Zoey Jones [Bonus Material]

The Night Before

When we got to a residential area the guys quietened down, but that was mostly because Grigory was too busy looking around to be much conversation. In the dark things were hard to recognise from the pictures I'd seen, but I thought we passed the tree he'd fallen out of when he was five. He'd broken his leg and had been in plaster for six months. Then we turned onto a house lined road. Every building was a huge shadow looming close, each a different shape to the last, yet somehow uniform with dark spaces that were windows blocked out by curtains and even darker spaces which were balconies linking one room to the next.

We passed a few more streets like this before getting to a wide cul-de-sac with an island to turn around and each house had a brick wall with a metal rail fence on the top, decorated with gold motifs.

"Ah. Oh, I forgot about that," Alyosha said and stopped outside the gates.

"What?" Grisha asked.

"Your mama had to get a new lock. I don't have a key either."

"Oh crap," Grisha said switching to Russian. "Well, we'd best figure it out somehow."

They both got out of the car to figure out how to get to the house. For a moment I simply looked at it. A little way down its own drive, and surrounded with a loose gathering of trees, the house was a pleasantly large log chalet with a sloping roof, huge windows and I think there was a balcony across the whole of the front first floor. A patio with a sloped roof went all the way around the house by the look of it and there were a few steps leading up to it. There was something hanging down a little way from all of the roof edges my first thought was icicles, because what else hangs down from the edges of roofs, but they clearly weren't. It was nineteen degrees out there already.

Grigory opened my door.

"Is that really your mum's house?" I asked in wonder.

"Da," he said in a warm tone. "Home." He held his hand out to me.

I unclipped my seatbelt and let him pull me from the car into the too warm morning. I took my cardigan off – weird at this time of the morning – and then walked over to where Alyosha was stood looking at a tree. The suitcases were down by his feet and he had a look of deep thought on his face. Grigory and I stood next to him and followed his line of sight.

"Why are we looking at a tree?" I whispered to Grigory a few long moments later.

"Lyosha, are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Grigory asked.

"I think I am, Grisha," he grinned.

"What?" I asked warily.

They looked at one another over my head and grinned some more.

"Do you like climbing tress, Zoey?" Alyosha asked me.

"I like going though gates to get to people's houses more, but – What?" I asked incredulously. "You want to break into Grigory's mum's house? Why can't we just use the gate?"

"Because we don't have the key," he said deadpan. He looked at Grigory. "I thought you said she broke into Sergey's house before she knew him."

"I didn't have a freshly not broken arm!" I protested.

"I have rope in the car," he said easily.

I frowned. "How does rope come into this?"

Rope came into this by being thrown over a branch, me sitting in a make shift harness and being hoisted up by two strong men. When I got to the branch of the sturdy, old tree, I had to transfer myself to a branch that was the other side of the wall and then I was slowly lowered. It was a smooth, successful operation and it was so easy (at least for me) that I thought they were going to get the luggage over in the same way. The case with the electronics was hoisted over.