Do I trust him? After the bag? After "I can't"?
Yes. Despite everything. Because trust isn't the absence of anger. It's the presence of something stronger than anger. And what I feel for Nico Konstantinos, even furious, even exiled, even standing in a room with a man who will use me to destroy him, is stronger than anything I've ever felt for anyone.
Hands bound. Zip ties. Tight enough to dig, loose enough for blood flow. A bag over my head. Darkness.
They take me out into mountain air that cuts through the bag's fabric. A vehicle. I breathe. Count. Memorize. Left turn. Straight. Long straight. Another left. South. We're moving south. I track time: forty minutes, an hour, ninety minutes. We stop.
When the bag comes off, I'm in a factory. Concrete. Industrial. High ceilings lost in shadow. One light, overhead, a pool of yellow in the center of a vast dark space. A chair beneath it.
I've seen this staging before. The harbor facility. Finn's chair. Viktor's vocabulary: one light, one chair, an audience of armed men arranged in the shadows like a theater of violence.
They put me in the chair. Bind my wrists to the metal armrests.
I'm a hostage. But I'm alive. And as long as I'm alive, I can fight.
I begin working the zip ties against the armrest's edge. Slow. Deliberate. Micro-movements invisible to anyone watching. The friction will take hours. I have nothing but time.
And the certainty that the man who sent me away is coming, and when he does, I'm going to save his life and then never forgive him and then love him for the rest of mine.
Chapter 32
Nico
The Hunt
* * *
The phone rings at 4 a.m., and I know before I answer.
I know because the penthouse is dark, and the sheets smell like her, and I've been sleeping in our bed for four nights because the alternative is admitting she's gone and I sent her there. I know because the number is the NH contractor's secure line, and the time is 4 a.m., and nothing good has ever come at this time in any century of human history.
I answer.
"Sir, the safe house was hit. Twelve men. Coordinated assault." The voice is professional, controlled, the delivery of a man trained to separate information from emotion. "Two of our team are down. Mrs. Konstantinos negotiated to keep the remaining staff alive." A pause. "She went willingly. To protect us."
The line stays open. I've stopped hearing.
For one full minute, I stand in the dark of a penthouse that I designed for solitude and achieved it, and the solitude is killing me. One minute. Sixty seconds. In those seconds, I feel everything I've spent fifteen years learning not to feel. Terrorthat tastes like copper at the back of my throat. Rage with no target except the man in the mirror. Guilt so total it fills my chest like concrete setting. And love. Love so sharp it cuts through the concrete and the rage and the terror because love is the thing that survives when everything else is stripped away, and what's left of me without her is not a man but a weapon with no purpose.
I sent her away to protect her. Viktor found her anyway. The safe house. The contractors. The operational security. The mountain and the glass and the four armed strangers who called her ma'am. All of it insufficient. All of it my design.
I did this.
The phone rings again. Different number. Unknown.
"Nico Konstantinos." Viktor Reznikov's voice is pleasant. Conversational. The voice of a man who has just taken the most important thing in my world and wants me to know he's enjoying it. "I have something of yours."
"If you've hurt her?—"
"She's fine. Cooperative, even. Negotiated terms before we left the safe house." A note of admiration that makes my blood curdle. "A meeting. You, me. I'll send coordinates. Tonight. Midnight. Come alone, she goes free. Bring anyone, she dies first."
"How do I know she's alive?"
Silence. Then her voice. Strained but steady. Furious and controlled and managing the crisis from inside it because she is Siobhan O'Brien and she was running threat assessments before Viktor Reznikov learned to hold a gun.
"I'm here. Don't do anything stupid."
The connection cuts. I press the phone against my forehead. Close my eyes.