Chapter Five
NATALIA
My phone rings at six forty-three in the morning, and I already know something’s wrong.
No one calls that early unless they’re panicking or apologizing… sometimes both.
I fumble for my phone on the nightstand, knocking over a half-empty glass of water in the process. I hear the moment the glass hits my notepad, and I can imagine the ink beginning to run. I send out a muffled curse as I fumble to grab my phone.
The caller says Randolph (Luka’s agent). The contact I input ahead of time, like Carey suggested.
Luka’s agent is calling me at the butt crack of dawn. That can’t be good.
"Hello?" I say, voice thick with sleep.
"Oh, good, you’re up. He’s gone, and you need to follow him."
The words hit before my brain fully comes online.
"What?" I sit up, rubbing my eyes. I look around and am reminded that I’m back in Seattle and sleeping in my childhood bedroom. "Who’s gone?"
"Popovich," he snaps. He sounds wired, like he’s already had three coffees this morning. "He boarded a flight to Switzerland this morning."
Switzerland.
I stare at the wall across from me as if it might blink back and tell me I misheard.
"He left for Switzerland with everything going on?" I say, confused as to how someone leaves for vacation when their career is on the line.
"I explicitly told him not to," Randolph says. "He was supposed to stay in town until we got ahead of this."
"Well," I say, pulse starting to thump, "clearly he didn’t get the memo."
"This isn’t funny, Natalia."
"I’m aware," I say. "I’m just trying to understand what you expect me to do about it."
"You’re going to follow him," Randolph says as if it’s the most obvious solution in the world.
I let out a sharp laugh. "I’m sorry… You expect me to do what?"
"I’m sending you the details now," he continues, like he hadn’t just upended my entire life before sunrise. "The resort name that he always books. He goes there every bye-week to get away and go skiing."
"Did you just say skiing? As in, skiing in the freezing cold snow?"
"What other kind is there?"
"I don’t know, the warm lake and sandy beach kind, for starters."
My phone buzzes with an incoming email before I’m even finished speaking.
"You’ll have him cornered there," he adds, ignoring my concern about the cold. "Or we cancel the deal."
The word ‘cancel’ makes my stomach turn. If Randolph cancels the deal, I’m out of a job in more ways than one.
"You can’t be serious," I say.
"I am. I don’t have time for you to wait for my client to make his way back to the States. Sponsors are calling me every day with concerns. New endorsement deals are drying up as we speak. Have you seen the gossip magazines lately or the post-game interview from yesterday?"
I don’t bother to tell him that I was there in the flesh and witnessed it. Or that his client told me off after I scared away his ‘entertainment for the night’. As he so eloquently put it.
"If you’re not willing to pursue him, I’ll have to find someone else, because he’s not going to fix it from a ski lift," Randolph says.
If he finds someone else to chase after Luka, that will mean that Carey wins, and I’m back out in the job market.
I swing my legs out of bed, feet hitting the carpet. My head is already calculating flight times, travel windows, and costs I can’t afford.
Good thing I thought to bring my passport when I flew out here.
I scroll through the emails. The place Luka travels to every year is a luxury alpine resort. The kind of resort that’s going to wipe out the rest of my credit cards if the flight alone doesn’t do it.
He doesn’t run like a man who fears consequences. He runs like a man who doesn't seem to care about them at all.
"I’ll go," I say before I can second-guess myself.
"Good," Randolph says, relief bleeding into his tone. "I’ll expect updates."
The call ends.
I sit there in the quiet for exactly ten seconds.
Ten seconds to breathe and pretend that I still have options. Then I stand up. I won’t let Luka’s little runaway stunt cost me my job. Now I know why Gabriella didn’t want to take him on and why Carey was so happy when I took it.
I pack every layer I have, but even I know that I didn’t pack for a Swiss Alps ski vacation.
Then I remind myself… I’m not going skiing. I’m not hiking glaciers. I’m walking into a resort bar, finding one arrogant hockey player, and dragging him back home, by the ear if I have to, so that I can get him out of this mess he got himself into.
I check my bank balance and wince. It’s enough to get there. Along with my credit cards, I’ll make it work, but just barely. The sooner I convince him to come home, the better it will be.
I’m not chasing him because I want to.
I’m chasing him because I have to.
The airport is in its usual state when I walk through the automatic doors, which is absolute chaos, babies crying, oversized luggage being carted around, and TSA yelling at the next passenger to move along.
