Page 171 of Wicked Proposal
“Her name’s Mia. She’s the one who brought you to me.”
“Seriously?” She takes another, careful sip. Her lips are all cracked with dehydration. She almost chokes a couple of times, struggling to swallow. “Wow. Did I just happen to carjack the nurse you’re fucking, or did you develop a scrubs kink while I was gone?”
“If you’re going to choke on that, at least say something useful.”
“Hey, I’m on the mend. You should indulge me with sweets and gossip. How else am I supposed to get better?”
“I’ve indulged you plenty.” I fix her with a hard look. “Now, talk.”
She rolls her eyes, but obliges. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Figures.” She stretches in her chair, careful not to displace the IV in her arm. “It’s gonna be tough. My memory’s still hazy.”
“Try.”
“Gee, thanks. That’s helpful.”
“Start with the Ws. You know how it goes.”
Back when we were kids, our parents preferred belt and cane over shrinks. Mine never went that far, but the Morozov patriarch wasn’t very tolerant. As such, Nikita’s frequent lapse in memory and focus were written off as laziness, lack of intelligence, and occasionally disrespect.
She didn’t get an ADHD diagnosis until she was well within her twenties.
Nikita purses her cracked lips. “Right. Okay, well, I’ve got no proof about who took me.”
“But you have a guess.”
“Same guess you must have.” Her voice hardens on those words. It tells me we’re on the same page about this.
Only one common enemy turns her tone to ice like that.
Prizrak.
That’s the “who.”
“One W down,” I tell her solemnly. “Four more to go.”
“I rememberwhereI was taken,” she says, deep in thought. “I was following a lead. I’d been getting reports of homeless people disappearing without a trace, all in a single area.”
“Brownsville,” I fill in.
“Yeah,” she frowns. “How’d you know?”
“GPS in your phone.”
She doesn’t seem particularly surprised or even offended. “Oh, cool. I forgot you installed that.”
Nikita is infamous for her ability to get lost in a glass of water. Once, she went hiking and dropped off the grid for a whole weekend because she couldn’t find her way back to the path.
It was a beginners’ trail.
“Anyway,” she says, “I went to check out this construction site. Seemed like a promising place to start.”
“You shouldn’t have gone alone,” I growl. “You know how we operate. Our rules exist for a reason.”
“It was just a teeny-tiny building!”
