Twelve-year-old Moldavian girls kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, used brutally on an industrial basis and dead by twenty. Mountains of AK-47s put into the hands of Sierra Leonean child soldiers barely big enough to carry them. Cut heroin guaranteed to kill the poor sick fucks shooting up on the streets of a hundred cities.

Nick was going to take him down. Oh yes. It was what he did. What he lived for. He’d dedicated his life to taking down the bad guys and Vassily Worontzoff was as bad as they come.

Pity the road leading to the destruction of Worontzoff ran right through this beautiful woman sitting across the table, smiling at him.

“So.” He put his fork down and leaned forward slightly. He could feel the heat of the candle flame against his face. “What do pretty girls do in Parker’s Ridge? What are the local attractions?”

Charity shook her head. It was physically impossible, but it felt as if her scent covered him when she moved, as if it were a fine, pearly powder.

Head. Out. Of. Ass. Now!

“Parker’s Ridge isn’t Manhattan, Nick,” she said, with a gentle smile. “The pleasures here are more provincial than you are perhaps used to. Still, we do have some attractions. And there’s always Vassily Worontzoff’s musical soirées. He manages to attract world-class musicians to our little corner of the world.”

Not by a flicker of his eyelashes did Nick betray any emotion. He furrowed his brow, clueless businessman trying to place a name he knew he should know, but didn’t. “Worontzoff,” he said, frowning. “Isn’t he that Russian…Russian what? Musician? Dancer?”

“Writer.” Charity laughed. “Russian writer. A very great writer, the author of Dry Your Tears in Moscow, one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Each year he is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he would undoubtedly have won if he had continued writing, but he never did. He was one of the last of the dissidents sent to a Soviet prison camp. After he was released, he never wrote another word.”

Her face and voice had turned serious. She looked down at the tablecloth, tracing a pattern with a pink-tipped fingernail. She looked up at him, gemlike eyes gleaming with emotion.

“And he won’t talk about it, either. He’s a wonderful man and we’ve become friends since he’s moved here. As a matter of fact, he’s having a musical soirée this Thursday evening.”

Oh God. Nick felt his heart nearly stop. Friends. What the hell did that mean? Was she fucking him? It was bad enough that she’d spend next Thursday in Scumbag Central, without him having the image of Charity spending time under Worontzoff, those slender legs wrapped around the fuckhead’s hips…

This was bad shit. He didn’t even want to think about it. This was worse than Consuelo’s chest of toys, way worse.

Nick looked at her carefully. She met his eyes, her gaze calm and serene. He relaxed. If she’d been Worontzoff’s lover, she’d have shown some sign. A little blush, evading his gaze, a slight smile. Something. But there was nothing.

So, she wasn’t fucking the bastard. Good.

Not that he cared.

Much.

Jesus. Oh, shit.

The short hairs on the back of Nick’s neck stood up. He’d just been handed an opening—an honest to God opening wide enough to drive a Humvee through—to insinuate himself into Worontzoff’s house, as Charity’s guest. It was a goddamn huge window of opportunity, it was why he was here and not in the smelly surveillance van and the first thing that flashed through his mind wasn’t How do I wangle an invitation into Worontzoff’s house but Is Charity fucking the guy?

He’d been completely sidetracked from the mission. Pow! It had been punched right out of his head. Being sidetracked went against every single ounce of training he’d ever had, not to mention it being an excellent way to get killed.

Undercover work is like proctology. You poke and prod around assholes, looking for something bad, and then you zap the bad things you find. His line of work required utter concentration, day and night.

If Nicholas Ames made a big mistake, he lost money. Nick Ireland paid for his mistakes in blood.

Time to get back on track, fast.

“I haven’t read anything by him, sorry. How long has this guy—what’s his name? Worontzoff?”

Charity nodded.

“How long has this guy Worontzoff lived here in Parker’s Ridge? It seems a strange place for a Russian exile to settle down in.”

“Well, maybe not so strange. I’m told upstate Vermont is much like the area around Moscow, only our beech trees have larger leaves. And Vassily isn’t a Russian exile. He got out of prison camp more or less in the same period the Soviet Union fell. In Moscow, he was greeted like a king when he was released. I remember it still. I’d just read Dry Your Tears in Moscow and I followed what happened to him in the newspapers.”

Nick did some fast calculating. “Good God, you must have been—”

“Twelve.” She shrugged, more of that fairy dust coming his way. “A very precocious twelve. And…that summer I had…a lot of time to read.”

Damn straight. In the summer of 1993, when Worontzoff was released to return like a conquering hero to Moscow, Charity Prewitt had been in the hospital. Her father had thrown her out of a third-story hotel bedroom window in a desperate attempt to save her life during a hotel fire. The two Prewitts, man and wife, perished, and Charity suffered a T12 fracture. She’d had three operations and spent that summer and most of the winter in a full body cast.

Nick waited for her to tell her story, but she didn’t.

Interesting.

In Nick’s experience, people who have been through trauma are almost always eager to talk about it. It was like a badge of honor—look what I went through, look at what I survived.

Charity’s story was particularly dramatic. Fire started by a disgruntled employee breaking out on the fifth floor of the five-star hotel in Boston where she was staying with her parents. Her father wrapping her in blankets and throwing her off the balcony in a desperate attempt to save her, then rushing back into the room to try to save his wife. It took two days for the room to cool down enough to collect the charred bones for a funeral. Charity never got to attend the funeral. By that time, she’d already had two operations and was sedated.

Why wasn’t she telling him all about it?

But she wasn’t, and she wasn’t uncomfortable with silence, either, like most women were. She sipped her wine and watched him calmly.

Nick finally broke the silence.

“So he leaves Russia and moves to the States? Why? I mean the Soviet system fell, after all. Why didn’t he just stay? Particularly since apparently he was a big shot there.”

This was bullshit. Nick knew exactly why Worontzoff was here and he was looking at it right now. Charity Prewitt. A dead ringer for a woman long dead, Worontzoff’s lover, Katya Amartova, who had perished in the labor camp.

Nick had seen the photos of Amartova, and the resemblance to Charity was uncanny. A normal man wouldn’t ever expect that a woman who merely looked like the woman he’d once loved could be her, but Worontzoff had gone well beyond normal years ago.

She was silent another moment, then rested her chin on her fist. “I don’t really know why Vassily moved here. He’s never actually talked about it. I just assumed he wanted a clean slate and immigrated here to wipe out the past.”

Well, to set up a criminal empire here, too. There was that.

“We don’t really talk about these things,” she continued in her soft voice. “Mainly we talk about books. Vassily has a great mind. It’s a privilege to spend time in his presence.”

Fuckhead, Nick thought sourly, then caught himself again, appalled. The secret to undercover work is to stay in character, even inside your own head. Especially inside your own head. He’d been carrying on an internal monologue all this time and if he’d been chatting with someone a little less harmless than Charity Prewitt—with, say, Guillermo Gonzalez, who’d shoot a hole in anyone’s head at the least suspicion that someone was double-crossing him, blow your kneecap out for the hell of it and your elbow off for target practice—then he’d have been a goner.