Lisette
“The Hotel Rêve is one of the few places in the city where you can still pay cash,” Nomar says as he leads me down the hall to a room on the fourth floor.
Blues and grays dominate the space with a double bed, extra pillows, and a view of the street through the thick velvet curtains.
“Sit,” he orders, then muscles the dresser in front of the door. “I need to check your head.”
“I am fine. How long has it been since you spoke to that man?”
Nomar checks his phone. “Twelve minutes.”
“Why are we here? We should be going to Barcelona. To get Mateen. It is only a few hours. What if Raziq sent men there too?”
I suck in a sharp breath when he meets my gaze.
“He did. Youknowmy son is in danger!Putain!How could you not tell me?” I can barely see through my tears. “If anything happens to him…”
“I needed to get you somewhere safe,” he says. His arms band tightly around me, his lips close to my ear. “If we don’t hear from Griff in the next half an hour, we’ll go. But Ford and Austin have connections I don’t. The kind that get you places on private planes. We could be in Barcelona in ninety minutes.”
Ninety minutes. Not four hours. Ninety minutes. I stop fighting him, and suddenly, everything hurts. My head. My shoulder. My hip. “Promise me,” I whisper. “In thirty minutes, we will go.”
“I can’t do that, sweetheart. I don’t know a damn thing for sure right now. But in thirty minutes, we’ll have a plan. Please trust me. This is what I do. What I’ve always done.”
It feels so good to be held. To have strong arms around me, his voice in my ear. I cannot trust him with my heart. Not now. Maybe not ever. But I trusted him to save our lives once before. I can do it again.
“Okay.”
Nomar leads me to the sofa and eases me down next to him. “I need to check you for a concussion.” He pulls a small flashlight from his duffel bag and flicks it on. “Look straight ahead for me.”
The beam is unbearably bright as he sweeps it from the outer corner of each eye inward.
“How much does it hurt? Scale of one to ten?”
“Three—merde!”The pain increases tenfold when Nomar probes the swelling. “Stop.” My heart pounds, and I jerk away from his touch. “My head is not important. I need to call Amelie.”
With a nod, Nomar pulls a canvas pouch from his bag and sets a phone, a black metal disc, and two cables on the low table in front of us. “Give me your mobile.”
The screen lights up at my touch, and Mateen’s smiling face peers back at me from under the hundreds of cracks in the glass. “You can retrieve my photos? They are all I have…” Hot tears spill down my cheeks. If anything happens to my son—if Faruk’s brother gets to him—will I survive it?
“I can get to everything.”
Less than three minutes later, a small piece of my world rights when I hold the new phone in my hand.
“Call Amelie. I’ll try Griff again.”
Endless seconds pass, our phones ringing in stereo. With each one, my panic grows. Voicemail.
“Amelie? Please call me back. Mateen…he might be in danger. I will try Laurent next, but…” The last shred of my control shatters. Sobs wrack my body. The room is nothing but a shimmering haze of gray.
Nomar tries to ease the phone from my hand, but I jerk back. “Do not touch me!”
“Fuck!” He stalks over to the window as I swipe at my cheeks. “Lisette, if I could go back to that day in Boston, I would. In a heartbeat. But you have to know…EverythingI’ve done in the past two years has been to—”
His phone buzzes on the table, and he snatches it up. “Griff? Where the hell have you been?” he demands. “Mateen—”
“They took him. Shit. Stop! I’m private security—”
The line goes dead. A wail comes from somewhere deep inside, my heart shattering into a million jagged pieces. My son. My whole world.
