Chapter Ten She Could Make a Killing as a Boxer
West
Paris, France
It’s been six years since I was last home, and I’m relieved that very little has changed.
The Eiffel Tower is still towering. The Champs-élysées is still as song-worthy as ever.
Notre-Dame has been renovated and reopened to the public, as glorious and awe-inducing as it always was.
The skies are cloudy, sporadic moments of sunshine peeking through.
It’s nowhere near as romantic as the movies make it seem, but that’s probably because I was born and raised here.
I never had the luxury of rose-tinted glasses, though there’s something to be said about the city’s beautiful architecture and rich history.
I missed strolling alongside the Seine, the smell of fresh bread wafting from the boulangeries and the hard-to-miss tinge of cigarette smoke in the air.
We’re nine hours ahead of Vancouver. Adelina snores lightly beside me in the back of the taxi.
She conked out the moment she slid into her seat at the airport pickup.
Between traveling, jet lag and the fact that I didn’t catch Adelina rest a wink while on the plane, it’s no wonder she’s out cold.
She hugs her backpack close to her chest, defensive and prickly even in sleep.
It’s a shame she’s missing the view. We won’t have any time to spare for sightseeing once the rest of the crew arrives, not that this is exactly my idea of a vacation.
It takes us another thirty minutes to get to our hotel in the fourth arrondissement—one of twenty boroughs that make up the city—the traffic growing heavier and more congested the closer we draw to Paris’s core.
The taxi driver stops along the curb, and I pay him the handful of euros he’s due over his shoulder. Adelina doesn’t stir.
“Ms. Choi?” No response. She’s out like a light, so I try again. “Ms. Choi?”
It’s then that I pause, taking the opportunity to study her face.
She has a cute button nose, full lips, and lashes that don’t so much curl as they grow straight down and out.
There is a small mole just above her right eyebrow and a splash of faded freckles sprawled over her cheeks.
But what I find the most intriguing is the tiny tattoo just behind her ear.
A sunflower.
First the sticker on her laptop, and now this.
I feel a bit like a Victorian man catching a glimpse of ankle for the first time, utterly enthralled.
I’m starting to wonder if it’s her favorite flower, though she doesn’t strike me as the type of person to have a favorite anything.
More of a doom-and-gloom kind of gal. I can’t help but feel like I’m intruding on her secrets, glimpsing at facets of her life that I was never meant to see.
As I place a hand on her shoulder and give her a gentle shake, I notice the edge of her phone sticking out of her jacket pocket.
My heart thuds. The pictures she took of my passport…
She was smart to collect blackmail against me, but I really can’t afford to have that kind of ammunition pointed my way.
It puts me in a tough spot, but more importantly, it could put Jack in danger.
I don’t need the police sniffing around and digging up things from my past. For a moment, I consider swiping her phone and deleting everything she has on me, but Adelina’s bright.
She’ll notice sooner or later, and then she really will turn on me.
“Adelina,” I whisper, her name rolling off the tip of my tongue.
Her eyes flutter open—
And then she yelps and throws her fist, a purely instinctual reaction, her knuckles cracking against the bridge of my nose. I reel back with a grunt while she screams, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“What the hell was that for?” I groan, pinching my bloody nose. “I was trying to wake you up!”
“Si tu bousilles mes sièges, tu me payes le nettoyage!” the taxi driver snaps, exasperated. If you mess up my seats, you’re paying for the cleaning!
Great. Now we’re all yelling.
“You startled me!” she protests.
“What? Did you think I was going to kill you?”
“Yes!”
“You think I would endure a fourteen-hour flight seated next to your mouth-breathing just to kill you now?”
“Who are you calling a mouth-breather?!” she asks, incredulous.
“Sérieux, dégagez avant de foutre le bordel dans ma caisse,” cries the driver. Seriously, get out before you mess up my car.
Adelina and I rush out of the cab together, the cool morning air sticking to my skin. When we manage to make it to the front reception area, the man in a suit standing behind the counter looks understandably troubled.
“Oh, goodness!” he says when he notices the state of my poor nose. I really didn’t want to start this job off by making a scene, yet here we are. “Are you alright, sir? Let me get you some ice.”
