“Took you long enough!” Blond hair curling out from the bottom of his helmet indicates who sprayed the snow—Mason.
“Sophia is finally skiing, and she chooses a double black as her first run?” another familiar voice shouts.
Grinning, I look over at a skier in a pink helmet and fur-trimmed ski outfit—Charlotte. “Skis look good on you!” She whistles. “Sure you can keep up?”
“I didn’t know Parisian girls could ski!” Mason taunts.
“I’M NOT PARISIAN!” I proclaim, laughing.
I look at Aksel, who is bent forward, on his poles, watching me, smirking. Henry and a girl named Sarah are beside him, laughing.
I flick my pole at Aksel’s chest. “I’ll see you at the bottom.”
“Is that a challenge?” Even while wearing a helmet and fluorescent goggles, Aksel is betrayed by his smile as the best-looking boy on the mountain.
I laugh. “Last one to the bottom buys lunch.”
Digging my poles into the packed snow, I angle my skis downhill, drop off the flat plateau, and descend into the narrow chute.
Behind me Emma shouts, “We’re not allowed to race!”
“A rule you only follow because you never win!” Mason shouts back.
Waterford may not produce the fastest skiers on the circuit, but it definitely produces the most fearless. Charlotte does a 360 off a mogul even my father wouldn’t try—and lands it. From the chute, I ski over into the light, fresh powder, hidden among tight clumps of pine trees.
In seconds, it returns—the rhythm, the icy thrill.
“On your left!” hollers Emma as she skis past me, bypassing a tree with low-hanging branches. I catch up to Charlotte as she catapults off another jump.
I only lose my balance once, while in thigh-deep powder at full clip.
Back on packed snow, I carve down the steep terrain. I push my shins into my boots, curl over my knees, and tuck my arms close to my hips. Accelerating faster and faster, I fly down the steep mountainside.
I soar, and for the first time in over eighteen months, I am free.
CHAPTER 29
Driving home in the late afternoon, I am warm, glowing from skiing all weekend. Aksel squeezes my hand and turns to me with a smile that makes me flush.
I start to say, “I’m so glad,” but stop.
Two unmarked black vehicles are reversing out of my driveway onto Edgewood Lane.
My body stiffens. My heart starts pounding.
“Sophia?” Aksel’s sharp voice feels distant.
Sudden tension locks my body into place.
The vehicles pass us with windows so dark we can’t see through them.
Aksel slows to a stop. “Who was that?” His even tone fails to mask his stony expression.
“No one. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” I say hastily.
“Sophia.” He clutches my hand. “What’s going on?”
“Promise you’ll pick me up for school?” I say placidly. “I had fun this weekend.”
Aksel’s face betrays his unwillingness to let me go, but I must go inside, and he must leave. Inside is my past and Aksel is my future and the two can never meet. Not now. Not today. They have to remain apart.
“Sophia—”
I unbuckle my seat belt, push open the door, and sprint to the house.
I race over the threshold. “Dad? Mom?”
They are standing in the living room speaking softly to each other.
“Who are they?” My words slice through the quiet room.
“Acquaintances,” my father answers.
“What were they doing here?”
“Sophia, it’s nothing—”
“Nothing does not look like that!” I shout.
My father has always told me—Shouting undermines credibility, Sophia. I breathe through my nose. “What were they doing here?” I ask with a seething calm.
My father’s nose twitches, like the bulls in Pamplona before the running starts. “Do you remember a few years back, we were visiting the Musée d’Orsay? You asked if we could go to St. Petersburg to see the Hermitage and—”
“You said no because you had a dangerous job there before I was born, and afterward, returning to St. Petersburg became impossible.”
“It wasn’t just a dangerous job, Sophia. It changed everything.”
