28. Ofelia
Ofelia
The tunnel is pitch-black and extremely slippery.
Going by the smell, I’m almost grateful for the darkness, particularly when something wet and sleek brushes past my leg.
I bite down on my yelp of surprise and continue feeling my way along the damp walls with my shoulder, splashing through the shallow water.
I tread carefully, listening for any sound of pursuit, but the farther I go into the tunnel, the more silent it becomes.
I lose track of my progress quickly in the darkness.
One of my sandals broke during our run from the car, and the other comes apart soon after I start walking.
I kick it off and continue barefoot, trying to ignore the sharp edges of debris among the mud and slime.
I start counting my footsteps as some kind of measure, partly to give myself a sense of control and partly to block out the hideous mental pictures of Teresa and Julia lying dead in a ditch somewhere.
My fault.
I have the same dull sense of guilt that I did many years ago, when I watched my father’s men die to rescue Masha and me from the Orlovs. Only this is somehow worse.
I chose Teresa and Julia. I took them to Alexei’s yacht. I made them a part of this secret—and now they’re both dead because of it.
At least Seline should be safe.
Ivan said he didn’t have a gun, and he’s hardly going to kill Seline with his bare hands while the police are watching.
I try not to think about what will happen to her if the police are on Ivan’s payroll. Thinking that far ahead will drive me crazy.
I don’t blame Seline. Maybe, at the beginning, I was a job to her; if I look back now at our first meeting at a college party, I can see that she made a particular effort to befriend me.
But it’s clear that since then she’s done all she can, including lying at great danger to herself, to protect me.
And after hearing the way Ivan spoke to her, I have a fairly good idea of the kind of pressure she’s been under.
“Your mother’s hospital bills in Atlanta,” he said, “paid in full . . .”
I think of the stark horror on Seline’s face as he spoke, and also of how bravely defiant she was, even in the face of such a heinous threat. I wonder how long they’ve used her mother’s health to hold her hostage.
As I stumble through the darkness, I think back to the day she read cards for me at my house in Granada. The way her expression became oddly introspective, as if she saw something she didn’t want to explain.
She must have known that she was the betrayal in the cards. That’s why she was so concerned about my security and where Teresa was. She could see what was coming.
It’s why Deda Sergei’s remarks upset her so much.
I round a corner and feel a surge of excitement at the dim light falling across the ankle-deep water. It’s coming from my right—south. I wade toward it, then pause to check for anyone following me. But I can’t hear anything other than rushing water and the distant sound of traffic overhead.
I turn into the new tunnel and wait again. When there’s no sound, I grope around with my back to the wall, until finally I find what I’m looking for—a sharp edge in the corner. I scrape the zip tie back and forth over it until finally the plastic snaps.
The relief of blood rushing back into my hands is profound, not to mention the bliss of finally having more balance. I turn down the tunnel with renewed optimism, able to walk much faster now that I can touch the walls on either side to brace myself.
What do I know about what just happened? I think as I walk down the new tunnel.
One: I know that some Russians by the name of Novikov are chasing Alexei.
Two: I know that they targeted me in the hope that I would lead them to him.
The question is why they targeted me in the first place.
No, I realize. That isn’t really the question. The truth is that I was just low-hanging fruit, as the saying goes. They probably didn’t expect to get anything of any use from Seline when they first convinced her to befriend me.
But then I went ahead and told her everything, I think miserably. During our very first reading.
It was only weeks after my twenty-first birthday, and despite my best intentions to forget him, I was an utter mess.
Alone in a new city, with no friends and nobody to confide in.
I’d gotten so desperate I almost called Zinaida Melikov.
But the thought of crying to one of my father’s closest friends about the same teenage obsession she’d witnessed years before was too humiliating for words.
I talked a little to Benny and Lourdes, but they’d already offered the same advice too many times: Forget Pirate Boy, Ofelia, and move the fuck on.
So when I found a tarot reader who seemed not only completely underwhelmed by my unusual family and my wealth, but who showed an almost clinically detached interest in my fixation on Alexei Petrovsky, the relief I felt was akin to someone releasing a pressure valve: I opened my mouth, and the entire story just came tumbling right out.
Nobody needed to target me, I think despairingly. I put the target on my own fucking back.
I have no idea if I’m going the right way.
The dim light I’d followed earlier came from a narrow gap in the concrete on the roof, too high for me to reach and too small to be of any real use.
Once I pass it the inky darkness envelops me, so complete it makes no difference if I have my eyes open or closed.
The tunnel hasn’t curved left or right, so I have to assume it’s still leading south.
But I’ve no clue how far I’ve come, nor where I might be now.
And I still don’t know if anyone is following me.
What if I’m going the wrong way?
Fear seizes me with cold, stealthy fingers.
What if there’s more of them, and they know I’m down here?
I halt, suddenly horribly unsure of what to do. Water drips around me, the hollow sound oddly sinister in the dim silence, somehow even more disturbing than the stench of mud or the odd creature brushing past my leg.
Look at me.
I hear Alexei’s voice as if I’m back in the Orlovs’ cell and he’s leaning over me, his blue eye gleaming with arctic fire, a blazing light in the darkness of that place.
Trust me, Ofelia.
I feel the cold thrill of his blade against my skin and remember the strange certainty that, despite the pain, somehow he’s going to keep me safe.
