Just for a second. Just until I remember how to breathe.
“You had him followed, right?” I mumble into his lapel. “Tell me you have someone on him, or a tracker, or— I don’t know, a guy in a van. Because if he’s gone, and we don’t know where he went, or why, then we’re— Mat, we’re so screwed, we’re—”
I lift my head in surprise. “Huh?”
“I didn’t follow him,” he says.
“I heard you crying through the wall.” His thumb brushes the hinge of my jaw. “And I made a choice.”
The wind wails louder. Out on the parkway, Raymond is getting farther away by the second, taking whoever was on the other end of that phone with him.
And Matvei is here on the carpet with me instead.
“Mat,” I whisper, “that was the wrong choice.”
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
“It was, though. Mat, come on. That was our ch
