in the hospital. Your sister forced the replacement before discharge.” Reznikov touched Alina's imitation of Anika's signature, then pulled his hand back as though the paper burned. “She threatened to expose the entire ward unless I withdrew it.”

“Alina protected her.” Anika pressed her lips together, grief and anger fighting across her face. “After helping them hide her in the first place.”

“She made terrible choices.” Reznikov finally met her eyes. “Leaving you to raise Nora alone wasn't one of them.”

Anika's fingers slipped from the desk, then closed around its edge again. “What does that mean?”

Reznikov unlocked the bottom drawer and removed a paper file swollen with folded pages. He placed it between the certificates, cleared his throat, and flipped it open. “Your sister came back three months after the birth with a photograph from the masquerade. She wanted their names.” Maksim went unnaturally still, and Kirill pushed away from the door.

Every photograph hid us behind masks or placed us outside the frame.

“She returned nine times over four years.” Reznikov watched me turn the pages, then turned sad eyes to Anika. “Sometimes she had another list. Sometimes she wanted access to Sokolov's files because she believed he knew who attended. She kept saying you weren't supposed to do this alone.”

Anika stopped me at a photograph of the hotel entrance and traced one blurred shoulder at the edge. “She never told me.”

“She didn't want you to know how badly she'd failed.” Reznikov reached toward her before thinking better of it, then snatched his hand back with Kirill snapped his fingers. “The last time I saw her, she made me promise that if I ever found out who they were, I'd tell them Nora existed.” He tapped the image of the three of us beneath the clock, a copy of the same image Nora had shown us.

My heart cracked right down the fucking middle, and Anika’s fuckity fucking dump truck curse ran a marathon loop around my thoughts.

For five years, Maksim, Kirill, and I hunted for Anika. Alina hunted three men she'd only seen behind masks, determined to repair at least one consequence of what she'd done.

Anika closed the file. Her gaze moved from Maksim to Kirill before settling on me. “I never found you. And we never…”

“We never stopped looking for you.” The truth landed with a kind of softness I hadn’t known I possessed until Anika. “Not once.” Her eyes shone, and I wanted to pull her close, but Reznikov's file remained open between us with Sokolov's fingerprints all over it. I turned back to him. “Why did Sokolov control the ward? What did Nora have to do with the masquerade?”

His face collapsed inward. Sweat shone along his hairline despite the cold office. “You still think the theft began in that hotel.”

“Where did it begin?” Maksim moved away from the window.