Page 58 of In Her Blood
She moved her arm out of his reach. “Maybe that’s what he really wants!” She turned to face him at the edge of the hall, putting her back to the neutral territory she had proclaimed the main gathering space to be. “When I’m not here, he has the run of the damn place. Then all he has to say is ‘look how absent she is, is that what you want?’ and I lose.”
“And what do you win if you’re fuckin’ dead?”
Evelina shook her head. There had to be some other explanation. Something they were still missing. She wasn’t seeing the whole picture yet; she was sure of it.
An echoing, feminine scream carried through the halls as Evelina’s mind scrambled to identify all the clues.
Evelina spun in time to see three in-house security, including Kirill, rushing from the main hall through one of the adjoining doors. She didn’t give a second thought to following. If Pyotr was coming, he’d be upon them any minute. If he wasn’t, then who- or whatever he was sending would be upon them any minute. Either way, she couldn’t fathom that this sudden commotion was unrelated.
Otto caught her by the elbow before she could make it through the next doorway. “Lina, stop!”
She rounded on him. “I need to know what’s going on!”
He narrowed his eyes at her, not releasing her arm. “You’rethe one who drew the lines, Lina. Think how it’ll look if you ignore ‘em the first time there’s a little chaos.”
Evelina blinked. She looked behind him, back at the hall, then tilted her head forward and up in some bizarrely dazed attempt to orient herself within the house.Shit.He was right. She’d nearly run straight across her own defined boundaries,onto Pyotr’s territory, with potentially half a dozen witnesses. And for what? Because someone may have found a spider?
She exhaled slowly and allowed Otto to guide her back into the hall. “Text Kirill, ask him to keep us updated on anything important.” She hadn’t considered how limiting it would feel to not be allowed to investigate half of her own damn home. But then, it would never have been her choice to have to share the property, either.
Frustrated, Evelina turned and paced up to the far end of the room. She was mid-motion on pivoting back around, just trying to work off some useless energy while her brain spiraled, when her gaze caught on a shred of paper she was sure she knew. She adjusted course for a closer look.
The shred was stuck to the wall by a thumbtack pushed into the sheetrock, and she realized there were four in total. Each with a varyingly sized shred of off-white paper hanging from them. One shred bore a trace of brilliant blue along the tear line. Another shred bore a curved line in sparkly golden ink.
She stared at the golden mark for a heartbeat, suddenly remembering scrawling her signature on the blueprints as a way to authenticate them. Her signature always ended with one final curve, because she liked it. And she was sure she’d used the gold pen Otto had grabbed for her.
“Pyotr really fucking hated your ideas.”
That bastard.
That disrespectful, arrogant, narcissistic bastard.
“Ms. Nikolaev?” Kirill’s unexpected voice startled her enough to chase the red from her vision and Evelina turned, putting her back to the lingering insult on the wall.
Otto angled past his friend and up to her side, the downward curve of his lips suggesting he’d noticed her distraction. But he didn’t ask.
Evelina slapped on a more neutral expression for Kirill’s sake. “Please tell me a maid found a mouse.” She actually hated mice, but as it was on Pyotr’s side, she’d be happy to have the problem quite literally dropped in Pyotr’s bed.
Kirill sighed. “I wish I could,” he said. “The problem is actually outside. She just happened to look out a window as it was … being delivered.”
Well that sounds ominous.“And what is it, exactly?”
“A message,” Artem declared as he strode up to them. He nodded to Kirill before shifting his attention to her. “From Pyotr, I’d guess. Though the boy himself hasn’t shown.” He paused, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “It goes against my instinct to suggest you come see this, but as pakhan, you probably should. I will warn you, it’s unpleasant.”
“Par for the course, then,” Evelina muttered. She started forward, noting that Kirill fell in behind them, and allowed herself to follow Artem out the front door. It was almost surreal to think she’d only been home for a few hours, with everything that had happened in the time since her return.
From the porch, Evelina could see several men standing around on the front lawn, like onlookers at some spectacle. Except she quickly realized they appeared to be divided. One group stood back, forming a line, each wearing a gun strapped to his chest and standing at the ready as if expecting war. There were six of those. The other group was more of a cluster. They stood several feet removed from the first group, some of theirheads bobbing as if they were continually shifting their focus between the armed men and an obscured object on the ground while others held transfixed by whatever she still couldn’t see.
The thing she couldn’t see had to be the delivery, then.
Artem paused before they descended the steps. “The men with the guns are from Viktor’s crew. The others are a mix of on-site staff and Ivan’s guys.”
Evelina blinked. Ivan was one of the two brigadiers who’d remained, as far as she had heard, suspiciously silent since her father’s passing. Probably she should have been pushing to talk to him, and to the fourth brigadier, Grigoriy. She’d let herself get too swept up in other things to prioritize that.
She made a mental note to fix that oversight at her next opportunity, then pushed ahead and marched down the steps.
The armed men were the first to shift their attention to her, of course. She could practicallyseea couple of them debating the merit of swinging his gun outward and pulling the trigger.
“What’s going on here?” she asked, projecting her voice and pointedly ignoring the gunmen’s glares. They weren’t going to kill her. For whatever reason, she felt confident that wasn’t what they’d been sent to do.
