Page 6

"If we do succeed in flying you out of Moskra…”

It takes so much effort to stay still for some reason.

“You'll need to live in a secure and undisclosed location. You won't be completely safe from Konrad until he's behind bars or six feet under."

And equally hard is keeping my breath from catching as he stops right in front of me.

"You never told me your name."

"K-Karyna."

I don’t know why, but it scares me that he has to ask this. Like him knowing my name means life can never get back to normal⁠—

"It's time to make up your mind, Karyna."

All I can do now is stare, my mind dazed, and my heart just as dizzy from all the seesawing between optimism and despair. I really feel like I’m losing my mind with him making it sound like everything’s so insanely easy and simple as he goes on to ask⁠—

"Are you going to take your chances with me or not?"

Chapter 3

Not A Good Idea Either

Ican see it now.

When—yes, when, I'm still the optimistic type, so it's when, not if—when this is all over, and if (well, this part, I'm hoping it's an if) any of this becomes public, and Netflix still insists on turning my life into a biopic…

The old title won't work. Because the genre's changed. This time, I'm not dead, but I'm still a victim.

Karyna Francisco: The Girl Who Knows What Stockholm Syndrome Means But Pretends She Doesn't.

Because right now, I'm just feeling really…swoony.

I don't know if that word exists either, but since I've already started pretending, why not keep pretending?

So yeah, swoony.

As in, knees-about-to-buckle swoony, but it has nothing to do with what happened in the past few hours.

I mean, the way my now husband got me out of the hotel? It was like we were shooting for one of my favorite action movies. He had me hiding in a housekeeper's laundry cart, and after that, he had me whooshing down a laundry chute like it's a water park slide, and slipping out of a service exit like a spy before racing away in a bulletproof car like we're being chased by bad guys.

We weren’t, by the way.

I mean, Konrad and his men are bad guys, but thankfully, we really did give them the slip. I don’t think they’ll catch up to us anytime soon, and as for the official he told me about who could make us husband and wife? He already had the papers ready, and after signing on the dotted line, we were man and wife just like that, and…The End.

As in, that's how I ended up here, flying back to America in my own suite. Because my husband has his own jet. My husband, whose motive for potentially risking his life to rescue me is still unknown.

The suite is bigger than my old bedroom back home, which is a ridiculous thing to say about a room that's thousands of feet in the air. There's a bed with more pillows than any one person could need, a window full of nothing but night, and a low hum coming up through the floor that I can feel in the soles of my bare feet. My sneakers are still where I kicked them off by the door, one of them lying on its side, because I was too tired to care.

Too tired to sleep, too, apparently.

And yet…

Swoony.

That's how he makes me feel.

Every time I think about all the lengths he's gone to just to rescue me?