Chapter 19
MINA
My mother answers on the second ring. I hear clinking cups and a small voice in the background, then the hush of a door closing.
“We’re fine,” she says before I ask. “We ate. We walked. They napped like champions. No visitors. The only wild animal was a squirrel with an attitude.”
My shoulders relax before I do. “Thank you.”
“You have nothing to worry about. Your husband thought of everything. The women here move like a chessboard. I tried to sneak into the kitchen to wash a bottle and three of them beat me to the sink and handed me tea, while another washed the bottle for me. Go enjoy your day.”
“You swear?”
“I swear,” she says. “If anything changes I will call. If nothing changes I’ll still call, because you’re you, and you won’t stop worrying unless I call you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Look, I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through.
When I had you, I was worried about everything from germy strangers trying to hold you to whether your dad thought to start the washer, since we were going through so much laundry.
I had normal stuff to worry about.” She pauses and when she speaks again, her voice cracks a little.
“What’s happening now…this is so far out of my experience that I’m just doing my best to keep up with it all.
Thankfully, the women here are more experienced in this bullshit, and they know what to look out for.
They’re letting me deal with the boys, while they handle everything else for me.
Honestly, I’m feeling kind of…pampered here. ”
I snort a laugh. “Then why do you sound upset about it?”
“I’ve never been pampered, Mina. It’s weird, and I’m not sure how to process any of it.”
“Ah.” Her words hit too hard. “Yeah, it’s damn strange here too, as far as that goes. We’re at a resort—”
“Don’t tell me where. You know the rules.”
“I know, I know. But I get what you mean. The people here do everything for us. Hot food shows up in our room. Clean towels too. Everything is clean, and I didn’t have to do any of it myself. It’s like that at Roman’s house too, and—”
“You’re married to him, Mina.”
My brow lines at that. “So?”
“It’s your house too, now.”
That thought takes the breath right out of me. Something in my brain breaks a little bit. “Well…not really.”
“Yes, really. Didn’t you read all the paperwork? If something happens to Roman, the house and his money, it’s all yours. Well, yours and the boys’.”
“You know something? I’m trying to make all of that fit inside my head, and it won’t.”
She giggles. “It feels too soon to me too.”
“No, I mean, none of that feels real yet. I keep expecting to wake up and all of this is some elaborate prank.”
“An elaborate murder prank? That might be the worst kind of prank.”
I roll my eyes at my mother from thousands of miles away. “Your comedic timing is flawless, as always. Maybe you could joke about my potential murder a little less?”
“If I don’t joke, I’ll start screaming, and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop. You might be married, but you’re still my baby.”
Something wedges inside my chest that has nothing to do with murder. “I miss you, Mom.”
“Go be with your husband. This might be a sham marriage, but you’re still on your honeymoon.”
“A murder honeymoon.”
“Oh, so you can make jokes, and I can’t?”
“Yes, that’s the rule.”
I hear the smile in her voice. “Alright, newlywed, go be married, and I’ll go be a pampered grandmother, and we’ll see which one of us makes it to the end of the week.”
“Love you too, Mom.”
I hang up and press my phone face down on the vanity. The suite smells like salt and clean linen. Roman waits by the door with two white robes over his arm and the relaxed posture he uses when he wants me to relax. He doesn’t push. He offers a hand. I take it.
I don’t let myself think about the dark reality of what Mom and I talked about. According to Roman, today is for relaxation only. I’m not sure I’m capable of that, but I’m going to try, for his sake.
The path to the spa walks along a strip of sand and a fringe of palms. The lagoon is flat enough to be sky. Farther down the boardwalk, a fisherman lifts a line and lets it fall. Roman’s security is present if you know where to look.
A man who loves birds. Another who loves his phone. Fake tourists, real bodyguards.
The resort is all so normal I don’t know what to think of it. But I should stop thinking and enjoy the quiet moments we have. It’s just hard to do that when I know someone out there wants me dead, and he’s good at getting what he wants.
Inside the spa, air cools my skin and the light goes soft. A woman at the desk greets us by name and asks if we prefer silence or music. We pick music. We choose coconut oil—it smells like my favorite kind of cake. He signs the intake forms, and we follow two therapists down a peaceful hall.
The couple’s room is intimate, with candles and lowered lights. Two tables. Two baskets for clothes. Two glasses of water that sweat into round coasters. They tell us to undress and lie face down under the sheet. They step out. The door closes with a hush.
My robe falls away. My body remembers the weight of the last year and wants to keep holding it. I tell it to let go for one hour. I slide onto the table and fit my face into the cradle. The sheet is heavy in a way that makes me trust it.
Roman lies on the table beside me. His fingers reach under the sheet and find mine for a second, just a press that says he’s here with me. “It is no crime to relax, Mina.”
“I know. It just feels like one.”
“Take deep breaths and let your mind wander like you did with the sharks.”
He’s right. I know he is. So, I heed his advice, and my chest loosens. I breathe. The music keeps time with the fan. The therapists re-enter and the first long stroke down my back unhooks my shoulders from my ears.
I am as relaxed as I can imagine right now. I think that, and then I realize what sits under the thought, steady and bright. I am falling for my husband. It feels dangerous in a new way. It also feels like a choice I have been walking toward since the night I met him at Rope.
The therapist asks if the pressure is good. It is. Roman’s therapist works in silence except for a quiet instruction about breath. His inhale matches mine for a while. I am aware of his presence the way you feel the sun through a window. Not touching. Warming everything anyway.
