“Good.” He opens a drawer and takes out two passports and a slim folder. “Plane’s ready. We’re going to Fiji.”
“Fiji?”
“We’ll be at a private resort. Friendly police. Enough cameras to make tracking him on the island easy.”
“Will he come there?”
A simple nod is all I get. Not an apology—not that I need one. None of this is Roman’s fault. Nor do I getI’ll keep you safe forever and nothing bad will happen.
I appreciate that he doesn’t sugarcoat this for me. He doesn’t treat me like I’m fragile. It’s more respect than I’ve gotten from anyone I’ve dated.
We move through a service corridor that opens to a small underground garage. The car is plain and dark. The windows show a pinstripe of the world and nothing else. My chest wants to climb out of my ribs. I count streetlights to slow it down.
At the private terminal, light spills in strict lines across concrete. The plane waits with the stairs down. Marcus talks to the crew. Tanner checks a list. A man and a woman dressed like us step into a van and disappear toward the wrong gate to be seen by the right camera. Decoys, I imagine. I keep my face blank because someone could be watching from anywhere. It’s too open here, too exposed for my liking.
Hopefully, the decoys work.
I imagine walking into the tiny plane and facing Vitaly with nowhere to run or hide. My lungs don’t want to do their job. But I walk up the stairs anyway.
Inside, the cabin glows warm and quiet. My eyes take in the sights in flashes, still on the alert for our killer. Pale wood. Soft tan leather that doesn’t squeak. A blue runner of plush carpet on the aisle and between the seats. Water bottles lined up like soldiers. I touch the back of a seat because I need to touch something that will not move when the rest of this does.
No Vitaly in sight.
Roman speaks to the pilot and sits across from me. He buckles. I buckle. If I do what he does, I don’t have to think, and right now, thinking is doing me no favors.
He suggests, “Call your mother now. The line will go dark after takeoff.”
He pulls a small secure handset from the armrest and taps two buttons. My mother’s voice fills the small room. “Hi, honey. We’re just fine, almost there. They made me turn in my phone. The women are not chatty. They know what they’re doing.”
“Are the boys okay?”
“Dead to the world,” she says. I hear her swallow. “We’ll call on the house phone when they let me.”
“Okay. I love you.”
“Love you,” she says. The line drops. Roman tucks the handset back and looks out the window.
The plane moves, and I take a quick breath. I’m not a fan of flying. It’s not on my worst fears list, but it could be, depending on the day. And this plane is tiny. The runway lights scroll under us like stitches. I grip the armrests and try to relax my jaw. No success. The engines lift. The city tips backward and falls away.
I close my eyes and see the things I don’t want to see. A cup that almost touched his mouth. A body on a rug with a hat near the hand. I open my eyes before the images stick.
“Tell me about yourself, Mina,” Roman says.
“I hate this.” The words spill out. I can’t stop them—my heart is too wound up to stop now. “I hate that I’m leaving them. I hate being bait. I hate that your son is a hurricane we have to fly into on purpose. I hate that I quit my job on a landline like it was a bad affair. I liked that job.”
“You will have another when you want one. Or something you like better.”
“I don’t want better. I want normal. I want a printer that jams and a bus stop view and a clerk who knows me. I want to count calendar days until my next vacation that I know I lied to myself about getting, but I use it as inspiration to go to work anyway.”
He looks perturbed. I can’t tell if I hurt his feelings by rambling all of that at him, but he asked, and if he’s going to be honest with me, I’ll be honest with him. He clears his throat before saying, “You’ll have whatever you want when this is over.”
I almost believe him. But I’ve never had whatever I wanted before today, and I can’t picture that happening now or ever in my future. I also cannot stop rambling, because my pulse and my brain are conspiring against me. “I like you. I wish I didn’t. It would make this simpler.”
That earns a flicker of a smile at the corner of his lips. It’s hidden by a day’s worth of stubble, but I catch the ghost of that smile, and I wonder how handsome he’d be if he ever actually smiled fully. “It would be simpler, but I’ve never had simple a day in mylife, and from what little I know of you, neither have you. What would you do with a simple circumstance, Mina?”
I think my husband is flirting with me. But the question blanks my mind. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I’d do with a simple life. I got close to having one briefly…” I take a breath, trying to sort through the few thoughts I have. “But then your son showed up again, and now I’m here.”
The flight attendant appears long enough to set down water and vanish. The plane levels. The engine hum becomes a blanket I can live under for a while. I drink, and the world tastes less like metal.
