Page 167 of Shattered Altar (Makarova Bratva Duet)

OLIVIA

“Isabella?”

She looks different than I remember. Her hair is a little longer, a little more styled. She’s more toned, too. Hardened. Her cheekbones are sharper, her jaw more angled.

But it’s definitely her.

“Am I hallucinating?” I whisper out loud.

Isabella stares at me as though she’s taking me in, too. For a moment, she doesn’t look like she knows how to react. Then she shakes it off.

“No, Liv, you’re not hallucinating,” she whispers back.

I’m shocked, but the undeniable feeling rushing through me is, of all things, relief. Pure, unadulterated relief.

“Oh my God.” I dash forward, wrap Isabella up in a hug, and squeeze her as tight as I can. “Rob was right. You’re alive.”

She hugs me back, but she’s also the first to let go. “Hey, kid. Yeah, I am. Alive and well.”

“You’re okay?”

She nods. “Yes.”

I drop my arms and back away a little, just to get some perspective. She’s wearing loungy knitted sweatpants and a matching crop top. She’s got a belly button piercing. That’s new.

Slowly, as the relief wears off, other questions start rattling around in my head. Especially once Aleks walks over to stand beside Isabella.

They’re not even touching, but there’s a familiarity between them. Comfort. Rapport.

“Wait… what’s going on here?” I ask, looking between them.

“I told you,” he says. “I had nothing to do with Isabella’s disappearance.”

“That’s not totally true,” Isabella points out.

He throws her an impatient glare. “It was for your own good.”

“I know,” she sighs. “I know.”

“Well, I don’t!” I say, furiously trying to control the burgeoning panic inside me. “What the hell is going on? And why am I getting the feeling the two of you know each other way too fucking well?”

“Because we do,” Isabella tells me gently. “We have known each other for years.”

“Almost a decade, in fact,” Aleks says.

A decade? So the two of them knew each other long before Isabella ever met Rob.

“Isabella…?”

She winces. “That’s not my name, Liv. I’m sorry.”

I shake my head like that’ll make everything fall into place. Shockingly, it doesn’t work. “Who are you?”

“She was mine from the beginning,” Aleks says. “A Bratva spy.”

“Spy?” I repeat, as if the word is brand new to me. “I… I don’t understand…”

“The FBI received a tip about the Makarova Bratva,” the woman who isn’t Isabella says, sending my brain spinning in a hundred different directions at once. “About two and a half years ago. No one paid any attention to it. But the tips kept coming, and coming, and coming. And finally, an ambitious young agent decided to make it his mission.”

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