Nicola sat in her apartment with her eyes closed, trying to will the headache away, but nothing was working. She didn’t have time to take the medication the doctor had prescribed since it knocked her on her ass for about ten hours. The meeting with Sacha had only made it worse, and she was waiting for his retaliation. That would be the excuse she’d use when she cleaned house and started over. All this waiting and planning was getting on her nerves.

“Eleven locations?” She cracked an eye open and stared at Nina. Svetlana wasn’t ready and would never be as good as Nina, but Nina was starting to slip. “Are you being serious by bringing me a list that long?”

“Things like this take time, but he’s certain that Linda is one of these people. When she ran, she did a good job of hiding her tracks.” Nina placed the list on the coffee table and sat across from her, but on the edge of the chair like she was nervous. “He wanted to know if you thought any one place would be better to start with. Linda’s your family, after all.”

“Linda was my family. She decided to kill off the person I knew, so now she’s just my next target.” She grimaced when she reached for the paper and glanced at it before putting it down beside her, not wanting to move again. “California is a good place to get lost in.” She spoke softly to minimize the pain, but she felt like someone was jabbing an icepick in steady intervals. “That’s where I’d start.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say, but we did get some information from our contact about Cain Casey. Her wife is from some small town in Wisconsin where her father owns a dairy farm.”

“How quaint,” she said, making a motion for Nina to lower her voice.

“It seems strange to me that Casey would’ve gone for someone like that, but it matters now because one of the names on the list is in a town in Wisconsin about an hour away from Casey’s father-in-law’s farm.”

“Fuck!” She pressed the heel of her hand to her head when she screamed. “That can’t be a coincidence. Get someone there now, and tell them if they let her slip away again, I’ll kill the lot of them.”

“That’s what I thought, but I didn’t want to give the order until I checked with you.” Nina made a phone call and gave Zoya Levin the information.

Nicola loved that it was Zoya going. There was no way Zoya needed a lot of hints as to what had to happen. She’d bring Linda and her brothers back so she could kill Linda slowly and painfully.

“She’ll charter a plane if she has to, but she’ll get there.”