33. Ofelia #3
“Get the fuck out of my way, Mickey.” I wrench open the closet and pull some of Lourdes’s clothes from the hangers inside, throwing them on without any consideration for appearance, then race past my silent brother back onto the deck, where Lars ushers me down to the docking jetty, still barking orders into the phone.
“Jack’s men have eyes on him,” he says as he hands me into the boat. “Hang on,” he says to whoever is on the other end. Covering the receiver, he looks directly at me. “Be careful,” he says tersely. “This is bad. Really fucking bad, Ofelia. Do you understand?”
“Do I know how dangerous Alexei is when he’s hurt?
” My voice is shaking, but I can’t do anything to stop it.
“How he’ll do anything—including murdering someone right in front of me—to convince me that every vile word my brother just said is true?
Yes, Lars, I fucking get it. Now you need to get out of my way, before you find out exactly how dangerous I can be.
” I turn to the grim-faced dark-haired man at the controls. “You’re Jack Bellini, right?”
He gives me a curt nod.
“Well, Jack, we need to fucking go.” I tug the rope out of Lars’s hands and turn away from him, staring toward the distant coastline.
Jack pulls the accelerator, and we surge forward, bouncing across the waves.
I turn back as the yacht begins to shrink behind us. Benny and Lourdes are leaning over the railing, their faces taut and pale, yelling something I can’t hear.
Lars and Mickey, however, are nowhere to be seen.
“We’re bypassing the port authorities,” Jack yells over the wind as we race toward the shore.
“We can do that?” I look around, half expecting someone to stop us.
“We can.” He grins. “My family is one of the oldest on the island, and respectfully, every bit as dangerous as yours. Nobody will stop us.”
We reach the shore in minutes. Jack leaps onto the jetty and pulls me up behind him. He nods at several men discreetly stationed around us. “These men are part of my own team. I like to keep work and family separate.”
I give him a sideways look from behind my wide glasses and the scarf drawn over my head. “That’s an odd choice when you’re working on the island your family runs.”
“Contracted by Mak,” Jack says. “Which means it’s my shit show. Fortunately I get along with my cousin Luca a hell of a lot better than I do with my father, Enzo, back in New Orleans. And”—he gives me a conspiratorial wink—“this contract has the added advantage of severely pissing off said father.”
That almost makes me smile, despite everything.
“When it comes to pissing off fathers,” I say tightly, “I’m pretty hard to beat at the moment.
” My smile fades as we come out of the marina into a parking lot and a black sedan pulls up alongside the curb.
“Are you sure you know where he is?” I ask Jack as he opens the door.
He nods. “He’s on a motorbike,” he says. “We’ll follow him.”
“Stay well back,” I warn him. “Alexei will likely shoot first and ask questions later if he thinks he’s being followed.”
“Funny.” Jack gives me a dry smile. “Lars said exactly the same thing. You’d almost think I’ve never done this before.”
“Sorry.” I’m too worried to say it with any real sincerity. “But Alexei—well. He can be . . .” My voice trails off uncertainly.
He can be what, Ofelia?
A sadistic, murderous psychopath, as Mickey accused him of being?
Sometimes, certainly. He had to become those things, or he never would have survived the Orlovs. And when cornered, I don’t doubt he can become them again.
But behind the persona he was forced to assume there is also a man who never lost his compassion and honor, despite all he endured.
The man who loved me in silence to save me from himself.
“Unpredictable,” I say finally.
Jack glances at me. “It’s not my first rodeo, Ofelia,” he says quietly. “And Alexei and I have worked together before. He won’t just pull out a gun the moment he sees me.”
Let’s hope you’re right.
We move swiftly through the city streets close to the port, then turn up a coastal road that winds around the mountains until Palermo disappears behind us. I can still see The Singularity lying at anchor in the distance, a white square on the horizon.
“He’s just up ahead.” Jack glances at me. “I think I should approach him—”
“No.” I shake my head. “Pull over here and tell me where to find him.”
The sedan comes to a halt on a gravel patch beside a parked Ducati.
“He’s taken the hiking trail.” He nods at a narrow path, frowning. “I don’t think I should let you go up there alone—”
“Then feel free to follow me.” I’m already out the door, running up the trail.
It’s steep and rocky, but despite my flimsy sandals, wig, and way too many clothes, I race up it like a mountain goat.
