Slowly the heady pulses of ecstasy begin to fade. I sag against the door, enveloped in his arms, his heat. Every muscle in my body is spent. Under different circumstances, I could laugh and ask for another round.
But as safe as I feel in Maxim’s arms, I know we are surrounded by danger, and there’s only more to come.
Just for a moment, though, I want to ignore it all. I want to exist in this world with him, where it’s just the two of us, where nothing else matters. Where our love, this dangerous, treacherous love, is enough to protect us both.
* * *
I rest while Maxim and Yvan finish scouring the Jeeps and finding a place for Gregor’s gunshot-riddled body. It’s not long before they come back in. Maxim tosses me something and I catch it.
“Can you work with this?”
I frown, turning the phone over and over in my hands, then lift my eyes to Maxim. “You want me to crack it?”
He nods once.
“If I do,” I warn him, “it’ll give off our location at the very least. Who knows what else?”
“They already had our location,” he says. He sits on a rickety wooden chair by the door, watching me. “They don’t know how good you are. They didn’t know that we’d be able to get into it. Because of that, they were probably careless. The odds are good that there’s something in there we can use.”
I nod, but the whole thing reeks of a set-up to me. Sending a few gun-strapped Jeeps to a hovel in the middle of nowhere isn’t exactly discreet or clever. My father had to have known there was a chance it would end like this—his men dead, their bodies left to freeze on the highway. Maybe that was his intention.
It’s true they already had our location. What else could my father stand to gain by leaving this phone out in the open for me to hack? Maybe Max is right—maybe he doesn’t know what I’m capable of.
But now that I’ve declared for the other side, I find there’s a very real sense of fear building within me. I’ve won Maxim’s loyalty. But my children are still, somehow, in the hands of the Snake. And what of my mother?
Three days ago, back at the Roza Dom, I would have pretended to hack in without doing it, to protect myself. Now, though, there’s no point in play-acting.
I lift my eyes from the phone to Maxim, fully aware Yvan has fixed me with a suspicious glare. “It feels like a trap,” I say simply.
Yvan growls, “I knew it.”
Maxim raises a hand to him. “Easy.”
“She is not on our side. She will never be on our side. The first chance she gets to prove her loyalty, and what does she do? She protects the Snake. I wash my hands of it,” Yvan spits, then storms outside and slams the door behind him.
Maxim looks at me warily.
“He knows where we are,” I say. “By now he knows his men weren’t successful. This is some kind of game, I can feel it.”
“His,” Maxim says softly, “or yours?”
I grip the phone tighter. “I’ll open it if I can. I’ll look through it. But I’m warning you—he’s setting us up. I know he is.”
Just then, a low hum builds outside. It takes me a moment to recognize the sound of a few cars coming up the road.
“Sacha and the others,” says Maxim, not looking away from me. “I trust you. But they will not. Give them reason to, Annika. For your sake, and mine.”
I open my mouth to argue, but Maxim is already standing. He steps out the front door and closes it behind him, a clear dismissal.
* * *
I take shelter in one of the back rooms. The phone, wiped relatively clean and used in a strictly utilitarian fashion for outgoing and incoming calls, is easy to crack, despite a few required passwords.
As I suspected, the data is shallow. Apart from the passcodes, there’s no security whatsoever implemented.
When Maxim raps on the door a while later, I tell him as much. Luckily, Sacha and Yvan aren’t with him to dispute this and call me a temptress or a seductress or a traitor or whatever they’d like.
It’s not that I blame them—if our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t trust me either. It occurs to me, as Max scrolls through the useless phone, that all of this would be easier if I won them to my cause as well.
