Folk stroked my cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. “Always.”
27
FOLK
We were too late for our original plan. Alexei tried not to hold it against me, I could tell. But he failed, and as our operation stretched into more dark and cold days than I’d mentally prepared for, his bad mood became mine.
“It is going to rain,” he said for no reason whatsoever.
I spun the satellite phone on my knee. “Then we’ll get wet.”
“Why are you staring at that phone? It is not going to ring. The soldier will not appear from it like a genie from a lamp.”
“You’re using Disney references to make fun of me now?”
Alexei grumbled and flopped back on the boat seat, turning his grouchy face to the cloudy sky above us. “I am not making fun of you. I do not want to be here either, and watching you stare at a phone that will not ring is fucking annoying me.”
“Annoyingyou?” I tossed the phone onto the deck. “There. Happy?”
“Ecstatic. Can you tell?”
Alexei lit a cigarette. The smell made me want to push him overboard, but I didn’t get to do that until tonight. Until the Sambini trawler came within range of Alexei’s radar blocker and we could finish this game once and for all.
If it goes right.And there were no guarantees it would. None at all, especially now we were forty miles further east than we wanted to be and the weather was about to drop a bomb of its own.
They might not come.Our targets. For their weekly offshore meeting. And even if they did and we executed our plan without getting slotted in the process, we’d be running from a storm all the way home.
Home.A deep ache flared in my heart. I rubbed my chest the same way Alexei had been doing since he’d woken from a nap that had left him in a worse mood than ever. It had been more than a decade since I’d truly had one—a home, not a nap, though it was starting to feel that way. But living with Decoy and Ivy had rooted me in ways I hadn’t seen coming. I loved them, and whatever happened tonight, I needed to find my way back to them.
“I am sorry,” Alexei muttered after a while. “That man deserves a soul as fierce as yours to love him.”
It started to rain, wind from the west rocking the boat. “He deserves better than me.”
A faint smile warmed Alexei’s ice-cold face. “You are cruel to yourself, Veles. I did not think of you and Decoy together, but it is more perfect than anything my bitter heart could imagine.”
“Your heart isn’t bitter.”
“It feels that way today.”
Alexei was still staring at the sky, letting the rain pelt him. He got like this sometimes—bleakly chatty. It made a change from efficient silence, but with my own sore heart, his melancholy was hard to take. Also, it was dangerous. We had a couple of hours before the dive of our lives. We needed fuel and rest. Weneededto shut the world out and forget what we’d left behind.
“I have never left him alone.”
I rummaged in the bag at my feet for carbs and sugar. “Who?”
“Saint. Since the fire, always with Cam.”
I didn’t want to think about that fire. I’d had three nightmares on this boat already, and I couldn’t decode the messages. Either it was Rocco’s morbid way of cheering us on, or he was warning me that the ominous clench in my belly was something real.
Or maybe you’re just messed up. Not everything has a deeper meaning.“He’ll be fine,” I belatedly answered Alexei. “Cam’s back soon.”
Alexei sat up and accepted his pre-guerrilla-warfare snack. Two bananas, and a granola bar I already knew he’d hide under his seat.
“Eat it. You’ll need the energy later.”
“Then I willeat itlater.”
He ate the bananas.
