He said, “It sounds to me like after your father abandoned you, you replaced your father with his, and then formed an oedipal pair-bond with your biological aunt who just happened to be an organized crime boss because you thought she would love you and fill that gaping, sucking mother-wound of yours. Am I reading that right?”
The gasp and a moment of shocked-cold silence in the signal between their phones told Blaze he was correct, but he’d known that.
Logan’s voice ceased, and the background echo from the phone’s speaker dissipated.
Blaze looked at the phone screen to make sure Logan had hung up on him.Figured.
Sarah’s dark eyes flared wide as she stared at the phone. “I didn’t know that about his mom.”
“Me either, and I lived with him in a tiny dorm room for four years,” Blaze said.
Maybe he hadn’t really known Logan that well.
“Say, did you guys ever move away from the farm? Like, did you ever take an extended vacation or anything?”
Sarah squinted at him like he’d lost his mind. “Of course not. In case you haven’t been listening,I can’t leave the farm.”
“Because Logan mentioned several times when we were at school that he’d come back here during some summer break and found the farm abandoned. He said your neighbors didn’t even know where you’d gone.”
She rolled her eyes so hard that she must’ve seen the back of her skull.“No.If it was during the summer when the corn was growing and we had to monitor it all the time,absolutely not.Even in the winter, we’ve always had animals to care for. Plus, we had more livestock when my parents were alive. We never left the farm for longer than a few hours, and even then, our neighbors had our cell phone numbers.”
So, that had been a lie.
“Okay,” Blaze sighed, nodding. “Okay. Really, nothing’s changed. We knew Mary Varvara Bell would send hired killers here, and we knew it would be soon. It’s going to be soon. I need you to leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
He had to convince her. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay and milk HowNow and turn them out to pasture every day, and I’ll defend your farm. But I want you to go someplace safe.”
“This is myhome.I will stay and defendmy home.”
“It’s going to be different this time,” he told her. “Last time, they thought they were dealing with one naive farm girl, so they sent a few guys to the front door with handguns. This time, they’ll know they’re dealing with a retired Navy SEAL. Logan said they hired someone from the outside to hit this place.”
Her dark eyes were steady as she stared right at him. “Then why aren’t you leaving?”
“Because I won’t bug out unless you do. We’ll throw the cat in the car, and you can take HowNow and Charlie right back over to your neighbor in the trailer. We’ll hit the road after that.”
“We don’t have anywhere to go. We can’t just drive around the country for the rest of our lives.”
“Grab your birth certificate, and we’ll expedite a passport for you. We can be in Paris in a few days. Heck, I know a guy in British Intelligence who has a manor house on the outskirts of London. We’d have nation-state security there.”
“Didn’t a bratva kill that Russian spy guy in England twenty years ago?”
Blaze laughed at the ridiculousness of this conversation, a breathy huff that was a gruff imitation of other people’s laughs. “Damn, how does an Iowa farm girl even know things like that?”
She lifted a hand in an exaggerated shrug. “Dude,I read books.”
“Yeah, okay, but that was probably Russian intelligenceserviceswho murdered Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, and it was in 2006. And it was in a crowd in a small town, not on the secured estate of a high-level MI6 intelligence officer.”
Sarah squinted at him again, a dubious stare that was as frickin’ adorable as a suspicious hamster. “How do you know he’s a real spy for MI6 and not just faking it? A guy in my high school class told everybody that he worked for the CIA.”
Blaze shook his head. “We met on a military exercise where my Navy SEAL unit was conducting an operation with the SAS. He was the UK’s special forces’ intelligence liaison, and we realized we had mutual friends from boarding school. He’s the real deal.”
She frowned, a tiny line between her eyebrows. “I suppose that tracks.”
“We’d be safe there. We can leave right now.”
She shook her head.
