by Rachel Rust
“And now that she’s fled the law firm, I’m fair game. That’s why I was set up with you for that assignment last spring and why Sergei wants me dead now. A payback to my mom’s betrayal.”
“Exactly,” Eddie said.
“What about my dad and Josh? Are they in danger, too?”
“There’s an FBI watch on them, though they haven’t been briefed on it,” Luke said. “They’re in the dark for now, and we’ll keep it that way as long as we can.”
“Why did Sergei target me and not Josh?”
Eddie shot Luke a stern glance, one that said tread carefully.
“Because your brother’s an idiot,” Luke said, clearly not picking up on Eddie’s request.
Heat flushed across my face and chest. “Excuse me? You don’t even know my brother! He’s not an idiot, he’s … he’s…” My brain scrambled for a nice adjective to describe Josh. No matter how much I wanted to contradict Luke’s assertion of Josh being an idiot, the word smart wouldn’t come out of my mouth. “He’s a good guy!” I blurted out.
That much was true. It wasn’t like Josh would hurt anyone. For the most part, he was pretty decent. Or at least I believed he had the potential to be a pretty decent adult, with a few more years of practice.
Luke put his hands up to calm my anger. “Chill out. I’m just saying that you, Natalie, have the most potential out of your mother’s two children. Your parents have higher hopes for you than Josh, and seeing you fall would be a bigger loss than if the same thing happened to your pothead brother.”
I glared at Luke. “You seriously need to shut up about Josh.” My fingers curled into fists, but I remained seated. What was I going to do, punch an FBI agent? Something told me he was trained to deflect a physical attack from a wimp me with a flick of his little finger.
“This isn’t my thinking,” Luke said. “It’s Sergei’s. His definition of success is power and money—and between you and Josh, you have the most power and money potential. He knows about your full scholarship to Columbia. When he had you and Eddie paired up for the school assignment last May, he knew you’d work with Eddie even if you didn’t like him because you had to protect your grades. It was the perfect way to force you two together.”
I glanced at Eddie. His dark eyes stared back. For supposedly being so smart, I sure had been easily duped. I felt like an idiot, having believed that I had just been an unlucky partner for the assignment. But how could I have ever known that I’d been specifically targeted? I had just been a regular high school senior, living a normal life, annoyed by normal everyday things like a meddling father, immature boys, and slow WiFi.
And now here I was, sitting in a shitty motel room, in a shitty part of Manhattan, hiding out to save my life—with no WiFi. And my mother, once a selfish deserter, was now a selfless victim of Sergei Romanov.
Tears welled up in my eyes as a painful ball of fire rose from my belly. Ten years without my mom. Ten years ripped away by Sergei. Because of him, I had felt rejected by the one person who was never supposed to reject me. I had grown up a scorned girl—scorned by the very person who had given me life.
Sergei had demolished our family, stolen a decade’s worth of possible memories and family togetherness. We could have been normal … mom, dad, son, daughter. A real family, like in the movies. We could’ve had more Christmases together, more vacations, more family dinners.
We could’ve been happy. All of us. My dad’s heart never would have broken if not for Sergei Romanov.
But my dad didn’t know the truth. She was out there … my mom, his wife. She wanted us. She had always wanted us. But the gravity of the situation we were in dissolved away all thoughts of happily ever after. My mom had worked for a criminal law firm for over ten years. And now she had a neon target on her back.
My eyes closed. “My mom’s either going to end up dead or in prison, isn’t she?”
“Not necessarily,” Eddie said. “She’d be a valuable asset to the FBI, if she’s willing to cooperate.”
“If Sergei doesn’t kill her first,” I whispered.
“Don’t think like that.”
“I have to think like that,” I snapped back. “That’s the reality of the situation. He’s looking for her because he wants her dead, just like he wants the two of us dead.”
The heat from my belly shot up into my head.
My worlds were crashing together. The danger of my life with Eddie and the FBI and the criminal world of Sergei Romanov had, up until that moment, been separate from the comfortable refuge of my family.
Thoughts of my dad and Josh were what I had clung to whenever my fear escalated from this Sergei fiasco.
But now everything had been squished together. Those two entities—my family and my endangerment—were one in the same. And the worst part was that the danger in my life hadn’t seeped into my family, it had started with my family, with my mom.
My stomach lurched and bile seeped up my esophagus. I needed fresh air and to get the hell out of that small motel room. I stood up and bright flashes of light teased my peripheral vision.
“Natalie?” Eddie said. His voice sounded a mile away. His fingers curled around my upper arm, but I hardly felt them.
“Lay her down,” Luke said.
My head bobbed back and that was all I remembered.
Chapter Eight
The ceiling of the motel room had weird, chunky spackling. My eyes fixated on the plaster stalactites as Eddie sat on the edge of the bed, asking if I was okay.
“I’m fine.”
Lying flat on my back, my heart pounded in my head, and my stomach was tight, as if any movement would send its contents flying Exorcist-style. Except there was nothing but churning acid in my stomach. I hadn’t eaten anything since last night’s Italian dinner with my dad, and the emptiness of my belly was making itself known.
