I originally intended to give her thirty seconds to compose herself. I figured she’d go find a quiet space in a corner to breathe and reassemble her war paint.
But somehow, before I even reached thirty, I lost her.
And then, suddenly, there she is.
Problem is,someone else is after her.
I’m seeing in panes of color now. Her midnight blue dress slips into the darkness. A black block framed in white follows close behind.
I only see the back of the man on her tail, but it’s enough. Broad-shouldered, salt-and-pepper hair, the gait of a man who’s been told no perhaps twice in his life and didn’t enjoy the experience either time…
That must be the senator.
In the back room of Café Volna a few days ago, I floated my pet theory to Afon over glasses of tea:What if Raymond isn’t the head, but the face?What if the legitimate-looking American with the law firm and the Patek and the country-club wife is the front, and the man calling the shots is someone higher up? For instance, what if it’s someone with a Senate pin and a security detail?
Afon shut me down.It does not matter,he said.
Well, it fucking matters now.
Because I just watched Cass walk down a dim hallway, and I saw Senator Josiah DeMaris walk after her.
I don’t run. Running clears a path through a crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, and the last thing I want is three hundred wedding guests turning their phone cameras on me.
Instead, I walk. Fast, but smooth. I set my whiskey down on a passing tray without looking.
I know I’m leaving Raymond behind, and fuck, maybe I’m destroying the entire plan. This was supposed to bethe night,but I’m abandoning my post because the only thing that matters more than my freedom…
… ishers.
I glide past the pillars and into the corridor.
It’s badly lit in here. The powder room door is on the left, closed. The telephone alcove is on the right, curtain drawn. The corridor ahead doglegs once, and dumps into a service hallway that leads to the kitchens and the loading dock—the same loading dock I picked to host Raymond’s last breaths.
I’m about to charge down to the exit. But before I get that far, I hear noises.
A scuffle. A heel on carpet. A grunt.
I turn and rip open the curtain hiding the alcove. “How dare you touch her, motherfucker?”
I reach in and drag themudakout of the shadowy corner by the back of his collars before he can even get a word in edgewise. He flies into the wall so easily. He leaves behind a bloodstained crack when he crumples to the ground.
I cock back one foot to deliver a swift blow to the bastard’s’ skull?—
—and then I hear, “… Matvei?”
It’s a woman’s voice, small and afraid.Cass’svoice, specifically.
But it’s not coming from the alcove.
I look back to see Cass emerging from the powder room behind me. She has one hand flat over her belly and the other over her mouth. Her eyes wide and wet and very, very alive.
The man groaning at my feet…
… is a very confused and increasingly angry United States Senator.
I look over my shoulder. In the alcove out of which I just dragged DeMaris, there’s no victim. There never wasone. There’s only a half-empty highball glass that the senator must have parked there when he ducked in to do whatever a drunk man in a tuxedo ducks into alcoves to do. Take a piss, probably. Ride out a wave of nausea.
Not abduct my pregnant girlfriend.
