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you can handle," she answered, the cadence of her words a perfect match for the Rodchenko men he had spent his teen years despising.
    She brushed his hands away and pushed at his chest. Stunned, he let her open up a distance of a few inches between them. Her gaze swept over him, her lips curling with distaste as she took in his clothes wrinkled from a night spent in hiding.
    "I have bus tickets for us. There's a window in the break room big enough to crawl through."
    Her gaze was as dead as the fish he spent summers carting around in barrels at the docks.
    "You don't have to be afraid of your father or Dima," Mishka coaxed, certain that it was fear fueling her resistance. "We are right by the station -- the bus leaves in thirty minutes. They won't be done looking for you in the stacks by the time..."
    She tilted her head, the motion robotic.
    "How many times did you ask your mother to leave?" she softly whispered, her voice dripping with a false sweetness. "I heard you once, that first month, crying and begging like a little bitch."
    Mishka braced as if she'd hit his already battered body with all her force. His Alina never swore.
    "If she couldn't love you enough, why should I?"
    He grabbed her shoulders, his fingertips digging at her soft flesh.
    "Did they threaten you? Did they tell you they would kill me? Is that why you're saying this?"
    It had to be. His sweet Alina would never talk like this. He didn't care how much she looked and sounded like a true Rodchenko at that moment. She was incapable of such venom.
    Then how come it flowed so easily off the tip of her tongue?
    Her plump lips twisted into a sneer. "I don't care enough to lie to you, Mikhael. If you try to take me, they will kill you. But I don't care if you live or die."
    She brought her hands up between their bodies, her palms open and poised for a sharp clap that would draw Rodchenko's thugs. "Shall I show you how much I don't care?"
    Releasing her shoulders, he stepped back and shook his head, reality spearing its way through his chest.
    Alina was lost to him -- if he'd ever really had her at all.
     

Chapter Seven
    New York City - the past
     
    Mishka lingered in the city, the few thousand dollars he had stashed in the security deposit box at the bank dwindling fast. For twenty bucks a night, he got a room in a flop house that was little more than a former closet walled off. No private bathroom, no window, one door, and a sliver of floor between the bed and the wall, was all his money afforded him. Located at one end of the first floor, his neighbor was a hooker whose thrashing and moaning plagued his attempts to sleep. Across from his room was the communal toilet that tenants visited throughout the night.
    He stayed in New York because of Alina even though he knew he should have gone straight from the library to the bus station. Escaping the library, Mishka had spotted four cars in the parking lot that he knew by sight and six perimeter guards working in pairs at all the exits. Rodchenko was serious about his warning to stay away. The old man wanted a reason he could wave in front of the other families for why he "rightfully" killed his dead wife's son.
    Listening to his neighbor and her customer finish their business, Mishka closed his eyes and tried to catch some sleep before she returned with another man to fuck.
    His brain didn't want to settle. Should he make a second attempt at the library? If she showed up, did that mean she wanted to see him again? Should he try to get into the house -- or at least the yard?
    There were two windows that looked out on the garden with its alleyway gate. One was Rodchenko's office window. The other was an alcove in the hall where she liked to read and could almost always be found when he was returning from his day at the dock.
    Foolishly, he had fancied she chose the spot to see his arrival home and to have him pass her in the hall on his way into his room. Now he wasn't so sure.
    Her barb about his mother had sunk