I guess I just can’t help but feel like anything is possible right now. My life is operating on dream logic.

If anything is possible, then the ones you thought you could trust can turn out to be the enemy.

If anything is possible, then the ones you thought abandoned you can come back to haunt you.

And you won’t know which is which.

9

KOLYA

I throw a dart at the bulletin board. I had it erected less than twenty-four hours after June disappeared, and it’s already bristling with papers, pictures, maps, scraps of evidence. All of Ravil’s properties are marked in red pins across a map of the city.

Every single one of them has been turned inside out and upside down over the last few days by my men.

Every single one of them has come up empty.

Scowling, I march over to the board, rip the dart free, and march back to my spot. I have my arm cocked back to hurl it again when a sound comes from the door.

Knock-knock-knock.

“Enter.”

Milana slinks in wearing a gleaming cream-colored pantsuit and a pinched expression. The only pops of color in her ensemble are her blood-red heels and dark burgundy lipstick.

“You hate knocking,” I point out, rolling the dart between my fingers.

“And you hate darts. Yet here we are.” She sits down gracefully in the armchair across from me and eyes the board with a mixture of disappointment and resignation. “Kolya—”

“Don’t.”

She sighs. “Kolya, we have very few stones left to turn.”

I don’t look at her. “I’m aware.”

The fabric of her clothes shuffles as she leans back and crosses one leg over the other. “I’m on your side. You know that, right?”

“Are you?”

Her eyes go wide with disbelief before she composes herself. “You’re joking,” she says. “After all our history together, I know you can’t possibly be—”

“I can’t just let her slip away, Milana,” I growl, abandoning the dart and dropping myself hard into the other armchair. “I can’t just stop searching.”

“I’m not telling you to,” she assures me. “I’m just asking you to prioritize. You’re letting this consume you. There are other problems that require your attention.”

“None of them are as important as this.”

“You’re confusing your personal life with your professional one.”

I’m about to argue when her words hit home. Isn’t this the exact fucking reason I’d always considered a marriage, a family, to be liabilities? Because once you have those things, everything else ceases to be important. Everything else has to play second fiddle.

But despite the realization, I can’t let it go.

I feel like I did the first time I watched our father beat Adrian.

I was probably six, maybe even younger. Adrian had been crying about something or the other, as per usual, and as per usual, Otets considered it weak. So he reacted the same way he did with any man of his that didn’t meet his impossible standards.