“Okay, fine, so that was in St. Petersburg twenty years ago—”
“Nineteen years ago,” he exhales, “I was assigned to St. Petersburg to become acquainted with the SVR—the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. I found someone to talk to, who eventually defected with more weapons intelligence than we could have ever hoped to acquire—”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I recently contacted Andrews to express my concern that St. Petersburg might have been compromised.”
“So that was Andrews?” I motion in the direction the cars left.
“Andrews is in the Ukraine—those were some colleagues.”
“So, you’re not doing analysis?” I say accusingly.
“Everything I do is analysis, Sophia. I’m a regional specialist.”
“You’re a case officer,” I say bitingly. “Stop pretending.”
“Sophia, I’m not CIA—”
“Kent,” my mother snaps.
My father has always instructed me using vague terms, never disclosing specific details, and never revealing more than necessary.
This method has never bothered me before. Why does it bother me so much now?
“I know there’s more.” I concentrate on my father. “I deserve to an explanation!”
“I understand you might feel that way, honey, but my priority is to keep you safe—”
“Safe? You think I’m safe in Waterford? Someone was following me!”
Immediately, I regret the words. It is like the room is deprived of oxygen.
“Why do you say that?” asks my father in an edged tone, standing.
I shouldn’t have said it. It takes all my composure to remain calm, because if my father thinks I’m worried, he’ll worry, and he can’t worry about me. Not now.
My palms are clammy. “I thought someone, I mean, he wasn’t, but it felt as if someone was following me a while ago. Aksel thought the same thing—”
“Aksel was there?” he interjects.
“It was nothing,” I say quickly. “The guy was wearing a hood, so I couldn’t see his face, and he was walking straight at me, like he was aiming for me, except I was imagining it. I do that still, sometimes.” My eyes study the rug. “I imagine I see him walking toward me.”
Clasping his hands behind his back, my father begins to pace. Does he struggle talking about this as much as I do?
I glance at my mother. She is standing rigid beside the sofa, watching us.
It occurs to me how much freedom I’ve had in Waterford. They would never let me live this way if they weren’t sure that it’s over.
Collecting my thoughts, I look at my father calmly. “He was just a guy in Waterford, not paying attention, who almost bumped into me.”
My father stops pacing. “You’ve seen no one suspicious since?”
“No.”
He nods to my hip, to my phone. “You’ll call me if you do?”
“Yes.”
“Then, Sophia, stop worrying. My concern that there might be some loose ends to tie up doesn’t affect our lives here. This case is only chatter over a wire. Specific words popping up among terror cells we haven’t heard in a long time. Anyone with knowledge about the St. Petersburg job is secure.”
Secure. I have a prickly sensation on the back of my neck that “secure” means dead—and that “loose ends to tie up” means kill.
He continues, “We know terror groups are discussing certain weapons, but it’s nothing more than their own speculation and aspirations. Nothing new.”
“ADMs?”
He closes his mouth scrupulously.
I stare brazenly at him, pushing harder. “If Andrews told you
to retire, shouldn’t you follow orders and pass these loose ends on to someone else?”
“Sophia, you must understand that I’ll continually be approached for information or asked to analyze data. I’ve been around a long time. Bureaucracy, I guarantee, I’ll never escape,” he says wryly.
My father sits down beside my mother on the sofa. He looks tired.
“This fight against extremism is a war against an enemy that is both everywhere and nowhere. Occasionally, if new threats emerge associated with old enemies, old jobs, I’ll work. But none of that affects our lives here. We told you this when we moved here. Now you have to trust us.”
Trust. It’s such a complicated word. How can I trust them when they neither lie nor tell the complete truth?
“Nemcova,” I say abruptly, pleased my father looks surprised. “Who is she?”
“Ola Nemcova is an old colleague,” my mother answers calmly, rising to her feet. She presses out the pleats in her slacks. “Are you hungry, sweetheart? I made baguettes and vichyssoise.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“What about Aksel? Have you both eaten?”
“He left.”
My mother points over my shoulder. “He’s outside.”
I whirl around.
