Page 139 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

“How is this so hard?” I groan, resisting the urge to throw Dima’s phone across the room.

He comes up behind me. I sense his body heat and smell his scent first and I have to suppress a shudder.

He runs his finger along a body of water. “You said it was by a lake, right? Are you sure it wasn’t the Hudson? The Hudson River is the obvious choice, but there are a lot of beaches along the Hudson.”

“They said lake. I’m sure of it.”

“Who?” he asks. “Ernestine or June?”

“June.”

“And you don’t think there’s any chance she is misremembering?”

I groan again and lay back on the bed, arms spread eagle. “There is a chance this is all meaningless and I’m chasing after nothing. It was the first idea that popped in my head, and I got so excited by the possibility that it blinded me to the fact that Ernestine may have taken them somewhere entirely different. I mean, it’s not exactly lake weather right now, is it?”

He pats my arm gently. “We’ll still find them, even if this turns into nothing.”

Suddenly, self-loathing sets in, and I’m miserable. “I can’t believe I based this entire theory on one little girl’s story and a magnet on the refrigerator.”

“They had a magnet?” he asks.

I nod. “It had a plastic yellow frame with a little frog on a lily pad. It said…”

My words dry up. My eyes pop wide open and I sit up in the bed.“Beachside Bed and Breakfast.”

“What?”

“Beachside Bed and Breakfast,” I say again, jumping out of bed and clapping my hands. “Holy shit, that’s it!”

“How do you know?”

“Ernestine kept a thousand photos and magnets on her refrigerator. Most of them were for places around Albany and New York. They didn’t have the money to travel much further than that. One of them was a plastic picture frame with a photo of June and Rose inside of it. June is just a little thing, but she’s holding up a fish nearly as long as she is. Rose was in it, too.

I can see it in my mind’s eye. Rose stood behind her daughter, red hair twisted back in pigtails, grinning from ear to ear. So proud of her little girl. So happy. So free of demons—for at least one instant.

“I’m picturing it right now. It’s a yellow frame with a big frog in the top corner and the words ‘Beachside Bed and Breakfast’ written across the bottom. I think that’s where they would go.”

Dima twists his lips to one side. I know he’s worried I’m clinging to nothing. Hell, maybe I am.

But it’s a name. A findable location. We can go there right now.

We have to try.

49

Dima

Somewhere In Rural New York

“We’ve gone farther than I thought,” Arya says, wringing her hands in the passenger seat.

“That’s how it works when you drive a hundred miles per hour.”

She laughs, but the sound is tense. I glance at her out of the corner of my eye. She’s balancing on a knife’s edge. If she’s wrong about where Rose’s family went, it will gut her.

It’s funny how quickly things change.

Yesterday, I choked her half to death with every intent of ending her life.

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