Page 22 of The Harbinger
The sliding doors opened, and Dmitri walked through. “We have escorted him off the premises.”
I nodded, fastened the top button on my suit, then strode out of my office with Igor and Yuri in tow.
“What do we intend on doing with the girl?”
“She has the marks.”
Dmitri cleared his throat. “I thought that was a story your mama told?”
“So did I.”
“Should we tell him?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I want to be certain first.” Digging into my pocket, I pulled out my phone and checked Vlad’s location. “Did she see Sergei?”
“I instructed Vlad to call him on their arrival.”
“Horosho.”Good. “In the meantime, lock it down.”
“Already done. Ivan has secured all the doors and put a man upstairs. Vlad took her to her room.”
There was something about her that had my insides tingling. When she’d stood from her seat with a vacant look in her gray eyes, the tingling only grew stronger. Then she’d cornered herself in the bedroom like a child, mumbling things under her breath, all incoherent. It only drove the questions I’d had for her to the tip of my tongue.
Why now?And was she connected to Nina’s disappearance?
Dmitri walked me back to the SUV, where the other two vehicles waited, then opened my door. I slid inside, and he followed, shutting the door behind him as Igor and Yuri took their positions at the front of the vehicle.
“Any progress with Nina?”
Dmitri shook his head and pulled off onto the road. “She’s a ghost.”
She wouldn’t have just walked off. That wasn’t in her nature. She had no resources, no contacts, no friends. She was nothing without me. So what would possess her to leave?
The lack of answers left a black smudge on my mind, and one face shone through it…
Mia.
Chapter 6
Mia
“Mylastname?”
I rummaged through the darkness in my mind, sifting through the thick emptiness, only to come up with the same frustration and loneliness I always did.
Vlad had locked me in this room for the past two hours, telling me to keep to it and wait for the physician. It’d only taken thirty minutes in isolation for the tremors in my hands to shift into agitation, my feet pounding the floor as I paced. Then a man in his late sixties sauntered into my room as if this was a normal house call.
I didn’t even know they did those anymore.
“Yes. Do you know it?”
The rail-thin elderly man sat with his knees spread wide on the chair in front of me after giving me a physical, taking my blood, and blasting me with questions I had no answers to.
“No.”
He’d parted his salt and pepper hair down the middle, and bits of out-of-place locks moved when he scrawled something on his notepad.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” His broken English was harder to understand as his frustration grew.