From being pressed across Blaze’s scorching chest and now wrapped in the blanket, her shivers stopped. The warmth from his body and the quilt slowly chased the chill out of her boots, too.
Blaze crouched in front of the stone fireplace just a few feet from where the quilt was wrapped around her boots. She said, “I can build the fire.”
He crumpled newspaper and threaded it through with pine needles and wood shavings from crates on the far side of the fireplace. “No talking.”
“But I can—”
“You can build the next one.”
Thus mollified, Sarah snuggled farther into the quilt some other woman had made as if anticipating a cold person would need to wrap up in it. Blaze quickly constructed a log-cabin configuration, which seemed appropriate, and then opened the flue and lit the bottom of the pile with a long match from a can on the mantle.
“I suppose building a fire is one of those survival skills they taught you in SEAL school,” she said.
“And I was a firebug as a kid.”
“Hmmm, a pyro. Givenyour actual name,why am I not surprised?”
“Maybe it was the magic of my name. My grandfather was named Blaise, spelled the traditional way with an S. My parents changed the spelling. They thought they were modernizing it, but my father was probably trying to make it sound intimidating.”
Sarah watched him frown as the kindling in the fireplace glowed red.
“He was always concerned with scaring people so he could get his way. He drove an enormous black pickup truck so cars would scatter on the road ahead of him. And of course, he had a high-speed pursuit vehicle for the SWAT team at work.”
Blaze sat in the chair across from her and rifled through a small bag to find the two handguns he’d taken from her brother and the other guy back in Logan’s New York City apartment, and he frowned as he inspected them.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
The angry set of his mouth didn’t change. “They’re both loaded, and there’s a round in the chamber. I’d hoped they weren’t. The safeties were off when I took them away from Logan and Micah.”
Sarah didn’t need an explanation. “It’s my fault. I should have known Logan wouldn’t be on our side. My father told me Logan was bad a million times.”
Blaze shook his head. “It was the right decision, even though it produced the wrong outcome. Looking back, there were other signs I might have given more weight to, like Logan tracking my phone and Mary Varvara Bell always seeming to know where we were.”
“That’s not your fault,” she said.
“A few days ago, Logan said he was inMoscow,and I didn’t realizeMoscowwas a red flag.”
Sarah had been to Moscow every year when she was a kid. “Noteveryonewho spends time in Russia is in a bratva.”
“But when someone fromourhigh school, the Swiss boarding school Le Rosey, goes to Russia, it’s for the Russian mafia. We visited our friends’ dachas on the Black Sea during every school break. The Russian students wereallfrom organized crime families.”
“Well, maybe some of their parents were just politicians,” she ventured.
“That’s the same thing in Russia. Logan must have gotten mixed up with Mary Varvara Bell and the White Russian bratva, and now he’s sucked Micah and Tristan in. This operation was to snare me, too. Ican’t believeI was so stupid.”
Blaze pulled his phone out of his pocket and used his thumbs to tap furiously on it.
“Are youtextinghim?”
“Hell, no. I’m resetting my phone to its factory settings, and then I will downloadjusta GPS app but not even sign in. I assumed Twist was tracking me through the location-sharing app, but I have no idea what that asshole might have downloaded onto my phone at any time over the last several years. I can’t trust him. I can’t trustanyof them. I have been a fuckingfool.”
“You weren’t foolish. Logan has been your friend your whole life.”
He shrugged one shoulder, half-dismissive. “Since we were thirteen, anyway.”
He must have felt as betrayed as she was, maybe even more, and the hollowness in her heart devastated her. “The last time I saw Logan, I was seven years old. Even my dad was talking about events that happened fifteen years before. He didn’t have any loyalty to me, but he did toyou.”
Blaze nodded.