By the time it finally opens out into a rocky headland surrounded by prickly pear, I’m breathing heavily.
I pause behind a large boulder to catch my breath.
Alexei is standing about thirty meters away, on the very edge of the escarpment, staring out toward The Singularity. His wig is gone, discarded along with his sunglasses and helmet on the ground beside him, the leather strap of his eye patch visible across the back of his head.
“You shouldn’t have followed me, Jack.” He speaks without turning around.
“It isn’t Jack.”
He spins to face me with terrifying swiftness, his expression the flat, hard mask I remember from the very first time I ever saw him, the night Masha and I were kidnapped. “I gave orders.” Even his voice has the same chilling calm as it did then.
“And you should know better than to think I’d obey them.”
One arctic blue eye scours the path behind me.
“Jack is here, along with his men.” I walk slowly across the headland until I’m standing a few paces from him. “I asked them to stay back.”
He doesn’t answer, just stands at the cliff edge with the same uncanny stillness I recall from the time I was imprisoned.
“I’m sorry you heard the things that Mickey said.” I’m surprised at how calm my voice is, given the erratic racing of my heart. “I’m sorry he said them at all—”
“They’re the truth.” He cuts me off abruptly, his mouth hardening. “You can’t be here, Ofelia.” When I don’t answer, his fists clench at his sides. “Go.”
For a moment I’m twenty-one again, standing back on the Granada patio the night of my party, reeling under the shock of his flat-voiced rejection: “Go. For Chrissakes, Ofelia. Fucking leave . . .”
“You told me to leave once before,” I say quietly, “and I made the mistake of listening to you. I won’t do that again, no matter what you say or do.”
Still he doesn’t speak. I want to move forward, to touch him, but some primal instinct warns me not to.
Instead, I hold up my hand, the ring he gave me sparkling in the sunlight.
“You told me this means forever.” I stare into his lone eye, trying to convey with every ounce of my soul how much I feel.
“Forever means we don’t walk away, Alexei.
Certainly not because of the idiotic things my brother said. ”
“We both know Mickey is no idiot.” The sun beams full on his face, highlighting every one of the crisscrossed scars, turning his lone eye to glittering arctic ice.
“And he was right, about all of it. You and I had both forgotten the world we come from. Marrying me does mean signing your own death warrant. And whether you want to see it or not, Ofelia, I am a sadistic, murderous psychopath.”
Reaching behind his head, he pulls off his eye patch, exposing the sunken hollow and twisted scar tissue to the merciless midday sun.
“I could have had this scar repaired long ago.” His voice is cold and hard.
“Inserted a prosthetic eye, had the scars on my face removed. But I’ve never lied to myself about what the Orlov blades made me become, Ofelia.
They cut away whatever man I might have been, and I carved what was left into what I needed to be to defeat them.
What did Mickey call me?” His silken smile might be sinister if I hadn’t learned to read him long ago.
“The Swamp Surgeon. There are many other names. The Biscayne Butcher is a more recent one—”
“I know all of this!” Afraid that he’ll misinterpret any attempt to touch him as pity, I remain still, my voice shaking with the emotion I can’t hold back any longer. “I’ve always known—”
“You think you know.” He cuts me off with flat precision.
“But knowing it and living with it are two different things. This isn’t about defeating one enemy and then living happily ever after.
There will always be someone coming after me, Ofelia.
” He passes a hand over his face, staring past me with that same look I saw in his eye when he was working late on the yacht the last few nights.
“There’s always going to be another body in that fucking swamp,” he says, almost as if he’s talking to himself, “trying to pull me down into the mud.”
“I don’t care if there are hundreds of bodies in the swamp.
” I move toward him, determined to find a way through whatever nightmare he is seeing behind that thousand-yard stare.
To reassure him that whatever he sees late at night when he stares into that void only makes me love him more for having endured it.
But whatever reassurance I might have offered is lost, cut off and swallowed by a weird, sucking sensation that momentarily steals the air from our clifftop.
Afterward, I’ll never recall what came first—the strange silence, the deafening boom, or the orange ball on the horizon.
What I will always remember is Alexei’s body hitting my own, the sun-warmed gravel hard beneath my back as he hurls himself atop me, covering me completely.
I understand in that moment what people mean when they say something happened in slow motion, just as I smell the acrid scent of smoke in my nose even though logic says that must be my imagination, since Lars’s yacht is too far out to sea for me to smell the explosion.