6. Eva #2
Leon is already disarming the Gatto Boss, shoving him onto his knees. I look down into his terrified face.
I look down into his terrified face, and for a moment I’m struck by how ordinary he appears. Just a middle-aged man with thinning hair and sweat stains spreading across his shirt.
I don’t even remember his name. After all this—the death of my father, the attempts on my life, the kidnapping of the woman I love—this man who orchestrated it all is so unremarkable that his first name never stuck in my memory.
“Please,” he gasps, his voice high and reedy with panic. “Ms. Novak, please. I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. I can rectify this—I can make it right.”
His hands are shaking as he holds them up in supplication. “The girl—she’s unharmed. Completely unharmed. I can have her brought out right now, and we can forget this whole thing happened.”
I tilt my head, studying him. “Will you raise my father from the dead, too?”
“What?” He gives a silly, scared giggle.
“You cannot rectify your mistakes,” I tell him calmly. “They are too many and too terrible. You killed my father. You tried to kill me —twice. And you took someone I love and used her as bait.”
“Wait, I?—”
I raise my gun, pressing the barrel against his forehead. His eyes go wide, pupils dilated with terror. “So here I am, Gatto. I have taken the bait.”
“I can be useful to you, I swear to God!”
“I don’t want you to be useful,” I tell him. “I want you to be dead.”
The gunshot echoes off the concrete walls, and what’s left of the nameless Gatto Boss crumples to the ground.
It’s over. Four bodies. Four last obstacles between me and the woman I love, removed.
I feel sick as Leon approaches the door. What if we’re too late? What if she’s?—
The lock yields to a sharp kick from Leon’s boot. The door swings open with a rusty groan.
And there she is.
Robin sits zip-tied to a metal chair in the center of the room, her strawberry blonde hair limp and sweat-soaked. Her clothes are torn and dirty, her face shadowed with a bruise on one side. But her eyes—those beautiful blue eyes—find mine.
She’s alive. She’s breathing. She’s?—
“ Robin .” Her name tears from my throat. I run over and drop to my knees in front of her chair, my hands trembling as they frame her face. “Are you alright?” The words come out rougher than I intend, scraped raw by fear and desperation.
“Eva,” she breathes, and her voice breaks something inside me that I didn’t know was still whole. “You came. You actually came.”
“Of course I came,” I tell her, stroking her hair back from her face with fingers that won’t stop shaking. “How could you think I wouldn’t?”
Leon moves efficiently behind her, using his knife to slice through the zip ties. The plastic restraints fall away, and Robin’s hands immediately reach for mine, clutching with desperate strength.
“Are you hurt? Did they?—”
“I’m okay,” she whispers, her voice hoarse but steady. “Eva, I’m okay.”
The relief nearly destroys me. I want to crush her against my chest, to kiss every inch of her face, to carry her away from this nightmare. But we’re not safe yet.
“We need to move,” I tell her, helping her stand on unsteady legs. “Leon, check the hallway.”
As soon as Leon leaves the room, Robin grabs my arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “Eva, wait—listen to me. I heard them talking. One of the guards—he was speaking in the dialect from your village.”
I stop dead. “Which guard?”
“I don’t know. But he was on the phone with someone, talking. I recognized the language. I think—I think there’s a traitor in your organization. It could be anyone. It could be Leon .”
I stare at her, wondering if she is really as well as she claims to be. She’s been traumatized, after all?—
“You need to believe me,” she insists. “I’m telling you, Eva—I know what I heard.”
“I believe you,” I tell her, because that’s what she needs to hear. I take her hand and lead her out, but she stops dead when she sees the bodies on the floor. She stares at one in particular, the man I shot between the eyes.
“I told him he’d never see another sunrise,” she whispers.
“And he did not.” I squeeze her hand. “You are alive. That’s all that matters.” I pull her forward, but she resists once more.
“Wait.” She reaches out with her other hand, a shaking, pointing finger. “Him. See?”
I glance at the other corpse she’s pointing at now, and do a double take. He does look familiar…Yes. I do recognize him now. It’s the man from my village—the one Leon discovered had been skimming money meant for the school repairs. The one we’d dismissed as a petty thief.
What on earth is he doing here? And how long has he been feeding information to the Gattos? How many of my secrets has he sold?
“We need to go,” Leon says urgently, returning to us. “Now.”
“Look,” I say, pointing at the man from our village. Leon gives an impatient look that turns into a stare.
“May the devil take him,” he growls at last.
“Check his phone,” I say. “See who he was talking to.”
But Leon, when he fishes out the phone from the man’s breast pocket, makes a face. It’s in fragments, dripping with blood. “I’ll take it anyway,” he sighs. “We might be able to recover something.”
I doubt it, but I’m more concerned about Robin right now. I wrap my arm around her waist, supporting her weight as we move toward the exit. Her body is warm and solid against mine—proof that she’s real, that she’s safe, that I haven’t lost the only good thing in my life.
But questions burn in my mind. Who else is working with our enemies? How deep does this conspiracy go?