His Patience His Cage

Wren Adeyemi restores violins in Edinburgh. The Stradivarius that arrives at her bench has no paperwork, and the label inside is wrong in a way that only someone like her would notice. She photographs it. She posts it to a forum she thinks is anonymous. Two weeks later she is in a farmhouse in Fife with Ivan Sorokin — fifty-eight, Bratva, and thirty years unidentified — who has no interest in the violin and every interest in the four people Wren just showed it to. He doesn't chain her. He explains, calmly, that everyone she's touched is a loose end, and that the number is now four. So Wren starts closing the loops herself. One contact disappears. Two go quiet. The fourth answers with a police officer's voice. A Bratva age gap dark captive romance about a restorer who waits, and hires a lawyer, and rents a van in January.