Page 168 of Cashmere Cruelty

Finally, the silencer reaches my belly.

For the first time since this nightmare began, I feel a flash of fury. “Don’t you dare touch?—”

“Then be fucking quiet.”

I shut my mouth. With Nugget’s life on the line, nothing else matters.

“Good.” Petra smiles sweetly. “Now, listen closely. I have no interest in crushing Matvey’s toys. He may be an oath-breaker, but I still have honor.”

“That’s a relief,” I mutter sarcastically.

“So keep being good,” she warns, pressing the gun harder into my abdomen, “and, after this, I’ll let you go. I just need you to do one thing for me.”

I set my jaw. So many emotions are warring inside me: rage, fear, heartbreak. If I don’t keep myself in check, I’m terrified I’ll overflow.

So I do what I do best: I assess the situation. I calculate risk and reward. Most of all, I keep my cool.

“What do you need?”

With her free hand, Petra whips out a pamphlet. It’s the same crumpled one I’d shown her that day—I had no idea that she’d kept it. Had she been planning this all along?

Or did she hold on to it for a different reason entirely?

I chase that thought out of my head. It doesn’t matter anymore; Petra made her position perfectly clear.

We were never friends.

“Since your boyfriend won’t help me anymore, you will.” She throws the pamphlet on the table and points. “You’re going to help me audition. You’re going to help me makevor.”

I stare at the spot under her manicured finger. “‘Audition’?”

“Do you know whatvormeans in Russian,koshka?”

“Weirdly, it never came up on my Duolingo lessons.”

I glance at the pamphlet again. Her long nail taps against the paper, making a dent into her mark.

A tiara.A diamond-studded tiara worth millions.

Petra grins, baring her teeth. Like this, she looks every bit the predator. The killing nightingale. “It means ‘thief.’”

52

MATVEY

She’s not at her place. The twins aren’t picking up, either.

I toss my phone aside without replying. Yuri’s texts are doing nothing to improve my mood—in fact, it’s the opposite.

I don’t care where Petra is or what she’s doing. I never asked to be kept in the loop. And I definitely never told Yuri to go after her in the first place.

So why the hell is he still out there?

“Just called Vlad with an excuse,” Grisha suggests, stepping back into the room. Thank fuck someone is aware we’re in crisis mode right now. “He was perfectly polite. Didn’t seem like a man who’s been told his daughter was just scorned.”

“Good.”

“I still wasn’t able to get a read on the D.C. fall-through.”

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