“Growing corn shouldn’t be forced on anyone. If he gave you the farm and you like it, great. But if he forced it on you, too, I’m sorry I didn’t come back and get you earlier.” That’s when he turned around and looked at me, and his bright green eyes, so like my father’s, shocked me. “You would’ve made one hell of a Vor.”
AVor?Me, Sarah Nevaeh Bell, the head of a criminal organization so vast that it had a shot at overthrowing the United States government?
That was crazy. I was nothing but a little farm girl from Iowa.
But that was the moment—when Logan saw that I could’ve been someone different, that I could have been the mastermind in the white pantsuit with upswept hair ordering mercenaries around—that somethingclickedfor me.
I was the girl in the red corset staring down Russian mafia bosses in New York City.
Maybe I could be something . . .different.
36
BLAZE ROBINSON
The elevator doors chimed when they opened, and I glanced over at Colleen Frost, Twist’s wife, who was absolutelyfuming.
She was small, yes, but her eyes were narrowed. Her jaw was shoved into an underbite with her rage.
When Colleen saw me watching her, she muttered,“These. Fuckers.”
Yes, these fuckers, indeed.
As the elevator descended and my feet lightened in my trail runners in the lower gravity, Skull Trim glanced at me and sneered, “I guess your little farmer didn’t understandeverythingwe were talking about on the plane.”
I looked down my nose because I was about eight inches taller than the mercenary and said back at him in perfect Moscow-accented Russian that I, like everybody else, had learned at the Le Rosey boarding school, “She understood everything, and you didn’t pass Mary Varvara Bell’s loyalty test. Good luck when we reach the forest.”
Skull Trim scowled, but his grimace was tinged with worry again.
The other two mercenaries in the elevator behind Colleen and me shifted from foot to foot, their dress shoes shuffling on the glassy marble floor.
We were the last elevator down.
Micah, Twist, Kylie, and Sarah were ahead of us in the lobby, standing in the square and facing away from the elevators.
Mary Varvara Bell was already there, too, checking her phone nonchalantly as the mercenaries prodded Colleen and me into position behind the others.
The lobby was crowded.
Straight ahead, a dark-haired man was leaning against the far wall and holding a newspaper, looking over the top of it at us.
Even at that distance, I could see his ice-gray eyes, and somehow, I remembered him speaking with a cut-crystal British accent.
As Colleen and I stopped behind the others, the man folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm, looking away to the left.
This building’s open spaces were often thick with people wearing thousand-dollar suits and flashing red-soled shoes as they ascended to their law firms’ offices or stockbrokers’ headquarters on the floors above. I’d been in the building when visiting New York City before, not knowing that this would be my last stand on this day.
But today, an unusual number of people wore baggy suits as if they were trying to fit in with the upper classes. Their shoes were mirror-shined scuffed leftovers from their or their kids’ weddings, and some of them who weren’t even trying wore trail-running shoes like me.
Skull Trim poked me in the back with what must’ve been a handgun and ordered, “Move out.”
We prisoners walked forward in formation as the crowd’s random movements suddenly swirled, a significant number of them coming toward us and picking up the pace.
The Koch Group mercenaries didn’t see the change. They had been trained in urban combat like a civil war but not counterterrorism.
They were the terrorists.
The walls of running humanity closed in.
