Chapter 20
ROMAN
The resort is on lockdown within five minutes of Vitaly’s attack. Doors close. Radios chirp. Managers make speeches. Guests stare at their phones and order drinks. Staff tape off areas and say this is for your safety. None of that secures anything.
It’s security theater, like the TSA at the airport making travelers pointlessly take off their shoes.
But if you are the reason for the lockdown, you use the confusion to leave.
My job is to get Mina off the island alive. That is the only outcome that matters now. I will not engage Vitaly with her present. I will not look for revenge. I turn off everything that is not the job.
Tanner is down on the boardwalk near the palm line. Marcus is down on the service path behind the spa. No sirens. No medics. This place is designed to make problems vanish with towels, free drinks, and apologies in the form of spa vouchers. They don’t know what they’re dealing with.
As we breeze past resort security, I hear the men on the walkies give instructions. The resort has sealed the guest pier. When we dart past, guards in polo shirts and shorts stand there and try to look like they matter.
As if Vitaly couldn’t get past them with nothing but a paper clip.
I stage the bungalow for absence. Curtains half-open. Two cups on the rail. Sandals where they can be seen. Burner phones on the table. The scene reads casual and lazy to anyone who looks from the boardwalk. It will buy us minutes of confusion when Vitaly comes here to wait for us.
Mina nibbles her bottom lip, looking around like she wants to help.
“Keep your hands free,” I tell her. “If I say drop, you drop. If I say left, you go left. No questions. Just like at the wedding. Understood?”
“Understood,” she says. Her voice is level. Her eyes are clear. Good.
“Follow me.” We leave the bungalow for options.
Best exit is water. It’s harder to track than footprints or tire tracks in the sand.
No planes on the island—no place for a runway.
No helicopters either. I looked when we arrived.
There’s a service skiff, the dive tender, or a bright orange lifeboat.
The skiff is fast and simple. The tender is loud and draws eyes. The lifeboat is obvious and locked.
The skiff it is.
We leave through the maintenance building.
A housekeeper glances up and sees robes and then looks down.
Robes at a resort are the best disguise—staff assume that either you know where you’re going or you’re lost, and either way, they’d rather be too busy to deal with you.
At the back door I push the latch, let it creak, and hold it.
We move through bleach and steam to daylight.
The skiff sits with the battery switch off and the kill cord wound tight. I pull the cowling and run eyes and fingers once. Fuel line. Primer bulb. Coil. Throttle head. No extra tape. No fresh bolts with wrong heads. No wire that runs where wire should not run.
No bombs on board.
“Step in and sit low.”
She does so without hesitation. “Can I help?”
“Just stay low.” The outboard coughs and catches when I tell it to. I coil the stern line and drop it clean. I shake the bow line loose and we slide free.
No kayaks in our lane, no paddleboards. They prefer the smoother water of the other side of the island. I stay inside the lee of the reef until we clear the ring and the white anchored boat.
That boat had my men on it. There should be two standing there.
No one stands there now. Only a red smear against the white edge, as if someone’s bloody hand grabbed it and failed.
I do not stop to count ghosts.
Mina keeps one hand flat on the gunwale and her eyes on the horizon. She’s low in the boat, just like I told her. He’d never get a shot off at her like this. Only me, standing at the helm. But there’s no one out around this side of the island, and the main island is ahead.
It looks like a clear shot to our destination, and that makes me wary.
“Why can’t he leave us alone?” she shouts to be heard over the wind.
“Pride.”
I watch her shoulders lift and drop, like she’s sighing. She knows why he’ll never leave us alone. She’s frustrated, so she’s asking questions she knows the answers to. I understand the feeling all too well.
Shockingly, we reach the main island marina without incident. This means he truly is doing this alone. I’m insulted that he thinks he can kill me on his own, but considering the havoc he has wreaked so far, he’s not wrong.
I slide past the big boats and into the staff channel, where it’s easier to maneuver. Diesel drums sit on the dock. A barge needs paint. Two men in vests look at us, then at the water, then at a clipboard. We climb onto the dock and run to where I told the driver to be.
He’s there, leaning on the hood like he has been checking the time. He throws me a towel. I wipe once and drop it on the engine cover. “Tail.”
He nods once and opens the rear door. Mina gets in and slides across. I sit behind the driver. We peel out.
I call the plane at the last bend around the south end of the main island. “Bomb sweep in progress,” the captain says. He knows I will do my own sweep.
I pay my people well to keep them honest, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t pay them off. It was the captain’s job to stay with the plane the whole time we were away. If he stepped away for so much as taking a piss, something could have happened.
