3
A slow, satisfied smile curled my lips as I held the hideous invitation up to the light. Proof. This was proof the wedding was happening, that the whispers I’d heard on a phone call were true.
Sergei Romanov wouldn’t miss his daughter’s wedding. If this invitation was real—and I had no reason to believe it wasn’t—it was my ticket to finding him after his years of hiding from the world that hated his guts.
I flipped the invitation over, finding a note scrawled in handwriting I didn’t recognize: ‘What do you think of the font?’
A laugh burbled in my throat, fat and unbidden, quick to die. Of course, someone had taken the time to get approval on font options. As though it was a regular wedding and anything was normal about marrying off some old dude with an eighteen-year-old girl.
Okay, Emilio wasn’t old. He was only a couple of years older than me. But the surrealness of his life just elevated the satisfaction of my job well done and I enjoyed being a bitch to other people. It amused me.
It amused me even more when I snatched a pen up, scrawled ‘looks tacky, even for a wedding with a child bride’ and stuck it back in the drawer.
Smirking, I quit the study, feeling like I’d accomplished the mission. My recorders were all installed, and all that was left to do was to slip out without anyone noticing. Simple. Yet as I went through the kitchen, those damnable whiskey bottles called my attention again.
They sat in their sad little cluster, like a group of washed-up old men in a corner booth at a bar, grumbling about the good old days. Like when they could slap a woman’s ass without care. Or tell the gays to get fucked.
I didn’t want to care about a man. I didn’t want to stop my retreat for a man’s problems. But for some thoroughly ridiculous reason, I did.
I hated that something about them nagged at me. Not the bottles themselves, but what they represented. It wasn’t that they were just sitting there, it was that they looked like their owner had given up before they’d even started.
I’d seen that look before. On bottles. On people. My stomach twisted, and not because I hadn’t eaten. A flicker of memory stirred—me as a kid, crouched under the kitchen sink, stacking empties because my mom would get sad if she saw them out and realised how many she’d had.
My chest tightened, but I shoved the memory away. Not my problem. Not anymore.
Yet those bottles wouldn’t cease staring at me like ghosts. And not the hot murdery ghosts, either. But the seriously annoying and relentless ones.
With a sigh, I glanced around the counter, finding a sticky note pad near the fridge, its edges slightly curled from use. Perfect. My fingers found the pen beside it—sleek, unnecessarily expensive for something so ordinary. Typical rich man things.
I stuck my tongue out, and with the pen gliding easily across the page, I scribbled quickly.