It starts after midnight, when most harrowing and horrifying things seem to take place.
Emily Rotenberg has been in bed for about an hour but is still awake. It takes her hours to fall asleep these days, no matter how hard she tries. And she has tried everything to fix the situation, but nothing works—not a dreary book, not prescription pills. Not even a couple glasses of wine.
Emily has no reason to believe that anything was different about this night. After all, she lives at the most desirable address in London. That’s what the newspapers say, anyway: the way the media fusses over The Bishops Avenue you’d think God himself lived there. She read about the mile-long stretch just north of Hampstead Heath years before she met her husband, Mikhail, breathless stories in the color Sunday magazines when she was a little girl. It all sounded so grand, like something out of a fairy tale, and she would wonder what it would be like to live there.
She doesn’t have to wonder anymore. A huge mansion on Billionaires Row is one of the things her husband, a Russian oligarch, has given her. Though she would say that the only thing of worth he’s given her are the twins, Kit and Tatiana, asleep in the adjacent wing.
Mikhail is home. She knows this, even though he is not in bed with her. The fact that he’s home is by no means a given: as often as not he spends the night without her at the Knightsbridge apartment, his in-town residence closer to business associates, but tonight he is in the house they share. He is downstairs somewhere in the rambling mansion, still awake. The man is famous for never sleeping. When they were dating, Emily used to joke that he was secretly Count Dracula, that he slept during the day and rose refreshed and ready for an evening of wining, dining, and dancing. Though she knew that he’d been working because she saw the evidence of it in the news. He seemed to have a finger in every pie in Russia, not to mention his international interests. Mikhail Rotenberg is a machine for making money.
She hears a muffled noise toward the back of the property. That in itself is a rarity worth noting, but they do live in London, albeit a quieter, sleepier area to the north. It is a Saturday evening—technically, Sunday morning—so you can’t rule out the occasional odd bit of noise. Only a curmudgeon would complain on a Saturday night.
What happens next, however, never happens.
There is a burst of gunfire.
She bolts upright in bed. It’s just a couple shots but that sound is unmistakable. Pop, pop, pop. While Emily was not wealthy growing up, she came from an upper-class family. She has been to her share of hunting parties, spent many an autumn weekend slogging through the woods of a family friend’s Scottish estate, a rifle in her hands, once she was old enough to participate. She wasn’t a bad shot. The father had proclaimed her a natural, marked her forehead with the bright vermillion blood of the deer she’d taken down.
The gunfire tonight is nothing like the quaint old hunting rifles she’d used for pheasant or grouse. These first shots are deceptively quiet, however. Nothing like what will happen next.