Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“Oh.” Theo looked at the gift wide-eyed. “Thank you so much. Your baked goods are the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.”
Gustav actually . . . smiled.
Bozhe moi! Maybe the world was ending and he’d been hit on the head by a meteor and was suffering delusions.
“Wow,” he said with a mock scowl even as his bear delighted in the irascible baker’s liking for her. “You’re obviously the favorite here.”
“Go away now.” Gustav flapped his hand. “I have civilized customers soon.” He looked over at Theo. “You can come back anytime. Do a proper taste test.”
“Pleasure doing business with you as always,” Yakov said, and grabbed the boxes of food, Theo taking the recyclable tray that held the drinks. As they drove out, it was pretty much a perfect day, with Theo trying a sugar-dusted donut in the passenger seat while Yakov bit down on his hot bacon-and-egg roll as they drove out of the city.
The world felt hopeful.
Then it all went wrong.
Chapter 29
Major incident unfolding in eastern quadrant of airport zone. Traffic at a standstill. No official reports. To be continued.
—Moskva Gazeta livestream (today)
IT HAPPENED WHILE they were about a half hour out from the site—which put them inside the airport’s automatic driving zone. Yakov was just about to take another sip of his coffee when he saw brake lights up ahead.
Not just one set.
Looked like a severe traffic jam. Unusual, when a major reason for the mandatory automatic driving zone was to ensure a steady and uninterrupted flow; his vehicle had switched to that mode the instant he crossed into the airport area—though Yakov had never mentally switched off.
Auto-driving in general might be safe, but it was still based on machinery. He needed to be in a position to react rapidly if his car suffered a sudden mechanical failure, or if an unpredictable hazard impacted the road. Today, however, his trusty all-terrain vehicle came to a halt at the precise safe distance behind a sedan stopped in the road. In front of that was a transit van to a rural area, and the line continued on.
When he flashed the car’s navigation system up onto the dash to check what was holding things up, he saw the red exclamation mark symbol that indicated an emergency a quarter mile up ahead. “Most likely an accident,” he said to Theo. “Must be pretty bad if traffic is this backed up.” The first responders usually opened up one lane around the site of an accident, but from the lack of traffic on the other side of the road, the entire thing had been shut down.
“I hope no one was seriously injured.” Theo lowered her window and tried to look around the side of the car. “I can’t see anything from here.”
Having mirrored her move, angling his head out into the crisp wind, Yakov said, “I can see the barest glimpse of flashing lights. A whole lot of them.” He sat back, his gut tight. “Has to be bad.” Injuries—even deaths—were highly likely.
Yakov’s phone beeped at that moment, with StoneWater’s emergency code. He answered it at once, putting the phone to his ear rather than on speaker. It was one thing to trust Theo on a personal level, quite another to bring her into the heart of his clan. One decision was his and his alone to make, while the other required the input and trust of his clanmates.
Valentin’s voice in his ear, no humor to it as there’d been at the bakery. “Yasha, our system is showing that your vehicle is very close to the site of a major incident.”
Yakov could’ve turned off that tracking—it wasn’t a clandestine thing. He’d left it on because he was on clan business and one of the benefits of the tracking system was that the clan could find people when it needed them in particular areas. “Stuck in a queue of traffic. I can see flashing lights up ahead but that’s all. What’s happened?”
“Another murder.” Valentin’s bitten-out statement made Yakov’s skin go cold. “Fucker is getting bolder. He laid his victim out in the middle of the road. Two drivers actually saw him do it, but no one was fast enough to capture him even though he escaped on foot. Enforcement brought in bloodhounds, but they lost the trail. They asked if we had a tracker nearby and you’re the closest.”
“Got it.” While most people didn’t know the extent of a brown bear’s acute sense of smell, Enforcement in Moscow would’ve had to be brain-dead not to utilize it. StoneWater’s relationship with Enforcement hadn’t always been as good as it was these days, but the bears had always responded when the cops asked for their assistance when it came to tracking down dangerous predators—or vulnerable victims.
That was one of the many reasons Moscow loved the bears even when they misbehaved. They knew that should their child or another at-risk member of the family wander off, they could send out an SOS for bear assistance and it would be provided.