"One ticket to Zurich," I tell the agent at the desk. "As soon as possible."
She types, frowns, and types again. "There’s one seat left on a flight leaving in an hour," she says.
"How much?"
She tells me the price and I don’t react. I just hand over my card before my brain can do the math.
The machine beeps—Approved, but my stomach drops anyway. This better work.
I jog to security, shoes half off, laptop out, shoving my bags into a grey bins with more force than necessary. I don’t breathe properly until I’m through the gate and walking down the gangway towards the airplane door. The stewardess smiles as I pass through the entrance.
I take my seat, wedged between two men at least six feet tall who have already claimed the armrests like territorial beasts. This twelve-hour flight is starting out splendidly already.
I flip open my laptop, reminding myself there’s one thing I haven’t looked up yet. If I have be on this flight for the next ten hours, I might as well get some research done. Thank God for inflight wifi.
I type in: Luka Popovich VELVT centerfold.
The second it loads, I make a small, involuntary squeak.
Holy shit. He has an eight-pack.
Not a six. Not even a respectable seven. An actual eight-pack, as if he were carved in a lab. Then I feel it. Movement over my shoulder and the feeling of being watched.
I glance sideways and catch the man to my right staring at my screen… then slowly at me… like I’m streaming porn at thirty thousand feet.
I snap the laptop shut so fast I nearly sprain a finger—my cheeks blaze.
"It’s for research," I sputter out, not making eye contact.
"Right…" he says, and then shifts his body away from me.
I exhale and drop my head back against the headrest, repeating the lie that keeps me moving.
Cab to resort. Resort to bar. Bar to bed. Then flights home, bringing back Luka like a warden and her prisoner. Only, I doubt he’d let me put him in handcuffs to keep him from running again.
We land hours later in a world that looks like it's been personally victimized by the apocalypse.
The snow isn't falling or drifting prettily like it would in a Hallmark movie. It's blowing hard like it's angry, committing assault on every building, vehicle, or inch of earth it can find. Thick white sheets slammed sideways into glass and metal like Mother Nature woke up and chose violence.
This is not Scottsdale-cold.
Or even Seattle-cold.
This is ‘end times’ cold. This is "question every life choice that led me here" cold. This is "no amount of wool or prayer or thermal underwear blessed by old man permafrost" could keep me warm enough to survive.
The departure board is lit up like a Christmas tree with blinking red lights. CANCELLED. CANCELLED. CANCELLED. Every outbound flight from now until forever.
The doors opened and the cold immediately punched me straight in the face.
My nose starts running instantly—not delicately, but like a faucet someone forgot to turn off.
I can't feel my fingers. Within seconds, I can't feel my face.
I'm convinced I'm going to die in an airport in Switzerland, and they won't even spell my name right on the plaque.
People around me groan, fumbling for jackets they hadn't packed. Unlike the snowboarders dressed like they're about to summit Everest in a Red Bull commercial, practically vibrating with death-wish energy as they treat this blizzard like a personal invitation to their own funeral.
They're reacting like it's Christmas morning, grinning, whooping, slapping each other's backs.
While I genuinely cannot feel my face. Not a single functioning brain cell among the entire group.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure I'm developing hypothermia in my cashmere coat that costs more than their collective IQ points.
This blizzard was not on the forecast. It was supposed to hit way higher in the mountains, but the storm changed course as if it had a personal vendetta against me specifically.
It looks less like weather and more like a declaration of war.
I call Molly as I try to move through the crowd. It’s 4pm here, so she should be just getting to work by now. She answers on the second ring. "If this is about the in-flight eight-pack incident, I don’t want to know."
I texted her as soon as I landed about the passenger next to me who wouldn’t make eye contact with me for the rest of the flight.
"It was research," I snap, dodging around a passenger who decided to stop dead in the middle of the walkway to check his phone… Honestly, what is wrong with people? "Listen. It was nice knowing you."
I heard her let out a sigh, the sound of her car door echoing as if she had just got to our office parking garage. "Oh good. We’re dying now?"
"This assignment is going to kill me. I’m standing in what can only be described as a frozen death spiral of atmospheric betrayal."
"You’re in Switzerland."
"I’m in an ice maker the size of a country."
She sighs. "Natalia."
"As my final will and testament, you may have the neon pink stress ball in my desk. The one shaped like a tiny dumbbell."