“You never heard him drive away, did you?” she reprimands me.
Anger flares inside me. Isn’t that why we moved here? So I wouldn’t have to pay attention to every sound, every noise?
I run back outside. Aksel unfolds his hands and closes the distance between us in several strides.
“What are you still doing here?” My body pulses.
He scans my face. “I had to know you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” I snap. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
His expression hardens as he tucks his hands into his pockets.
I stare at Aksel’s guarded face, searching for answers: Why did he stay?
He lifts his eyes from mine. They refocus on my parents. Standing in the window. Watching us.
“I’ll leave, okay?” With a swift kiss on my cheek, Aksel gets into the Defender.
Ignoring my parents’ eyes drilling into the back of my head, I duck around the hood, open the passenger door, and get in.
“Drive,” I order.
Moments later, steep cliffs enclose us in a granite cocoon. As we near the bend around Eagle Peak, Aksel brakes and steers over to a landing on the shoulder. He stops with the wheels a meter from the ravine edge and shifts the car into park.
“What’s going on, Sophia?” he demands.
I wanted to drive—not talk. Talking means confronting it, and I don’t want to confront it. I am trembling again. A cold sweat has broken out on my forehead. I loop my thumbs into the wrist straps on my sweater.
Aksel knows I have a past—does he know more than he’s letting on?
“Why did you really stay?” I plead.
Affronted, he glares at me. “Because I was worried, Sophia!”
“Why?” I prompt. “I was just going home!”
Aksel drags his hands over his forehead. Then he walks around to my side and opens my door. Behind him is the steep summit of Eagle Peak. In the starlight I see the sharp edges of the rocks we climbed. It’s hard to believe there was a time when I barely knew Aksel, when he only knew me as that girl from Berlin.
He drapes his arm on the door. His jaw is clenched tight, as though he’s trying to conceal emotions.
“Look, I don’t know what happened before you came to Waterford and I don’t need to—I respect your privacy, your past—but that also means I don’t know whether you’re going to be staying or leaving …” He trails off.
Leaving. Is that what this is about?
“And what about you?” I say hotly, exposing my own fears. “Am I supposed to believe your training, your classes, your target practice is simply for the Academy?”
“I intend to be prepared,” Aksel says dismissively. “That’s all.”
“Fine. I intend to stay in Waterford,” I retort.
Aksel’s mouth tightens. “That’s what worries me. You’re not necessarily making the decisions.”
“Things are different here,” I say emphatically.
“Are they?”
“Yes! So you shouldn’t worry about me, Aksel.”
Aksel stares at me audaciously. “Well, I do. A lot.”
“So, stop!”
“You’d rather I not care?” Aksel appears incredulous; his eyebrows furrow over his wide, emerald eyes. “Sophia, do you realize that every night when I go to bed, I wonder if I’m going to wake up in the morning and find out you’re gone?”
I bite my lip, pushing aside the voice in my head echoing Aksel’s concerns.
I’m safe here. Safe.
“That won’t happen.” My voice is barely audible. “Not anymore. Not here.”
Aksel’s shoulders flex beneath his sweater; he is still holding fiercely onto my hand, as if I’ll dissolve into air if he lets go.
“You’re right,” he finally says, “it probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about it. I care about you, Sophia. A lot. Too much, possibly.”
We have never discussed it—this inexplicable communication between us, this ability to understand so much about each other in so little time—but it’s here, right now, like an electric current between us.
There is more to this. More to Aksel. More to us.
We are combustible.
Eventually, Aksel’s hand settles on my knee. His touch sends a voltage down my leg and up my spine.
I twist my fingers through his. “I get it, Aksel. My life hasn’t been normal. I’m not normal—”
He pushes his lips firmly against mine. “You don’t want normal,” he says in a sultry murmur, “and neither do I.”
An hour later, I am back in my living room.
I sit down at the piano, determined to suffocate the questions billowing inside me.
