In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(105)

She smiled as fear settled into her belly like lead.

“Congratulations, babe.” He grinned at her, eyes glittering with razor-sharp concentration. “This is special. Only with you.”

“Stop it, Sam. I’ll apologize later, I promise. On my knees.”

“Ah, now there’s a happy thought.” He spun around, just a carefree guy on vacation with his girlfriend. “If we live through the afternoon, you’ll spend a long time on your knees to make up for this.”

“Don’t be crude,” she snapped.

“Stop looking scared. At least pretend to look forward to your apology. Kiss me again. Grab my ass. Laugh. Act.”

“Stop jerking me around,” she hissed. “You’re pissing me off.”

“I get this way under stress,” he said. “I default to sex, my favorite coping mechanism. Could be worse, right? At least sex is life affirming.”

She snorted. “Right. So now what?”

“We f*ck off, fast. And once we’re someplace safe, and your long, yummy oral apology has calmed me down, I will kick my own ass for letting you talk me into this.”

She realized that she was clutching the rose so tightly, she’d snapped off the head of the flower. The red blossom hung limp and forlorn. The sight gave her a pang of premonitory dread. She put her finger under the bloom to hold it straight, which was when she felt the shred of paper wrapped around the stem.

She glanced down. Svetlana was written on it in Cyrillic.

She let the hand holding the flower drop. “Sam,” she said.

He hustled her swiftly along. “What is it, baby?”

“The flower the guy gave me? There’s a note on it. Wrapped around the stem, right under the blossom.”

He didn’t react or look at her. “Could it just be a piece of tape?”

“It has my name written on it.”

“Oh f*ck,” he hissed. “Don’t look at it til we’re in the car.”

Once in the car and speeding away, she unrolled the scrap. “Via Savoni 84, Torre Sant’ Orsola. It’s an address.” She typed it into her smartphone GPS. “A town about twenty kilometers from here.”

“Tell me you don’t want to go there now, Sveti,” he said.

She stared at him. “Of course I want to go there now! Why did you think we came here at all, Sam? For my health?”

“Yes! You saw the guy in the ice-cream shop! This address is probably just a more discreet place to shoot you in the head and stick you in a hole than the main shopping district of a tourist town!”

“Why would Misha go to the trouble? He had me in his clutches in Rome! If he’d wanted to shoot me, he could have done it then! Easily!”

“Yeah, I know! I remember every second of it, believe me.”

“He could have killed us, but he didn’t. He threw me a clue.” She craned her neck to look behind them. “No one appears to be following.”

“The look on the ice-cream guy’s face was enough reason not to go to the address on that note.”

Sveti held up the paper. “And the look on Misha’s face is enough reason to go. This is my only possible point of contact with Sasha.”

“Well, it’s burned now, babe.”

“My point exactly! If not now, then never!”

“You think Sasha will never be able to find you again? That’s stupid! You don’t hide, Sveti! You damn well should, but you don’t!”

“Sasha would only go to such insane lengths if he were scared to death. He’s trying to protect me with this cloak-and-dagger spy stuff.”

Sam flipped the turn signal on and jerked the car to a stop at the side of the road. He reached for Sveti’s phone. “Give me that thing.”

She handed it to him and waited as he stared at the digital map, eyes darting between it and the rearview mirror. Constantly monitoring.

“We should be taking this to the police,” he said.

“That won’t help Sasha,” she said.

“You’re so sure? How are you supposed to help, if they can’t?”

“He’ll tell me when he sees me,” Sveti said quietly.

Tires squealed as the car surged into movement again. “Yeah, baby, I just bet he will.”





It took a couple hours to get to Torre Sant’ Orsola by the route Sam took. He circled, backtracked, puttered around on back roads, even parked the car in the alley of a small town and dragged Sveti into a bar for a tense twenty minutes, while he stared at the street outside and gnawed a prosciutto sandwich. She was too tense to eat anything.

By the time they finally arrived at Torre Sant’ Orsola, he was as convinced as he would ever be that they had not been followed. It was insane to drive into this rendezvous with no idea what they would find. It was a peculiar sort of torture, to feel so responsible for her while at the same time having no veto power over her decisions. If he refused to play, she’d do whatever the f*ck she wanted, alone. She’d demonstrated that this morning. She never backed down. He’d have to restrain her physically to keep her from her suicidal bullshit. Nor could he distract her with sex. He’d tried, but it didn’t matter how many orgasms he brought forth. As soon as she caught her breath, boing, she bounced right back. Up and at ’em again. More pigheaded than before.