Page 9 of Pageant

“About to get balls deep in Number Eleven.”

“Where the fuck are you?”

“You can’t come here. There are bodies everywhere.”

“That woman. What’s her name?”

I stick my hand up Number Eleven’s T-shirt and palm her breast, rolling my thumb over her tight nipple. “You think I bothered to ask?”

Elyah snarls a string of expletives and I drop the phone from my ear. For fuck’s sake. Resigning myself to whatever personal drama Elyah is going through, I zip up and get to my feet. The woman had a handbag, didn’t she? I wander through the apartment until I find it next to the sofa. Inside is a passport.

Elyah is still swearing and ranting when I put the phone back to my ear. “Her name’s Yulia Petrova.”

“No, it is not.”

“I’m looking at her passport right now.”

“It is fake. It has to be.”

I frown and tuck the phone against my shoulder. With both hands, I pass my fingers over the seams of the passport. Across the photograph of the blonde woman. Feels normal. Then I run my thumbnail along the edge of the front cover, and it slips between two pages. There’s a page that shouldn’t be there, and I peel it back to reveal an entirely different picture and name beneath Yulia Petrova’s.

“Huh. It’s fake. How did you know?”

“Bring her here.”

“Who is she?”

“Bring. Her. Here.” Elyah’s voice is cold and menacing, and he hangs up.

My eyes narrow. Elyah never told me who the bitch was that betrayed him. It can’t be this blonde, who I found talking to the Lugovskayas like they’re old friends. His enemy and some of mine, together in Milan? It’s too much of a coincidence.

I find my clothes and get dressed. The first Number Eleven was the Italian bitch who wouldn’t stop screaming, and now Number Eleven is potentially Elyah’s most hated enemy. I saunter back to the unconscious woman and gaze down at her. I thought I was hunting two worms and a dove. Perhaps it’s two worms and a snake. If she is who Elyah thinks she is, I suppose I’ll be out looking for a new Number Eleven before the sun rises. Oh, well. Maybe he’ll let me play with this one before he kills her. I pull her shorts back up her thighs and tug her T-shirt down. There’s a black trench coat hanging in a closet by the front door, and I wrap her in it and haul her over my shoulder.

The back stairs are the quietest way out of the building. I pull up my hood and keep my head down as I carry her to my car. It’s past one in the morning and I can hear distant traffic and voices as I buckle the woman into the passenger seat. With the coat wrapped around her and her cheek on the headrest, she looks like she’s asleep.

It’s a two-hour drive back to the villa at Lake Como. Number Eleven stirs only once as I take a sharp turn, her head rolling from the right side of the armrest to the left, her eyelashes fluttering.

As I roll through the gates of the villa, Elyah comes striding out the front door. Before I’ve even put the brakes on, he’s torn open the passenger door, grabbed the black trench coat with both hands and pulled the woman’s face into the light. She’s pale, eyes closed, her beautiful neck arched and exposed.

Elyah steps back and pushes his hands through his hair. He groans and clenches his hands into fists. “It is her,” he says in a voice raw with emotion. “It is fuckingher.”

Konstantin steps forward. “Are you sure?”

Elyah nods, his eyes wide, jaw tight. “I would know her anywhere.”

“Blyat,” I mutter. Of all the women here, I happened to snatch the one that Elyah hates most in the world. She walked into Milan, no doubt believing she was thousands of miles from danger. I get out of the car and walk around to stand with my two friends, all of us staring into the car at the unconscious woman.

I hold out my knife to Elyah. “I can get us another Number Eleven.”

He looks at the weapon and then back at her. Her dark golden hair tumbles around her shoulders as she sleeps, no idea that we’re discussing whether she goes on breathing.

Elyah takes a fistful of the woman’s hair and wrenches her head back.

“You took me prisoner, Lilia Aranova,” he seethes in her face. “Who is the prisoner now?”

4

Elyah

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