Page 99 of Shattered Cradle (Makarova Bratva Duet)

“Fuck,” Rob says at last, breaking the strangling silence. “Isabella.”

She shakes her head apologetically. “I’m not Isabella, Rob. I never was. My name is Jennifer Hartley.”

He shakes his head. “No—”

“Yes,” she says firmly, cutting him off. “I’ve known Aleks Makarova for over fifteen years. And I’ve been working for him for almost all of that time.”

He stares at her, trying to gauge the sincerity in her tone. In just a couple of sentences, she’s managed to crush all the lies he was telling himself.

“Remember that day we met at that farmer’s market, Rob?” she asks. “I’d been following you for almost six months by that time. I knew your routine, your favorite haunts, your work schedule. I knew you worked out Monday through Saturday from five to seven in the morning. You grabbed a coffee from the corner café before heading to work. Sometimes, you picked up a newspaper, but mostly, you just kept walking.”

Rob shakes his head. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“In the six months I watched you, you had a total of two dates,” Jennifer continues. “The first one you met through a dating app. It lasted an hour and forty minutes. You walked her to her car afterwards and sighed with relief when she walked away.”

Rob shifts nervously in the booth, but his eyes are locked on Jennifer.

“The second was a woman you met in a bar. You went back to her place and emerged an hour later looking extremely dissatisfied for a man who’d just had a one-night-stand.”

He just stares at her as she rattles off all this information. If it wasn’t for him blinking every so often, I’d think he was frozen.

“I watched you, Rob. For months before I entered your life, I watched you. That farmer’s market was a fluke. You didn’t usually have the time for that kind of thing, but you passed it and you decided to give it a shot. That was when I decided to ‘run into you,’” she says. “My job was to get your attention, start a relationship with you, and eventually convince you to divulge information from the case.”

Jennifer swallows, her undercurrent of heartbreak suddenly cutting through her cool exterior.

“I knew it would take time, and I was prepared for that. I’ve had jobs last years before, but this one had to be expedited. It seemed to be going that way, too. And then… you proposed.”

On the word “proposed,” Rob snaps out of his trance. He blinks away the fog and glances over at me like he’s just remembering I’m sitting here, too.

“Aleks never tricked me or lied to me. He didn’t abduct me or threaten me, Rob. He assigned me to you. You were always meant to be a job.” Her voice hitches on the last word. “Please… say something.”

My heart bleeds for my brother right now. No matter how many unresolved issues we may have, I don’t want him hurt.

And right now, his pain is approaching unbearable.

“So it was never real?” he asks hoarsely.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” she replies softly. “But I got… emotionally involved. That was why Aleks and I decided it was better that we end the mission prematurely.”

“Mission,” he repeats, as though he’s trying to wrap his mind around the idea.

“You were more than I bargained for, Rob.”

He shakes his head. “The story you told me about your parents dying when you were young—”

“The dying part was true,” she says. “The other details of the story, not so much.”

“It was all a lie.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but then changes her mind at the last second. “I’m sorry,” she says instead. “But this is my job. It always was. I was supposed to learn who the informant was. We needed to find out who was trying to frame Aleks.”

He flinches. “So you both are buying into what Makarova says? That he has nothing to do with the disappearances?”

“None of them disappeared, Rob,” she says softly. “You just have to look for them in the right places.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that, all the girls you’re looking for? They’re alive. Some are working in brothels now, some at strip clubs. Some were sold to other bad men. But they’re all alive. Most of them, at least,” she says. “Once they were chosen, they were vetted, used, and then discarded. They were left in places where they wouldn’t be discovered.”

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