Page 68 of North

“Timea!” The name tore his throat raw. Salt water flooded his mouth. “Tim⁠—”

Something floated past—part of the deck bench where they’d sat moments ago. He lunged for it, gasping as broken ribs shifted. Found purchase. He tried to pull himself up, but his leg exploded with fresh pain.

“Please.” He didn’t know whom he begged. The sea? God? “Please.”

He got his other leg up, clung to the bench.

The second explosion nearly knocked him back into the water.

This time, something hard cracked against his skull. Darkness edged his vision. He tried to hold on to consciousness, on to her name, but darkness, smoke, pain pulled him down, down into the cold dark, where memory dissolved into nothing.

And all he could think was…Please, don’t let her be dead.

Beeping penetrated the darkness. Steady, mechanical. He swam in shadow, oxygen pouring into his lungs.

Timea.

He practically lunged forward, back to consciousness. Into the light. He opened his eyes and the pain hit in waves—his leg, suspended and weighted, spots of agony where pins jutted through skin. His chest, each breath filled with shattered glass. The left side of his head throbbed, bandages pulled tight against swollen flesh.

Hospital.

The sharp bite of antiseptic burned his nose. Scratchy sheets grazed burns he couldn’t see. He’d closed his eyes against the splash of pain, but forced his eyes open now, blinked against fluorescent lights that made his head spin.

White walls. Medical equipment crowded around his bed, shadows long in the late-afternoon light. A window looked out onto nothing—just gray sky and the edge of another building. Someone had left a cup of water.

Timea.

He tried to sit up, but again fire ripped through his chest, black spots dancing in his vision. “Tim—” His voice came out as a rasp, his throat raw from smoke or screaming or both. He lay back.

A nurse appeared. Young, dark-haired like his wife, but nothing else the same. Not her eyes, not her smile. Not her.

“You must lie still. Your ribs—” Her English emerged broken, with the hint of a Greek accent.

“My wife.” He grabbed for the nurse’s arm, but tubes and wires tangled around him, an IV pulling sharply against his hand. “The boat—there was a woman⁠—”

“Sir, you need to calm down.” She pressed him back against the pillows. “You’ve been unconscious for three days. The doctor will⁠—”

“I don’t care about the doctor! Where is my wife?”

The nurse’s face shifted. Pity, there and gone like a shadow. “I’ll get the doctor.”

“Don’t go!”

But her footsteps faded down the hall, past voices speaking rapid Greek.

Three days. Three days of Timea lost at sea.

“Alexander Steele.”

The voice froze his blood.

“Or should I say, Alan Martin?”

Damien Gustov stood in the doorway, elegant in a black suit. “Or perhaps…James Cooper?” The traitor had made something of himself, clearly. Probably pulling the trigger for his Bratva pals.

“Did you really think you could just—” Damien crossed to the window, looked out at the gray sky. A ferry horn sounded somewhere in the distance. “Disappear? Start a new life?” He turned, smiled. “A little house on Crete? How domestic of you.”

James didn’t know what to call himself, really, but his heart stopped. “You were watching us.”