Our search is over.
I failed.
“Come inside.” Faina’s soft voice drags me from my turbulent thoughts and my chest squeezes.
“I’m fine.”
She appears at my side. “You’ll catch a cold and get sick and I’m not in the mood to nurse you or deal with your man-flu, so get the fuck inside.” Her tone remains gentle, but the apparent warmth from her body that radiates just from standing next to me highlights just how cold I’ve gotten while perched out on the balcony of our most recent motel.
The sky is darkening and a brisk March wind blows in off the nearby ocean. With Faina’s alluring warmth next to me, there’s nothing to stop the shiver that forces its way through my body and she clearly sees it by the way she clicks her tongue. She doesn’t say anything else, though. She just turns and heads back inside.
Now I’m aware of my chill so reluctantly, I follow.
Inside our small room, some takeout containers rest in the middle of the small circular table beside Faina’s new laptop and several feet of cable linking to multiple outlets around the room. Faina perches on the chair opposite the laptop and leans forward with a cup of coffee in hand.
“What could you possibly be looking at so intently?” I start gathering up the containers and tossing them into the nearby trash.
“Unlike you, I haven’t given up,” she replies shortly.
“I haven’t given up. I’m just realistic.”
She glances over the edge of the laptop. “There’s realistic and then there’s you, all doom and gloom.”
“What did you expect? I had the fucker right where I needed him and he just—” My throat closes and I throw chopsticks angrily into the trash. “I let him go.”
“Fuck off,” Faina sighs. “You didn’t let him go and that kind of thinking isn’t helpful.”
“You saw what happened.”
“Yeah, I saw the two of you fighting like animals and he used your leg against you. Unintentional, I’m sure, because he ran rather than going for the kill. Don’t you understand?” She leans up and tucks her hair behind her ear. “He ran. He didn’t kill you.”
“So?”
“Ohmygod,” she murmurs. “You’re so caught up in your grief and your anger that you’re not thinking.”
“Because I’m fucking useless, that’s why!” My voice raises a few octaves. “What use have I been to you other than dragging you down?”
“It wasn’t me who came up with the plan to kidnap Hawk and take him away. It wasn’t me who deduced the entire party was a way for him to kill everyone off. It wasn’t I who found the money being sent to Africa. And it wasn’t me who tracked all that money across Europe. Don’t you get that?” Faina leans forward slightly and rests one elbow on her knee with her cup dangling from her hand between her legs. “All I can do is fight. That’s it. I’m not the brains here, you are. All my tech is from Erik. So I makedo. And you should too. We’ve all got weaknesses, and feeling sorry for yourself because you were tortured so badly that your leg fucks up sometimes? You gotta accept that shit and focus on your strengths, otherwise you might as well have died back at the manor.”
Her words are sharp and harsh but they’re honest. Like the biting cold of a chill winter morning. Silence falls until her laptop makes a noise and steals her attention.
She’s right.
I hate that she’s right.
I was growing consumed by all the things I couldn’t do as well as I could before while missing all the things I’m still good at. Nudging the trash can with my foot, I take a deeper breath.
“I’m sorry.”
Faina glances up with a softer expression and nods. “Apology accepted.”
“So…” Walking closer, I hover near her shoulder. “What were you implying?”
She swivels in her seat and looks up at me. “Hawk ran, right? He didn’t try to kill you. So I think he either thinks the rest of the Gifford Clan are alive and are waiting in the wings, or he thinks you know something that’s a bigger danger to him and he went to take care of it.”
My brow tightens. “But I don’t know him. I didn’t even recognize him.”
“I know. There might be a connection between him and your family that’s set him on edge because he didn’t recognize youeither until I said your name. But the fact that you are alive worried him enough to flee instead of taking the shot, so I’m hoping we can use that to buy us some time. And in the meantime, while you two were fighting, I noticed he had a hawk tattoo on the side of his neck. But it was weird, it had a black swan in its beak. Weird but unique.”