Somewhere in the building a door bangs, and my body jolts. Then another. Voices move fast and low. The therapists pause. They look at each other. The one at my table says, “One minute,” and steps out. The other follows. The door hushes closed.
Roman is off the table before I lift my head. “Dress now. Robe over your clothes.” No panic. No noise. He is already moving into his pants.
“What is it?” I whisper, and I’m already on my feet. My hands shake, but they do what they have to do. Underwear. Bra. Dress. My fingers find the zipper the second time. Robe. He puts his on too.
He crosses to the wall that shares a corner with the adjoining room. It’s painted the same pale blue as the rest and holds a framed print of a leaf. He pulls the print down and thumps the plaster with his knuckles. He thumps again lower, listening. “Hollow.”
Male voices grind far away. My stomach goes ice-cold. “It’s him.”
“Yes,” Roman says. He does not look at me.
He takes one step back and kicks. The plaster bursts, and white dust blooms and flakes down on the table.
He kicks again, lower and to the side, opening a square big enough for a shoulder.
He reaches in and grabs the crosspiece, then yanks until it snaps. He’s made a hole.
“We’re going through that, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“One second.” I stuff two pillows under the sheet on my table where my hips were and roll a towel into a head.
I pull the sheet smooth so the shape reads as a sleeping body at a glance.
I throw his sheet over the second set of pillows on his massage table.
From the door, with adrenaline in your eyes, it will look like us.
The hallway explodes with a shout. A chair skids. I hear a voice I know down to the last vowel. Vitaly curses in Russian, fast and vicious, then switches to English for an insult that feels like a slap even through a wall. Roman’s jaw tightens. He tips his head toward the hole. I go first.
The plaster scrapes my shoulders. I get a mouthful of dust and try not to cough. My foot finds the baseboard on the other side. Another couple’s room, but with no one in it.
Roman follows. He is bigger, but he moves like a man who has broken through walls before. He pulls the sheet off one table and stuffs it into the hole on this side, then adds a second sheet until the break looks like a careless laundry pile against the baseboard.
We hold our breath and hear the outer door to our original room slam. Two shots crack. They are close enough to make my ears ring. I flinch. Roman’s hand finds the back of my neck and holds there. One second. Two.
Vitaly curses when he realizes his mistake. He shot our pillows, not us. How disappointing for him. There’s a thunk like his fist meeting the wall.
We do not move. Roman tilts his head, counting the distance between footsteps.
Vitaly stomps further into the room, then back to the hall.
Shouts rise near the front desk. A cart hits a doorframe.
Someone runs. Two more voices argue about direction.
One says “kitchen” and the other says “villa” and both are wrong.
Roman waits for the one word he wants. He gets it when someone says “front” with certainty.
He touches my elbow and points to the service door at the back of this room. It is painted to disappear. It has the little square of plastic you push with a thumb. He doesn’t touch it yet. He watches the light and shadows at the bottom.
My heart tries to climb into my mouth.
Roman pushes the square. The door opens into a narrow service corridor that smells like bleach and citrus. A stack of folded robes sits on a rolling cart. A hamper waits under a chute. A green exit sign throws a weak glow at the far end. Somewhere beyond, a generator hums.
“Go,” he whispers.
We walk at first because running sounds like an announcement.
The floor is tile and not kind to sandals.
My steps click. I yank them off for silent steps.
Roman moves like air. Halfway down, we hear a woman trying to be brave, the front desk hero who did not sign up for any of this.
The woman says sir and please and then nothing.
Roman’s jaw tightens. He does not break the plan to save a stranger he cannot reach without getting us killed too.
Roman moves. I move. We take the last ten steps fast. The back exit is for deliveries, one no one uses. He checks the latch and opens it with his body turned so I can slip through first.
Heat and daylight hit my face like a hand. The service yard is a rectangle of concrete and stacked crates. The generator sits behind a slotted screen letting out a steady growl that makes it hard to hear anyone coming.
We move to the side of the building, and the side gate sticks. Swollen wood and salt. He sets his shoulder to it, and the wood squeaks against wood, and opens to a narrow path that threads between a hedge and a row of storage sheds.
We run then because there is no one here to hear us. The path drops to a service lane that meets the beach farther down. I can see the pale line of the water through the gap. Our target.
I look back once because I am human. Roman’s hand closes on mine and pulls me forward. “Come on!”
We take the lane to a gate that opens onto a stand of palms. The light changes under their fronds. The world smells like sun on bark and wet sand. In another story, in another hour, I would ask him to stop here and forget the rest of the island exists. In this one, we move.
“Left,” he says, so soft I feel it more than hear it.
We angle toward a maintenance path that skirts the back of the bungalows.
The planks of the boardwalk show through the leaves.
I can see the path to our door, but it’s a target—of course we’d go back to our bungalow where our things are. Vitaly would know that.
Roman squeezes my fingers once and lifts two of his own, a signal to someone I cannot see. The hedge rustles. A shape moves.
We push through into sun and salt and a strip of sand. The world looks the same as it did an hour ago. People drink from hollowed fruit. A child drags a shovel. A woman in a hat argues with a cloud.
They don’t know that a massacre just happened. Not yet.
Roman does not break stride. We cut behind a line of palms and reenter the maintenance path that heads to the bungalows. Our door waits at the end. He unlocks it with a hand that does not shake.
“Won’t he come here, looking for us?”
“Yes. That’s why we hurry. Grab anything important.” He produces a gun from beneath the mattress. I guess he followed his own advice.