Except the look on his face right now tells me he’s furious. Scared and furious.
“Sofia.” He crosses the waiting room in three long strides. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. It’s Anton. “
He sits beside me, close enough that I can feel the tension radiating off him. “You’re bleeding.”
I look at my hands. “It’s nothing. Just scrapes.”
The police arrive a few minutes later to get my statement. Gregor is practically sitting in my lap to keep them from looking at me.
“Walk me through what happened,” one says.
I tell them. The run. The engine. Anton throwing me out of the way. The SUV speeding off.
“Did you see the driver?”
“No. He had on sunglasses and a hoodie. The hood was up.”
“Plates?”
I shake my head. “There weren’t any. I don’t think. It happened so fast.”
They exchange a look, like they don’t believe me. Gregor is tense. In our world, we know what it means. It didn’t occur to me until just that second.
I was the target. That driver was trying to run me over.
“Any reason someone would want to hurt you, Miss Baranova?”
I keep my face neutral. “No.”
It’s a lie, but it’s the lie I have to tell. I can’t explain to the NYPD that I’m the heir to a criminal empire and my cousin just flew in from Moscow to challenge my claim. I can’t tell them about the would-be assassin on the bike last week or the fact that I sleep with a knife under my pillow and a gun in the drawer by my bed.
Some cops are on our payroll. These aren’t them. But I’m pretty sure they know who I am. They know who my father is. And they know what my father is suspected of being. They’ll never prove anything, but they know.
“This looks like a case of reckless driving,” the first one says after a pause. “We’ll check traffic cameras in the area, see if we can get a description of the vehicle or the driver. In the meantime, I’d recommend being more aware of your surroundings.”
I want to laugh. I want to scream at him that I’m always aware of my surroundings. That I’ve spent three years training myself to notice everything. I see threats in every shadow and danger in every stranger.
Instead, I nod. “Thank you.”
They leave, and I’m alone with Gregor again.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
He looks at me. “For what?”
“Anton. I know you two are friends.”
Gregor’s jaw tightens. He and Anton have worked together for years. They’re not just colleagues, they’re brothers in the way men who’ve bled together become brothers.
“It’s not your fault,” he says.
“He saved my life.”
“That’s his job.”
It keeps becoming someone’s job to save me.