Was it really just yesterday that I had dined with my dad? That meant it had only been twenty-four hours since he had brought me to Columbia. And already I had knocked out my roommate and ditched the campus for a safe hiding spot.
“Fuck,” I mumbled, hand to head. I pressed on my temples, but that made the pounding worse. “I need aspirin.”
“I can get some when I go out again,” Luke said. “I’ll grab a few more groceries too.”
He sounded like an errand boy, which was what he was for us. Eddie and I couldn’t leave and go shopping and take care of mundane things. Luke was our connection to the outside world. The mental image of him taking time out of his bad-guy-hunting to go grocery shopping almost made me laugh.
My stomach rumbled and Eddie gave me a pitiful look, as though I were a dying animal he couldn’t mend.
“You need food,” he said. From a dresser drawer, he produced a granola bar and an apple. I tried to sit up, but he pressed my shoulders to keep me down. “Just lie here for a while. Your body is dealing with an awful lot of stress right now.”
There was no disagreeing with his words, and I relaxed back into the mattress. The morning’s conversation swam in my head. My mom. Sergei. The money-laundering law firm. The story itself made sense, as if it were the plot to a movie. Woman unknowingly works for a dirty law firm, her family is threatened if she squeals, so she leaves her family to save them. But then she has enough and flees the criminal world, putting her life and the lives of her family at risk.
The puzzle wasn’t hard to piece together, but my brain had a hard time believing that it was my life, and my mother in that story.
But that was only my side of things. I was only half the equation. There was a whole other story, a whole other person involved in the bigger picture.
I stared up at Eddie. He was just as much a part of Sergei’s game as I was. But why?
I placed a hand on his forearm. “What about you?”
“I’m fine, I’ll eat later.”
“I’m not talking about food. I’m wondering what it is about you that Sergei’s targeting. Why has he been watching you since you were litt
le? What’s your connection to him?”
Eddie shook his head in a baffled way. “We’re still working on that. The connection between Sergei and your mom wasn’t too hard to find once we really started researching. But we haven’t found any connection of Sergei to my family or any prominent person from my past. My family’s farm business is transparent.” Eddie smiled a little. “My family’s pretty boring.”
“Then it’s not your family,” I said.
Luke nodded. “It could be something directly related to Eddie himself. Something from when he was younger, something we haven’t even considered yet.”
Eddie sat back with a sigh, running his hands through his hair.
The room went silent. Not reflective silent. Not solemn silent. But awkward and terrified silent. We were people in trouble—deep trouble, and the vulnerability of that hung in the air. It was maddening and embarrassing that we couldn’t just shake a fist in righteous anger and set things right. We had been outsmarted by an evil person in the past and all three of us knew there was a possibility it would happen again—with deadly results. Though none of us expressed such thoughts.
Luke stood up. “I’ll be back when I can.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, tearing the wrapper off my granola bar. It was the gross crunchy kind and didn’t have any chocolate in it, but my appetite would have chewed anything edible at that point.
Luke walked to the door and paused, hand on the knob. “Back to campus. We know Sergei’s men are around. Eventually, one of them will show their ugly mug, as they go looking for you.” He glanced at my backpack. “I had no problem finding your class schedule. And I’m sure they didn’t either. They know where to look for you … or at least they think they do. And that means I know where to go looking for them.”
I gave him a tight smile, thinking that wishing an FBI agent “good luck” was a tacky thing to do. I didn’t know how much success in their job depending on luck, and how much was sheer skill.
Eddie and Luke exchanged a silent goodbye that consisted only of identical head nods before the motel door separated them. It was clear that every time they parted one another’s company it came with the realization it might be the last time they see each other. They had history, having gone through training together at Quantico. They had both trained together in simulated hostile situations, but this was real life. Real danger that threatened to end us all.
I sat up, ignoring the throb in my head. Eddie’s back was turned to me as he sat, silent with heavy thoughts and staring at the floor.
I placed my chin on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
I thought a moment before answering, “I don’t know. For the shitty circumstance you’re in. Losing the faith of the people you worked for. Having to hide out in a crappy motel when all you want to do is get out on the streets and make things right.”
He stood and my chin slipped from his shoulder. “Don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault,” he said, walking into the bathroom, leaving me alone on the bed.
I lay back down, chewing on oats and honey, wondering if I had said something wrong.
The room was quiet and warm. My life was scary and confusing. And the boy in the bathroom had a knack for spinning my head in confusion.
Chapter Nine
The next few days were a big blur of boring. The excitement of being with Eddie again wasn’t enough to overcome the enclosing walls of the small motel room.
The room was plain with just a few pieces of furniture—the double bed, a tall dresser with a TV on top, and the small table with two chairs. The items were mismatched, each with different shades of veneer. One time I had watched a home improvement show that created a kitchen like that … black cabinets on the bottom, white cabinets on top, and a kitchen table surrounded by six chairs of different styles and colors. It had been eclectic and cute. But the motel room wasn’t eclectic. It was a shoddy mess of yard sale furniture, and it smelled like old wood with an occasional whiff of secondhand smoke.
