“When is Alessio coming?” she asks.
A bang from the door makes me jump, and Miro picks up his gun.
“What was that?” Val asks.
“Stay on the line just in case I need backup,” he says.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Just stay on the line, Val.”
Miro points his pistol at the door. “Go open the door before he breaks it.”
“Who are you talking to?” Val sounds fearful now.
The crack that comes with the next bang makes me want to pee my pants. Really.
“Get the fucking door!” Miro shouts.
I rush to the door, my body shaking all over. I open the door, and Alessio barges inside.
His normally crisp white shirt flaps over his pants, and it’s open, showing half his torso. With disheveled hair and rapidly moving gaze searching my body, he looks wild. “You’re fine.” He presses me against his chest and holds me there, kisses the top of my head. “Nothing is going to happen to you. Nothing at all. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Oh, but he will when he finds out I cooperated with his enemies.
Alessio goes stills. “What the hell is this?”
I don’t think he’s talking to me.
Alessio tucks me behind him. “You point a gun at me, you better shoot or start explaining.”
Definitely not me. I turn my head toward the exit behind me. Alessio kicked in the door, and it’s not closing correctly, so a line of light from the hallway outside penetrates the dark hallway.
“Alessio,” Miro says. “We have a breach.”
“You working behind my back?” Alessio asks, his voice low and terrifying. “After all I did for you and the mess you made in Venice, you come back and take my governess.”
I wonder how many people heard Alessio break into the room and if they’ll come to investigate. There are three dead bodies in here. Oh my God, I’m a witness to a crime, a….a…conspiracy, a crisis of potentially nuclear proportions. I can’t be involved in this.I want to go home.
“She’s not your governess,” Miro says. “She’s a mole.”
Alessio charges at Miro.
I scream, and for the first time in my life, I take flight instead of freezing in place. I run as fast as my feet will carry me. Down the hallway, past a pair of security guards who are running in the opposite direction, likely toward Alessio and Miro.
At the elevator, I slam my palm repeatedly over the elevator pad as if that’ll make the lift come faster. The five seconds I wait feel like an eternity, and when I can’t stand the wait anymore, I sprint toward the end of the hallway. I burst through the exit doors, setting off the fire alarm. It blares through the hotel, and now I’m freaking the fuck out, hyperventilating as I descend five flights of stairs to the ground floor.
Panic must make me a great runner, because I blast out of the stairwell onto the square and take off like a bullet, gunning toward the US embassy, which, because I thought this might happen, I already know is about a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel. At this pace, I can make it there in under ten minutes.
The heavy pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk forces me to slow down. I don’t want to hurt anyone if I run into them. Still, I bump shoulders with lots of people and even hear a woman shout at me in French. I’m rushing and apologizing profusely, and I try to watch where I’m going, but my vision is blurred, and I’m pretty sure I’d pass out from pure terror if I slowed down now.
So I keep moving.
I need to cross the street, and I do it, but realize too late and somewhere in the middle of a wide, busy Parisian street that I should’ve waited for the pedestrian signal. The cars zip past me, honking. The buses too. Other modes of transport in the city. Everyone honks. Everyone screams at me.
I freeze.
“Lake!” I hear someone shout my name and turn. There’s a man. White shirt. Black pants. My vision is a blur, but I can see he’s running toward me. “Lake, get back here!”