I recall the memories: tulle and chiffon gathered around my feet, my mother worrying I would get stage fright, a bodice so tight around my waist I could hardly breathe, but a dress I insisted on wearing because of the way the lustrous fabric shimmered on the stage.
The french doors swing open. My father comes in and sits beside me on the bench. “We need to talk.”
Ignoring him, I trace each polished key.
“I began tracking the Chechen Nationalist Front when you were twelve,” he says in a steady voice.
I play one note. Two. Don’t talk about this.
“Within a few years, CNF had evolved from naive Chechens posting stupid extremist stuff online and mixing Molotov cocktails in their kitchens to executing poorly coordinated attacks. They’d grown, and I had to pay attention.”
Tulle and chiffon … Tulle and chiffon … If I concentrate on that evening, that memory, I don’t have to think about the others.
“I’d been tracking their leadership for months. CNF was quickly becoming an effective terrorist network. I had foiled an attack in Albania when I left a man for dead, who, it turns out, wasn’t.” My father closes his eyes. “That man was Izam Bekami.”
Instantly, I stop gliding my fingers along the keys.
“Darling, whoever you thought was following you, whoever you think you may have seen …” My father’s voice is so low I can barely hear him. “It wasn’t Bekami.”
Eighteen months later, his name still sends chills across my fingertips.
Izam Bekami.
Bekami.
I lay my hands in my lap. My throat swells shut. Fear shrouds my vision.
I partition my life into two spheres: before Bekami, and after.
My father continues, “Please trust me, Sophia. Live your life here in Waterford. Izam Bekami remains imprisoned in North Africa. Every other member of that Chechen cell from Istanbul is dead. Farhad was the last one, and you saw me kill him in Tunis.”
I turn to my father. My fingers seal to my palm.
“Dad, I know. I nev
er once thought it was”—I struggle to say Bekami’s name aloud—“him.”
My father drums middle C with his crooked forefinger. He takes my hand and squeezes it reassuringly. Standing, he heads back to the den.
He pauses at the door. “It’s over, Sophia. You have to believe me.”
It’s over.
CHAPTER 30
“How romantic!” Charlotte swirls a piece of hair around her finger and sighs.
I unload my lunch bag onto the table and look at Charlotte. “Romantic?”
Earlier this morning as we pulled up to Waterford High, Aksel had turned to me, saying, “I suppose I kind of like you, Sophia.”
“Kind of?” I repeated, threading my hand into his.
Grinning, Aksel had opened the glove compartment, retrieved a thick envelope, and handed it to me.
Confused, I tore the seal and reached inside. Two glossy slips of paper met my fingertips, embossed with cursive script: The Kirov Ballet.
“… he must really like you,” Charlotte continues matter-of-factly, “because ballet is boring.”
“Degas didn’t think so,” Emma comments, half listening. Her art history book is open, spread flat on the lunch table; she is murmuring at a flash card of Manet’s Olympia.
“Weren’t you a ballerina?” I ask Charlotte.
She groans. “I told you that? I usually keep it secret.”
“No. It’s obvious: you point your toes even while relaxing, and your posture …”
She tosses a bread crumb at me, laughing. “You are so weird.”
Dipping her roast beef sandwich into a steaming container of au jus sauce, Emma asks, “So what are you going to wear?”
“A dress.”
“Which dress?”
Beside us, a soda drops to the ground, splashing droplets onto Olympia.
“Any dress.” I pass Emma a napkin.
“When do you want to go shopping?” Charlotte asks. “We’ll go into the city—”
“No, it’s okay. We don’t have to go shopping.”
“Sophia, you have to look phenomenal.” Charlotte runs a finger through a curl of glossy hair.
I screw the lid onto my thermos. “I’ll try.”
“Good. Pick you up at four?” Charlotte glances at her watch.
“Can’t. I have practice,” Emma murmurs, flipping over another flash card.
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