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“No middle name?” he taunts.

I blink. “No. My mother is Indian. We don’t do middle names.”

“But your father is…” he trails off.

“Your name, first.”

“Leonid. Leonid Yuri.”

Why does he say it like he’s James Bond? “That sounds more medieval than your dog’s names. Is it your real name?”

“But your father is?” he repeats, pointedly asking this time.

“White. A cop.”

“Do you know who took you?” Implying it wasn’t him, again. What choice do I have but to believe him? What choice do I have, period?

“No. Do you?” I challenge back.

It surprises me when his shoulders sag with an exhale. “You have no idea, Meera, how badly I wish I did. But no, I do not know who took you.”

My face must fall, too. “My father is a cop. Maybe he could find out, if you—”

Any chance of sympathy is obliterated when he cuts me off with a mocking laugh. “I’m probably your cop father’s worst fucking nightmare, Meera.”

A chill snakes up my spine. A beat passes. Div shifts at my feet. Mara hasn’t moved from her post at the other end of the couch, still watching me with those evaluative eyes.

I say nothing.

“My turn again,” Leonid says. “What do you do? For work, I mean. I assume you are a working woman.”

As opposed, I think, to the working girl I’m dressed as? I cover myself with the blanket and share, as dignified as possible, “I’m a high school teacher. AP Biology.” I watch for a reaction. A smirk, maybe. A dismissal. He gives me neither. His eyes gleam with unconcealed interest. It makes my palms sweat. “My turn. What do you do?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Oh, I’m just in the family business.”

“Which is?”

He tuts at me like a persnickety grandma. “That’s two questions, Meera. That’s not how this works.”

I don’t know how any of this works. But I can’t say that. “Then I’m done with this,” I counter flatly, eyes narrowed.

It isn’t the ace I’d like it to be, since he simply shrugs at me. “Okay then,” he drawls. Then he gets up and just… walks out.

He leaves the room and, while I stare after him, gimlet-eyed, he returns carrying a garment bag of all things, which he proceeds to set down on the arm of the couch. “Clothes,” he explains, like I’m a complete and total dimwit. “After you’re done with your breakfast, you can change out of that—” He looks me over like he can see through blanket I’m swathed in. “—lovely get-up. The bathroom’s down the hall.”

I stare at the bag. Then at him. “What, you aren’t going to knock me out and change me into them?”

“Would you like me to?” he asks, his voice not betraying a single emotion. There is a chance he is a sociopath. Can sociopaths have loving dogs? It’s safe to say that the gap in my psychiatric knowledge has never bothered me this much before.

I take the garment bag without a word, never relinquishing the grip on the blanket I hold around me.

***

The hallway outside the living room confirms what I’d already pieced together: this building is a church that someone has gutted and reassembled into something livable without stripping away its bones.

I walk down a corridor that is all stone and arched doorframes, with thick walls and radiator pipes running along the baseboards that tick and clank with a rhythm that sounds almost biological. Pale, colored light filters through fragments of stained glass in the upper windows—cobalt, amber, that deep ecclesiastical red—casting faint geometric patterns on the floor that shift as I walk through them.

The bathroom is easy to find.