“I’m surprised you trust her with him. Oddly enough, I can’t find anything on the bodyguard. It’s like he doesn’t exist. Who is he?”
My heart is beating fast. Too fast. Rage is already fueling the adrenaline. In my mind, I’m already out of this underground parking lot. I’m already out of this fucking city, halfway to Paris. But she has eyes on me, the same eyes she had on the boy.
“You’re awfully quiet, Nazareth.”
My hand tightens on the karambit, Valeria’s blood already tainting my vision.
“It would be so easy, if you think about.” I imagine her sitting on her gold chair, champagne in hand, my fingers ripping out her stomach. “I can already see the Paris headlines. American tourist falls from balcony in the City of Love. Boyfriend, a known associate of organized crime, found dead. Tragic, really. They’ll say she was on something. That she jumped. Or that he pushed her before he ate his own gun.”
“Touch her,” I say, my voice a lethal wire, “and I won’t stop until I’ve carved you out of this world. You and every blood relative you didn’t already make me kill. I’ll go through your family tree with a red motherfucking pen.”
Silence.
Then—soft, almost fond, “There he is.”
The line goes dead.
18
SOPHIA
It starts, as most things with Ian do, with an argument.
“I'm sick of Paris,” he announces, standing in the kitchen in yesterday's clothes with the energy of a man who has already made a decision and is now informing the room of it.
“You love Paris.”
“I love Paris the way you love a dentist who's good at his job. Respectfully. From a distance. With the understanding that prolonged exposure is bad for everyone.” He pours coffee with the authority of someone who has rehearsed this. “We're going to Greece.”
“We're not going to Greece.”
“We are.”
“Ian—”
“Greece, Sophia. Actual sun.”
“We’ve got sun here in Paris,” I say pointing out the window. “See, blue skies.”
“I’d say it’s more of a gray with blue aspirations.”
“Ian—”
“I want blue. Real blue. And I want the kind of summer heat that's almost offensive.”
I snort.
He points at me with his mug. “We need the vitamin D. And you need to get out of this apartment for longer than a few hours.”
I glance around. At the kitchen counter where the muffins lived for eleven days before Ian threw them out while I was in the shower and pretended he hadn't. At the balcony where we've been eating dinner every night for weeks, watching Paris exist outside us like a film we've seen too many times.
“What if he comes?” I say.
Ian is quiet for a moment. “I don’t think?—”
“I need to be right here when he comes.”
“Sophia.” His voice is gentle in the way it gets only when he's about to say something true that I don't want to hear. “I know you miss him. But you need this even more than I do. It’ll be good for you. Trust me.”
