That’s why I’m here. That’s why Nikolai is coming to check on me like I’m cargo in transit. Because if anything happens to me before the deal closes, the whole thing falls apart.
Me:I’ve been here for two months doing exactly what he asked. What more does he want?
Nikolai:He wants to know you’re not going to make this difficult. This marriage is happening, Natalia. Be ready when he calls.
My thumbs hover. I type carefully, the way I do everything with Nikolai. Measured. Small. Don’t provoke.
Me:Got it.
Nikolai:I mean it. No attitude when I get there. I don’t have the patience.
I set the phone face-down on the mattress and curl onto my side, drawing my knees up. The tears come slow and silent. The practiced kind that don’t make noise, because noise draws attention and attention draws consequences.
My brother is coming. In two weeks, Nikolai will walk through that front door and fill this house with his particular brand of cruelty. And there is a stranger in my guest room who cannot be here when that happens.
Through the thin walls, I hear the kitchen faucet turn off. The creak of the guest room door. Then quiet, except for the ocean outside, relentless and indifferent.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and stare at the ceiling.
Two weeks.
4
JOHNNY
Here’swhat I know about myself so far: I like sarcasm, I can’t stop staring at the woman who pulled me off a beach, and one plate of stir fry has me ready to pass out like a goddamn toddler after Thanksgiving dinner.
Pathetic. Truly.
But it’s not really the exhaustion that’s bothering me.
It’s that moment at the sink. Natalia’s hand under mine, the glass between us, and every nerve in my body lit up like I’d grabbed a live wire. Three seconds, maybe. Then her phone buzzed, and whatever invisible wire had been pulling us together snapped, and she walked straight to her bedroom without looking back.
Goodnight, Johnny.
I wanted to follow her. Which is insane. I don’t know my own name and I’m ready to chase a woman down a hallway because she touched my hand over a wet glass?
It’s not just that she’s beautiful, even though she is—distractingly, annoyingly beautiful. It’s that being near her feels like remembering something. Like my brain is trying to hand me a file it can’t quite reach.
A breeze carries salt air through the cracked window, and the waves outside keep their steady rhythm, that endless drag of water on sand that makes your eyelids heavy whether you want them to or not. I’m out before I can finish the thought that maybe I should…
The gun goes off so close to my face that I feel the heat of it.
I’m upright in the bed before my eyes open, legs tangled in sheets, gasping like I just broke the surface of deep water. My skin is soaked. Not damp. Soaked, like someone dumped a glass of water over me while I slept.
The dream won’t let go.
I was fighting someone. A man, big, face smeared and indistinct like a photograph left in the rain. I was losing. My ribs screamed, my mouth tasted like copper, and every time I tried to stand, my legs buckled. Then another figure came in. This one felt different, and dream-me trusted him without a single second of doubt.
He hauled me up. I turned. And I put a bullet between the other man’s eyes.
I watched him fall. I watched himdie. And what crawls under my skin now, what’s making my hands shake and my teeth clench, isn’t that I killed someone in that dream.
It’s that I feltgoodabout it.
The room is doing something it shouldn’t be doing. The walls are breathing. The moonlight from the window is wrong, too bright, stretching shadows into shapes that don’t match the furniture. I know I’m in Natalia’s guest room. I know I’m in the Outer Banks. But my body is still back in that fight, muscles locked, fists tight, still running on the adrenaline of violence, and the disconnect betweenhereandtheremakes the room feel like it’s tilting under my feet.
Bathroom. I need the bathroom.