Walk.
This time the voice is mine, coming from somewhere deep inside me.
I picture Alexei’s scarred, hard face, the fierce light in his eye when he looks at me, and move slowly forward.
When I get out of here, I think with an almost savage certainty, I’m coming to you.
Ironically, in the thick black silence, that thought is starkly clear.
I’m not spending one more day of my life adrift, waiting for someone to decide my future for me.
I take a step, then another, walking toward the future I’ve continually allowed other people to determine, and as I walk, I stop thinking about the fetid water and darkness and start thinking about what I’m walking toward.
I have no idea how long I walk like that for. But eventually my fingers find a metal railing.
I grope along it and realize it’s a ladder. I pause for a while, wondering if it’s safer to just stay here in the darkness or try to climb it.
If they make Seline talk, she’ll tell them you’re down here.
That prospect is enough to galvanize me.
I hang off the ladder, testing it with my weight. When it seems solid enough, I pull myself up onto it and climb. At the top, I feel around on the curved roof and find a workman’s hatch. It takes a few heavy shoves to dislodge it. I raise one edge of the round grate cautiously and peek beneath it.
I find myself staring at a rather grimy back alley and the window of a bakery closed for siesta.
I lower the grate and lift the other edge. There are a few shuttered shops nearby, but at midafternoon, the alley is deserted.
I push open the hatch and pull myself out, then kick it back into place. I walk to the end of the alley and peer around the corner along a busy road I recognize. In the distance is a café I recognize from tutoring one of my students in Zaidín. It’s about three kilometers past the bridge.
I know where I am.
From memory, the airbase Alexei mentioned should be no more than six or seven kilometers away.
I see a dirty cap discarded in one of the doorways. Tucking my hair under it, I put my head down, turn away from the busy main road into the smaller back alleys, and start walking.
An hour and a half later, I reach the white gatehouse at the entrance to the airfield.
I linger by a parked car nearby, unsure whether it’s safe to approach the gate openly or not.
That’s not the only reason I linger.
Where are you going, Ofelia?
I’ve passed at least four working phone boxes since I started walking. I could have used any of them to place a collect call to my father for help.
But I didn’t.
And now that I’m here, I know I should ask Alexei’s contact to fly me to Papa’s finca.
It’s the safe thing to do. The smart thing to do. For all I know, the Novikovs are still tailing me, just waiting for me to lead them to Alexei.
Except I’m sure they aren’t. The most dangerous thing I’ve seen since I left those tunnels is my own filthy reflection in shop windows. I stopped at a fountain soon after to wash the worst of the mud off.
The truth is that right up until now, I’ve been so focused on getting to safety, I haven’t stopped to think about what I’m going to tell my family. Now, just the thought of those conversations feels even heavier than the darkness in the tunnels.
Flying home covered in mud, having recently escaped Russian bratva soldiers, who kidnapped me to lure Alexei out of hiding, is a scenario designed to send my father stratospheric.
Any explanation I offer will be moot. Whatever slim chance Alexei and I might have had to gain his approval would be instantly shot to hell before it even breathed.
And there’s no lie I could tell that my father would believe. Not after this.
Going to the finca means confessing the whole. The secret week we spent on Alexei’s yacht, my years of yearning.
The fact that all of this began back in that cell, with me naked beneath Alexei’s knife.
Going to the finca now means Papa locking me away like Rapunzel in her tower and my family shunning Alexei as the worst kind of man.
And just like that, I know I can’t do it.
I won’t do it.
I’ve spent long enough alone and obsessive. We both have.
Whatever the future brings, I don’t want to face it alone. And I don’t want Alexei to, either.
But I also can’t fuck this up.
Taking a deep breath, I walk up to the gatehouse window. A guard in military uniform looks me up and down skeptically.
“Red 24,” I say, feeling vaguely ridiculous.
The guard’s eyes widen. “Code,” he says abruptly.
“0701.”
He picks up the phone and hits a number, still staring at me. “I have package 0701 at the gate,” he says. “Yes. Yes, I understand.” He hits a button, and the gate rises.
He comes out of the gatehouse with his weapon up, then ushers me through, looking warily at the street behind me. “Is anyone following you?”
“I don’t think so.” Suddenly, from inside the airbase come a half a dozen men racing toward me, all with weapons drawn.
Oh, God.
Terrified that I’ve miscalculated, I back away, my hands up.
“You’re safe with us,” one of them says as they surround me. “My name is David.” He gives me a tight smile. “Your friend on the water told us to expect you.” He looks behind me. “Is it just you? We were told there might be three women.”
“No.” To my horror, the word is almost a sob. “No, my security guards are both dead. At least, I think they are. It’s just me.”
He gives me a sharp look, then places one hand briefly on my shoulder. “Okay.” He pulls out a heavy-looking telephone. “I have the package,” he murmurs, leading me toward a waiting vehicle. Behind us a wall of men guard our retreat, weapons pointed out over the gate from every approach point.
I feel a slow, heavy sense of relief start to creep over me.
“Wait,” David says into the phone. “I’ll ask.” He turns to me. “Where am I taking you?”
And just like that, I know exactly what I’m going to say.
“My friend said you’d know where to find him.” I meet David’s eyes. “Take me to him. But first, we need to be absolutely certain that nobody is following us.”