“She’s dead,” Matteo said.
I choked on air, like it was caught in my windpipe. “Oh my God.” The vision of Boris’s wolf chewing Ivan’s heart flashed in my memories, and I gagged.
“Not her heart,” Matteo said, knowing what I was thinking about.
“What then?” I whispered.
He hesitated, not wanting to tell me, but when I said,tell mein a firm and sane voice, he said, “Her face.”
“What the hell is going on?” Mom demanded to know.
“It’s a really long story, but Régine Nemours is…dead.”
“You’re safe then, bestie boo?”
I shook my head. “Régine has never worked alone. Her family is tied in with dangerous Russians.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Mom looked Matteo up and down, and her voice was expectant. I stared at my mom fora second, wondering why she was talking to Matteo like that, but I chalked it up to the entire situation.
“I’m going to get my wife and you home,” he said.
“Good.” She nodded, holding close to me. “Let’s go.”
Matteo glanced at her, then started talking to his men in Italian.
“What are they saying?” she asked me.
“I don’t understand all of it, but…it seems like they’re making a plan to get us out of here.”
“Speak English,” she snapped at Matteo.
“Mom,” I said gently. “Some of his men don’t speak English. Italian is all they know.”
It dawned on me then that I trusted these men with my life, but she’d just met them. She didn’t trust easily, not even when I was a kid.
Matteo was focused on the situation, but that didn’t mean he missed a word we said to each other. He pulled out his phone and made a call. He was talking to who I thought was Lev about the wolf. Sparse Russian was interspersed with English. A second or two later, he hung up.
“That’s Boris’s wolf,” I said. “In the car with…her.”
“Yeah, but it belonged to Wolf first, and Boris stole her from him,” Matteo said. He stared in the distance for a second. “Boris and Wolf have bad blood. A long time’s worth. But the air seems to be running in the car. The wolf will be fine until Lev and Wolf get here.”
“How far are they?” I asked, not even wanting to think about the wolf eating the rest of Régine. She, the wolf, poor thing, was going to get indigestion. That was so cruel and mean, but…the thought came into my head, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking it.
He shrugged. “Could be in the woods around us or back in Russia. But someone will be here.”
“That woman?” I rushed out. “The ice queen?”
He looked down at me and touched my chin. “Maybe. Whoever it is will deal with the wolf, but I’m concerned about what the car could be laced with.”
“You mean a bomb?”
“Yeah, explosives.”
Placido had walked off, and when he came back, he nodded to Matteo. It seemed like Matteo had him order the men to keep their distance from the car and the wolf.
“Stay behind me,” Matteo ordered. “Straight from here to the car.”
Matteo kept my hand in his, my other hand in mom’s too, and we made a beeline for the car, but before we could get there, an explosion made me fall and my eardrums ring. It felt like a boulder had fallen onto my chest when I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings.
