Red London

ALSO BY ALMA KATSURED WIDOWTHE FERVORTHE DEEPTHE HUNGERTHE DESCENTTHE RECKONINGTHE TAKER G. P. PUTNAM’S SONSPublishers Since 1838An imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by Alma KatsuPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATANames: Katsu, Alma, author.Title: Red london: a novel / Alma Katsu.Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2023]Identifiers: LCCN 2022052365 (print) | LCCN 2022052366 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593421956 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593421963 (ebook)Classification: LCC PS3611.A7886 R435 2023 (print) | LCC PS3611.A7886 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052365LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052366Cover design: Tal GoretskyCover images: (woman) Mark Leibowitz / Trunk Archive; (London) Doug Armand / Stone / Getty ImagesBook design by Kristin del Rosario, adapted for ebook by Maggie HuntThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_142813756_c0_r0 CONTENTSCoverAlso by Alma KatsuTitle PageCopyrightDedicationChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36AcknowledgmentsAbout the Author_142813756_ For Jim Burridge, the best storyteller of all of us CHAPTER 1 LONDONIt 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.She’s reminded immediately of a murder on Billionaires Row she’d read about. It took place almost four decades ago, a foreign businessman shot dead in his home on New Year’s Eve. What made the case so fascinating is that it didn’t fit the usual pattern for home robberies. The robbers locked the wife in an upstairs bathroom instead of killing her alongside the husband. The gun used to kill the man was one of those tiny ladies’ pistols, the kind that was designed to fit in an evening bag, and—curiouser still—the bullets were made of silver. This last bit makes the whole thing ludicrous, as far as Emily is concerned. They had to be decorative or a conversation piece, unless the man was suspected of being a werewolf. Somehow, the wife managed to escape from the bathroom and run for help, but the assailants were never found.Because the wife survived, there were rumors that she was involved—of course. Even when a woman is the victim, she can’t escape suspicion.That infamous house is a few doors down.