Page 37 of The Harbinger
“And they removed her tattoo.”
Nina was a pretty raven-haired woman whose name was chosen to become our next prophet.
Although she’d had her vices, cocaine with a side of pain, she knew her place, her purpose. She wouldn’t have run off. And now that she’d turned up with her loyalty cut from her body…
I circled back to Mia and the absolute coincidence that knifed at me. She knew more than she’d let on. It wasn’t happenstance that she’d propositioned Vlad when Nina went missing.
The ring in my pocket with Lucifer’s sigil burned against me as if the fires of Hell licked at the silver.
There was more to this than met the eye.
“What would you like us to do with her?” Dmitri asked.
“What’s done is done. Let her go unidentified.”
“Da, Sacha.”
Mia’s moans echoed down the stairs, infiltrating my thoughts as easily as a bee gathers pollen from the perfect flowers.
“Grab Mia’s prints. I want to know everything about her.”
“Understood.”
He disappeared from my office as I stared at the faux ram’s horn skull mounted on my dark mahogany desk. At the base of the skull was a Latin saying, ‘happy is the man whose father went to the devil,’ etched on a gold plate beneath it.
And I was happy until Nina happened.
I fished through the thousands of girls on the western side of the United States who had gone missing in the last year.
Someone’s out there looking for her.
Hours ticked by. My eyes blurred from the hundreds of faces, but not a single woman or child looked remotely similar. She was a ghost. Or she’d come from a family who didn’t care she’d gone missing.
A faint knock hit the door. “Alexander Ruslanovich?”
The nurse helping Sergei stood at my office door dressed in a white uniform a size too small.
“Da? What is it?”
A questionable urge to rush upstairs twinged inside of me as the woman leaned into my office—her delicate fingers gripping the door frame.
“Do you have another staff member to help us get her into the shower?”
“Has she worsened?”
“No.” She shook her head. “She’s vomited in her hair.”
There wasn’t a single person around, aside from Katya and Catherine, neither of which could lift the girl.
My to-do list grew larger. Get more staff.
I stood with an exasperated sigh and leaned on my desk, closing my laptop with a snick. “I’ll do it.”
“But I couldn’t ask you—” Her eyes grew large as she stepped back.
“You didn’t.” I ushered her out of my office and followed her upstairs to find Mia lying on her side with a bucket beside her.
“Nikita,” Sergei said. “Did I not say to bring a staff member?”