“Anything else?” I demand.
“No…” He turns back to the screen. And then he sees it. “Wait,” he whispers. “Wait…”
“What now? Did you come here for a reason or…”
“Her hair…”
My heart pounds. Does he see it? “What?”
“Her hair. The cheekbone.” He turns to me in shock. “She reminds you of her. This is why you watch?”
“Look really close, brat,” I say. He is not my brat—my brother—by blood, but he is a brother in every way. We came up together in the orphanage in Moscow before the men of the Bratva took us and trained us.
Again he looks. How can he not recognize her? It makes me crazy. I loop an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t you see it? Look, Yuri. Look harder.”
He studies my eyes instead. “What?”
“Look at her!”
He looks at her.
“Do you see?” I demand.
“What?”
“It’s her.”
He turns to me.
“Look at her, not me!”
“It’s not possible, Viktor.”
“It’s her.”
“Do you have a shot of her? Her face?”
“No.” I let him go, and I kneel in front of the monitor. “She never turns.”
“You haven’t even seen her face?”
“I don’t have to. It’s her. It’s her body. Her style of movement. Look.”
He doesn’t look at her. He looks at me—sadly. “It cannot be her, staryy drug.” Staryy drug—old friend, he calls me. “You know that.”
“I know what you think, but it’s her. You think I wouldn’t recognize her? Twenty hours a day she prays like that. But I don’t think she’s praying; she’s meditating. Remember how Tanechka used to do that? She would focus her mind to a tenacious point before a kill. Tanechka’s perfect icy calm. Look at the way her hands are. Do you see? I think she is doing a form of isometrics in the guise of praying…”
He grabs my shirt collar and pulls me away from the monitor. “Listen to yourself!”
I try to push him off.
He is too strong, too angry. He shoves me to the couch, gets in my face. “Do you hear yourself?”
“It’s her. You don’t know her like I do. It’s her.”
“Tanechka is dead. You killed her. You threw her into Dariali Gorge.”
“We never saw the body.”
“Dariali Gorge, Viktor! She cannot be alive.”
“It’s her.” I push him off me.
“What do you imagine she’s doing? Is she there to bring the brothel down?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Probably.”
“Think. If Tanechka wanted to bring this thing down, she’d bring it down. She has access to a computer in there. Tanechka could make five kinds of weapons out of a computer. She wouldn’t kneel and pray. Tanechka kneels before no one!”
I stand and glare. I’m sure he didn’t mean to put that picture in my mind, but there it is: Tanechka, big blue eyes, hair like sunshine, light freckles across her face, kneeling, looking up at me, hungry for my cock.
I swallow, pull myself together. “Perhaps she waits for somebody she has a contract on. Maybe even Bloody Lazarus. She loved to take advantage of her looks. Remember how she’d do that? Remember her white dress and high boots? Those clothes she’d wear for the fancy jobs?”
“Brat,” Yuri says sadly.
“It’s her. You haven’t been watching.”
He points. “Message her, then.”
“A message,” I spit. “She’s undercover. I might as well put a bullet in her brain.”
“Or a message could prove that it’s not her.”
“I won’t endanger her. Don’t ask again.”
“You used to have those codes between you. What was that one—‘coffee with ten sugars’—that meant, ‘do you have an SOS?’ Try it.”
“Are you crazy?”
“That’s not so strange a thing to say. That way, you could test whether she’s Tanechka.”
“She’s Tanechka.”
I don’t like the look that passes over Yuri’s face now. Worry.
“You don’t have to believe me,” I say. “Find it out for yourself. You knew her. Come. Sit. Watch her. You’ll see.”
“Blyad!” He sits by me in a huff. “This is psycho.”
“Look how she breathes. Remember how Tanechka would do that? She wouldn’t breathe for a long time, and then this lift of her shoulders.”
“You see a ghost.”
We watch in silence.
“You see this woman with your eyes, but I see her with my heart,” I say. “A superior form of knowing. There are forms of knowing we can’t explain, I think. But I know, I know…” I lose my train of thought here.
“Viktor…”
“If only she would turn, you would see.”
He sighs. His attention goes to the other women in their cages. He points to Nikki. “That one’s yours?”
“Yeah. She just sleeps.”
“She looks like a bednyazhka from a little village. What is that in English?”
I shrug.
He looks it up on his iPhone. “Ragamuffin,” he says. “Nikki looks like a ragamuffin from a little village.”
“Perhaps.”
After a long silence, he says, “It’s not Tanechka. You don’t see her with your heart. You see her with your guilt.”