I wave him off. “Just a little accident,” I tell him. “We’d like to check in. Reservation should be under my sister’s name, Natalya Petrova.”
It’s a fake name, of course. There’s no telling how far or deep Berruci’s network extends, so I’d rather proceed with caution. I don’t know if Diana has arrived yet, but she promised to take care of the arrangements by the time Adelina and I touched down.
The receptionist checks his computer. “Yes, it seems she’s already arrived. Your suite is on the top floor.”
Adelina appears at my elbow with a handful of napkins. She must have nabbed them from the continental breakfast tables set up on the other side of the lobby. When she offers them to me, I spot something close to guilt in her eyes.
That can’t be right. Adelina—the woman who pulled a cleaver on me without hesitation—feeling sorry? I think she’s given me a concussion.
We take the elevator up to the sixth floor, making our way toward the suite at the very end of the hall. It comes with four separate rooms, a spacious living room area and kitchenette, all the while boasting a charming view of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower poking out over the rooftops.
I take a seat on the loveseat and inspect my nose. Despite the wallop behind her fist, I don’t think it’s broken. “My beautiful face,” I groan.
Adelina moves swiftly, retreating to the bathroom only to return a few moments later with a damp hand towel. She sits beside me and shoos my hand away, inspecting the damage done. “You’ll live.”
I huff. “Would it kill you to say sorry?”
“I already apologized.”
“Actually, you didn’t.”
She blinks, her cheeks turning the lightest shade of pink. In all the mayhem, it’s entirely possible that it slipped her mind. Adelina looks almost…ashamed. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles, unable to hold my gaze. The earnestness in her tone catches me by surprise. “It was a gut reaction.”
Whatever snappy remark I had queued up withers in the back of my throat.
Honestly? I get it. She’s alone in a foreign country with a guy she hardly knows, working a job well outside her comfort zone.
A partnership built on mutually assured destruction isn’t exactly an ideal foundation for building trust. If I were in her shoes, I’d throw hands first and ask questions later too.
Hell, if some jerk kid at school ever gave Jack a hard time and disrespected her space, I’d be the first to give her the all-clear to reinforce her boundaries.
Ideally through words, of course, but sometimes a good knock on the head is the only way to get your point across.
“It’s alright,” I say gently. “I’m sorry I startled you.”
Adelina glances at me then with almost bashful surprise. It’s like watching a robot trying to decipher the sensation of forgiveness, or a stray determining whether the hand I’ve offered will be used to praise or scold.
Try as I might, I can’t seem to get a read on her.
She’s clearly intelligent, quick on her feet, cautious.
A good childhood, from what I’ve been able to glean off her twin sister’s public Instagram account, though social media can be deceiving.
Everyone knows that it’s all curated junk to show a person’s highlights and little else.
Curiosity simmers beneath the surface of my skin.
Even after all the work I did to track her down, Adelina is very much a mystery.
How did she go from studying at a prestigious school—no doubt with a bright future ahead of her—to this?
“I think the bleeding’s stopped,” she whispers.
“Oh, good. I was starting to feel faint.”
Adelina shakes her head, lingering. She smells faintly of flowers, though I can’t exactly put a name to what kind. She dabs at my nose with the towel, her touch surprisingly gentle.
I guess she isn’t a robot after all.
But then our eyes lock for the briefest moment, and this somehow signals to her that she needs to reboot her system, because she quickly rises and steps away. She takes in the suite. It’s opulent, bordering on ostentatious, what with its cream-white walls and gold-painted molding.
“Who exactly is paying for all of this?” she asks.
“That would be me,” comes a woman’s smoky voice.
A tall woman in her mid-thirties steps in from the front door, her severe gray power suit contrasting sharply against her dark-brown complexion. She wears a mischievous grin, her hazel eyes observing Adelina intensely.
I can’t help but chuckle. “Still with the dramatic entrances, I see.”
“Dramatic?” she huffs. “You’re the one coming back from the dead.”
“Ad—Qwerty, this is Diana Nadkarni. She’s the backer behind our operation.”