He has watched me for four years. Tonight, he tells me he kept a folder.
Vera Mikhailovna Lebedeva is a 26-year-old freelance journalist who has spent nine months publishing pieces
about a Russian crime family she now realizes she got exactly wrong.
The pieces were never about the Volkovs. They were about the Sokolovs.
And the Sokolovs have just put her name on a list.
Yuri Volkov is forty-seven years old. He has worked for the Volkov family for twenty-two years. He has
watched Vera at press conferences, at award ceremonies, at the back of long rooms. He has never once
spoken to her.
Until the night her name lands on the list — and her best friend's brother-in-law, the man who has been
watching her, picks up his coat and walks her home.
She doesn't know that her father in Pskov has, three weeks earlier, written a letter to Yuri in Italian asking
him to take care of her.
She doesn't know Yuri has answered.
By the time she finds out, she will have learned to write the byline that cracks open the trafficking
architecture of three Baltic ports — and she will have learned, at fifteen feet, to do what no journalist should
ever have to do.
And the watcher who has, by his own count, never been allowed to want anything for forty-seven years on
this planet — will finally tell her what he wants.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Vera Mikhailovna Lebedeva is a 26-year-old freelance journalist who has spent nine months publishing pieces
about a Russian crime family she now realizes she got exactly wrong.
The pieces were never about the Volkovs. They were about the Sokolovs.
And the Sokolovs have just put her name on a list.
Yuri Volkov is forty-seven years old. He has worked for the Volkov family for twenty-two years. He has
watched Vera at press conferences, at award ceremonies, at the back of long rooms. He has never once
spoken to her.
Until the night her name lands on the list — and her best friend's brother-in-law, the man who has been
watching her, picks up his coat and walks her home.
She doesn't know that her father in Pskov has, three weeks earlier, written a letter to Yuri in Italian asking
him to take care of her.
She doesn't know Yuri has answered.
By the time she finds out, she will have learned to write the byline that cracks open the trafficking
architecture of three Baltic ports — and she will have learned, at fifteen feet, to do what no journalist should
ever have to do.
And the watcher who has, by his own count, never been allowed to want anything for forty-seven years on
this planet — will finally tell her what he wants.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Used availability for Danielle Kent's The Watcher's Bride