Page 74 of Disguised as Love

“The Saint.” My lips twitched at the memory of the old Val Kilmer movie, and I was surprised when she knew what I was talking about, because she smiled back.

“Violet made me watch that movie a dozen times,” she said with a small shrug. She looked around the boathouse that was growing darker. “Seems sort of appropriate now.”

It brought back the danger hovering outside the walls for us and the fact that we were waiting for her family to show up, hoping they’d escaped as we had. I didn’t want her to dwell on it. I wanted her talking and smiling, so I found myself unraveling my past for her.

I explained how I’d toured with Mom for most of my younger years with Nan and Dad along with us. But once Dad was gone, Mom had sent me and Nan to live in Beverly Hills in a house we’d rarely lived in before so I could attend one of the best high schools in the country and have the stability she felt I was missing. I told Raisa how I’d turned down a chance to play football but did enjoy wrestling, and about my love of music in all forms, but how I loved classical music best. Right behind my love of the classics was my love of the blues and jazz that influenced my mother’s and grandmother’s careers.

The entire time, she just listened, soaking it in as if it was a fascinating television show. Once in a while, she asked a clarifying question, but mostly she simply watched as I talked. My voice grew scratchy from speaking more words all at once than I ever had, telling stories I never told. But she’d asked, and I could only give her what she wanted. The feelings I had for her were growing in my chest, and yet I still refused to name them. To label them. To call them what I feared they were.

The air had turned from chilly to downright cold, and the shadows had blended to almost black inside the room when I felt her begin shivering. I yanked her closer to me, wrapped the blankets tighter, and drifted into silence. Six o’clock came and went.

She shifted into me, hands growing tighter on the blanket, body tensing. Seven o’clock came and went, and my stomach tightened with fear as I took her hands into mine, massaging them, trying to get her to relax but knowing it was useless. I was strung as tight as she was.

When eight o’clock came and went, my stomach fell completely, but I also knew we had to move. If the others had been captured, they would give up our location. Manya wasn’t built to hold secrets. Ito-san would die before she’d breathe a word, but I didn’t know what Malik or Ilia were like when tested. It didn’t matter. We had to leave.

“We need to go,” I said quietly.

“What?” She turned to me with wide eyes. “No! They’re just having trouble getting here. Not everyone can steal a car.”

“I can guarantee both Ilia and Ito-san can with probably more ease than I did. Something’s happened, little one.”

Tears that she’d held back almost completely during this trying day emerged. I’d wiped a single one away in the car earlier, needing to keep her from breaking down, needing the fierce and fiery soul to stay at the surface. But now, the water spilled over the dam of her dark lashes.

“I can’t… I can’t leave them…” she breathed out. I brushed at the tears just as I had earlier.

“We’ll find them,” I said quietly. “But it isn’t safe to stay here.”

She shook her head again. “They wouldn’t tell anyone where we were meeting.”

“You’ve never been interrogated by the mafiya,” I said dryly. “Everyone talks at some point.”

“Would you?” she demanded, throwing the blankets aside, standing, and stomping her feet at me. And as much as I hated the accusation in her voice, I was happy to see the fire return.

“I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t. No one can,” I told her the harsh truth.

She huffed out her disbelief as I rose from the little cocoon we’d spent the last hours in.

“We can’t stay,” I told her again, and this time, I backed it with my hand on her arm, pulling her toward the exit.

I’d checked in with Nolan every hour as I’d promised, but he was still scrambling to get us an exfil. No one at the Bureau was happy I wanted to bring the Leskovs and Ito-san in with me. With nowhere else to go, the next best option was to take us to the safehouse we’d pilfered from the CIA. I had no desire to put Raisa in Damien’s proximity, but it was the only other place in the city I could count on being even semi-secure.

I looked out the small window at the front, making sure there wasn’t anyone waiting on the pier, and then slid the door open. We kept to the shadows and had just gotten back to the car when I noticed a group of men at the marina store?two in suits, the clerk, and a man all in black. They were talking while waving their hands, and the clerk was pointing in the direction I’d headed earlier, down the marina.

Raisa’s eyes followed mine, and she inhaled sharply.

I hot-wired the car again, flipped a U-turn, and drove away.

“It doesn’t mean anyone talked,” I said, countering my argument from moments before because I didn’t want her to think about what it might mean for her family. Torture. Pain. Death. “I told you the clerk was eyeing me pretty hard earlier. I don’t exactly blend in here.”

She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me.

“Can you direct me back toward the Peter and Paul Fortress?” I asked.

She nodded, pointing the way while tugging at her locket. Nervous energy. Fear.

As we got nearer to the island that held the cathedral and other museums, the streets grew more crowded. There were even more people here than had been on the embankment or waiting for the funeral procession earlier in the day, and this time, they were in masks and costumes from three hundred years ago.

“What the hell?” I asked.

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