The cigarette smoke wasn’t coming from Eddie though. As far as I knew, he hadn’t lit up once since we took down The Barber back in Rapid City last May. He was coping with our new stressful situation in other ways.
While I spent most of the time napping or reading, Eddie spent his time moving. Push-ups. Sit ups. Stretching. When he wasn’t exercising, he was taking apart his guns, counting ammo, and inventorying our supplies of food and water.
His only stillness came when he stood near the window, peeking out at people, cars, and the buildings across the street. I didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, or who he was looking for. The FBI? Sergei? Probably both. He sometimes spent an hour or more at the window. But just because his body was still, didn’t mean his mind was. And I knew it killed him to be cooped up, to not be able to freely go defend himself, take back his FBI badge, and hunt down Sergei.
I knew he was just waiting for the opportunity to bust out of the room. All he needed was one bit of information on Sergei’s whereabouts and he’d be gone.
Our communications were hit or miss. Sometimes we’d go for hours without saying a word to each other, even though we were never more than twenty feet apart in the small room. Other times we talked at length. These conversations usually happened at night. There was something about a darkening, deep sky that brought with it heavy thoughts. Thoughts that needed to be spoken, or they’d eat up our insides.
One thing we never talked about—but was always on my mind—was the end. How were we going to get out of our situation? We had several conversations about tactics and strategies, but never about the actual end result.
Die or survive. It was only going to end one of those two ways, and I wasn’t sure what our odds were. Though I figured they weren’t good.
On Thursday—three days since we had seen Luke, and almost four days since I had felt fresh air on my face—it rained all morning, bringing cool relief from the blazing sun. The local news predicted the city would have record-breaking heat on the upcoming Labor Day weekend. I didn’t know what New Yorkers did on holiday weekends. Jam up the trains out of town and sit on a shore somewhere? Back home, my dad was probably prepping his boat for a rare lake venture. Maybe Josh would join him. Or maybe it’d just be my dad, some of his friends, and a case of beer. My dad wasn’t a drinker, until you put him near a lake.
He had no doubt called and texted my phone in the past few days. He just thinks I’m busy with class and new friends. But as I lay on the bed, staring at the bumpy ceiling, I also considered the notion that he had gotten so worried after not hearing from me that he had called the school, and now campus security was hunting me down. And why not? Everyone else wanted me. The FBI. A crazy Russian trafficker. Might as well add campus cops, too.
Rain pinged and splashed off the window, blocking what little view of the outside world we had. A rhythmic click click click to my right meant that Eddie was fiddling with his guns again. Loading bullets into the magazine, or whatever it was called. He had at least three handguns that I had seen. Two black, and one silver-colored. What else did he have? What other weapons had he been trained to use? Once again, my basic knowledge of Eddie was up against a brick wall. Running from danger and sharing a bed with someone didn’t exactly amount to a normal relationship. Normal couples blossomed with carefree talks about favorite movies and amusing life experiences. There was really nothing carefree or amusing about our relationship.
The pitter-patter of rain against the window slowed to a drizzle. The air in the room was cool but muggy. I stretched out my arms and legs. They needed movement.
“Let’s go outside,” I said.
Eddie didn’t answer.
Click click click.
“Outside,” I repeated, slow and deliberate.
“No.”
I huffed and sat up, swinging my legs off the bed until I was seated on the edge of the mattress. I stared at Eddie in silence until my own patience began to crack. Still
he didn’t look over at me. He had switched guns and was now loading bullets into the magazine of the second black handgun.
Click click click.
The sound scratched up my spine.
“Oh, my God,” I half-yelled. “You have enough bullets. How many times are you going to unload and reload your guns?”
Again, he didn’t answer.
“I need to go outside, just for a second. This room is like half the size it was when I got here four days ago. I could use a little fresh air.”
He let out a single laugh. “Well, I could use a beer, but that’s not happening either.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, standing and nudging his shoulder. “Just for a second, no one—”
“No.”
“—will even see us.”
“We don’t know that. We need to stay inside.”
“But you went to campus a few days ago to get me.”
“That was at night and under extenuating circumstances.”
“Yeah, well…” I crossed my arms, trying—and failing—to come up with a compelling reason to put ourselves at risk, other than my own discomfort.
When I didn’t say anything else, he put the gun down and stared at me. “Fine. You wanna go outside? Come on.” He rose with a nod of his head to follow him.
At the door, he grabbed the knob and glanced at my shoes near the bed. I slipped my feet into the flats and shuffled my way toward him, unable to shake the wariness of my bullshit meter. He turned the knob and opened the door.
“After you,” he said.
We locked eyes. If this was a joke, it wasn’t on his face. And that was probably another weapon he had been trained on by the FBI—the ability to be expressionless in any situation.
I moved forward. But before I could step outside of the room, he slammed the door shut and grabbed my wrist.
“What the hell?” I yanked my arm back, but it remained in his grasp.