I send Mina up first with the captain. I watch how the floor flexes under her feet. A device on a rail sings wrong. Nothing to worry about here. I check and recheck anything that seems too good to be true. I find nothing.
There comes a moment in every escape where you have to trust that things will go right.
It comes after you’ve done everything you reasonably can to ensure that fact.
I could spend an hour checking out the plane, but instead, I check the easiest spots to sabotage.
We don’t have the time for a thorough check, which means I have to trust that my check is enough.
When it comes to protecting Mina, nothing feels like enough.
If there is a bomb on this plane, I did not earn survival today. I climb the stairs and nod. The captain hits the switch. The door thumps. The seal sets. The cabin goes quiet.
Mina buckles in across from me. She watches my face and not the runway. She looks for tremors. I give her none. She gives me none back. I know my calmness helps her stay that way. “Everything looked okay?”
I nod firmly. “We’re as safe as we’re going to be.” It’s a low bar to cross, but we crossed it.
Her head bobs, and she finally looks out the window. The tension in her neck fades by a degree, and that’s all I can ask for.
The crew runs the checklist in a tone I can believe. No stumbles. No repeats. The engines spool. The floor carries a low vibration. The air tastes like hot metal and then like nothing when the engine powers back down.
Captain gets on the speaker. “The tower wants to hold us for traffic. Going to plan D.”
“Understood.” I reach beneath my seat and pull out a neck brace in case we’re boarded.
“Plan D?” Mina asks. “What happened to A through C?”
“A was nothing happening. B was a Vitaly sighting with no action taken, meaning watchful waiting, with a chance of activity. C…you don’t want to know what C was.” I wrap the neck brace around my neck and wait to hear the conversation.
The captain turns on the speakers, so he knows I’m listening. He tells the tower the right words about a medical need and a deteriorating situation. A minute later, we get expedited clearance.
No need for the neck brace, so I tug the Velcro apart and tuck it away. “Thankfully, plan D went without a hitch.”
Mina shakes her head in disbelief and chuckles. “You really do think of everything, don’t you? How many plans were there?”
“A through double F.”
She almost smiles at that, but after everything that happened today, smiles are a rare commodity.
At three thousand feet the islands become a smear of green and sand against a blue background. Guests will post stories that do not match. Security will write a report that avoids names. The manager will issue credits and lose sleep. My men will stay dead.
I do not look at Mina when that thought lands. If I look, heat will flood the places I need cold. She is in danger, and the thought chokes me if I let it. Falling for her is fast and hard. That is almost as dangerous as a bullet.
I turn that off. Staying focused is the only option.
I unbuckle and walk nose to tail one more time. The ritual keeps me sane. I listen for new buzzes in the cabinets. I look at crew faces. No darting eyes. No sweat that does not fit.
I stop at Mina’s seat. “Drink some water.”
“I’m fine.”
“For me.”
Rolling her eyes, she breaks the seal on a bottle and drinks. “Happy?”
“I won’t be until this is over, but I’m glad you’re drinking water.”
“You should too, you know.”
She’s right about that, so I force some down. “This will be a short hop to another island for fuel, then we continue on.”
“Understood,” she says. She closes her eyes for two breaths and then watches the window again. “It all looks so peaceful from a distance.”
“Most things do.” I didn’t let myself think their names when I saw the boat empty and bloodied. I swallow down more water first. “Marcus and Tanner are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Vitaly got them.”
She takes a breath, and her face goes pale. “Did you see them?”
“I saw enough to know.”
Mina’s eyes fall onto my hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Believe it or don’t, the next steps are the same. Get some sleep on this flight, because you’re unlikely to get much in the near future.”
“Sleep?” She laughs once. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Probably. All the same, sleep.” I close my eyes and let the dead sit across from me for a beat. Tanner with the loud shirts. Marcus who turned himself into a door when rooms needed one. The knot around their names tightens.
Vitaly killed two men he’s known his whole life. Three, if I count Fyodor.
That takes a special kind of brokenness. The kind that cannot be fixed. I’ve always known Vitaly wasn’t right in the head. Even as a baby, he didn’t cry like normal. Mostly, he stared, like he was trying to see into your soul. Always observing, always thinking. Calculating.
With Bridgette taking him under her wing, the kid stood no chance of being a normal person. Maybe none of us did, considering my own upbringing. But it’s hard not to wonder what went wrong with him. How I could have done better by him. Why he came out the way he did.
Those questions don’t matter right now. The only thing that matters now is solutions. I will not allow Yuri and Alexander to end up like Vitaly. I will protect them from him and the rest of the world. I will keep their mother safe. And I will love all of them with everything I have to give.
But love doesn’t matter now either. If I let myself think of things in terms of love and family, I’ll lose my nerve to do what needs to be done.