17. Sloane
SLOANE
I wake slowly, with the uncomfortable sense that I’m somewhere I don’t belong, and for several seconds I stare at the ornate ceiling above me while my brain tries to assemble the previous night into something that feels remotely plausible.
The private jet, Vadim, Hale, the attack on the tarmac, the hospital, the hotel, the tracker, and then Vadim looking at me like I might have been sent to get him killed.
It all comes back in an ugly rush, followed by the memory of exactly how close we came to having sex before everything went spectacularly wrong.
I groan and turn onto my side, reaching automatically toward the bedside table for my phone, because if I have to relive the entire disaster, I at least want to know what time it is.
My hand closes over empty wood.
I frown, blink the sleep from my eyes, and reach again as though the phone might somehow materialize if I’m persistent enough.
It doesn’t.
There’s a lamp, a half-empty bottle of water, the charging cable I remember plugging in, and absolutely no sign of my phone.
I sit up.
For a few seconds, I tell myself I must have left it somewhere else in the room, so I check beneath the pillow, then the sheets, then the chair beside the bed, even though I distinctly remember placing it on the bedside table before I fell asleep.
By the time I crouch to look beneath the bed, annoyance has already begun turning into anger.
There are not many explanations available.
I’m in Vadim Chernovar’s hotel suite, where practically everyone who comes through the door works for him, and my phone disappeared sometime after I went to sleep.
I know exactly who I’m blaming.
I grab the hotel robe, pull it around myself, tie the belt tightly enough to make a point, and head for the bedroom door with several increasingly creative insults already forming in my head.
The moment I step into the sitting room, I start talking. “If stealing my phone is your idea of what comes after almost having sex with someone, I should probably warn you that—”
The rest dies in my throat.
Vadim is not alone.
Marek is sitting at the dining table with a cup of coffee in one hand, looking far too awake for this hour, while Anton stands near the windows with a tablet and the grim expression of a man who has probably already been working for several hours.
Both of them turn toward me. Then, very predictably, their eyes move to the robe.
I tighten it around myself.
Marek’s mouth twitches.
Anton has the decency to look away.
Vadim does not.
He’s sitting at the head of the table in dark trousers and a black shirt, one hand resting beside a cup of coffee, and he looks irritatingly composed considering the fact that less than a few hours ago he was naked on a balcony accusing me of espionage while still hard enough to make the conversation deeply confusing.
His gaze stays on me for a second longer than necessary before he says, “Good morning.”
I stare at him. “Where is my phone?”
He picks up his coffee as though I have asked whether it’s raining outside. “Sit down and eat.”
The calmness of the answer irritates me more than outright refusal would have.
“I’m not hungry, and that was not what I asked.”
“There is breakfast.”
“I can see that.”
The table is covered with enough food to feed everyone on the floor, including eggs, fruit, bread, smoked salmon, pastries, yogurt, coffee, and at least three covered dishes I can’t identify from where I’m standing.
None of it matters.
“Where is my phone?”
Vadim takes a sip of coffee before answering. “Sit down first.”
I laugh once, without humor. “You can’t seriously think I’m going to sit down for breakfast while you avoid telling me why my phone disappeared in the middle of the night.”
“You barely ate yesterday.”
“Yesterday included an attempted assault, a gunfight, a dead pilot, a hospital visit, and you accusing me of doing something I don’t even understand, so forgive me if my nutritional routine became slightly inconsistent.”
Marek lowers his cup very carefully.
“There was a tracker found in your bag,” Vadim says quietly.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“A tracking device was sewn into the lining of your bag.”
For a second, I actually wait for him to explain the joke, because the sentence is too ridiculous to belong to my life.
“Sewn into my bag?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say.
“It transmitted during our descent,” Marek says.
The heat that had been burning through me seconds ago disappears so completely that I suddenly become aware of the cold air against my bare skin.
“You think that’s how they found the airfield.”
His silence answers before he does.
“Yes,” Vadim replies.
Anton remains focused on his tablet, although I can tell by the stillness in his shoulders that he’s listening to every word.
Vadim’s expression doesn’t change. “There, you have the entire story. Now eat.”
That does it.
I fold my arms and glare at him. “If you want to hand me over to the police, then just do it, because whatever this is would be significantly less irritating if you stopped pretending I’m a guest.”
Marek laughs. Not a polite cough or a badly concealed smile, but an actual laugh that he tries and fails to suppress behind his hand.
Anton looks down. His shoulders move once.
I turn toward them. “What exactly is so funny?”
Marek looks at Vadim first, apparently checking whether he’s allowed to answer, and when Vadim gives him nothing, he says, “Nobody is handing you over to the police.”
I frown. “Why is that funny?”
“We’re not going to the police,” he says with a smirk, as if that’s supposed to make me feel better.
“Then somebody might want to explain what’s happening, because from where I’m standing my phone vanished while I was asleep, and the man who owns this suite spent part of last night asking who paid me to get close to him, and now he’s accusing me of being part of the assassination attempt and leading his enemies right to him.
And it looks like I’m being held here against my will. ”
The room quiets.
Vadim sets his coffee down. “You are staying with me.”
I stare at him, certain I misunderstood. “What?”
“You’re not leaving on your own until we know who put the tracker in your bag,” he says.
“So there’s a why in it today when yesterday you had already decided it was me and decided to pass your judgment,” I say.
“I was wrong,” he says. I’m surprised at his candor, and almost taken aback for a moment, too surprised to be angry.
Then the anger catches up.
“Your solution to suspecting me is to keep me close to you?”
“Yes.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“It sounds like kidnapping.”
“It’s protection.”
“That distinction generally depends on whether the person being protected is allowed to leave.”
Marek looks down at his coffee again, clearly enjoying this far more than he should.
Vadim ignores him and keeps his eyes on me. “You are safer with me than you would be alone in a city where you know nobody, especially while we still don’t know whether whoever planted that device intended to use only your bag or intended to use you.”
I hate that he’s not entirely wrong.
I hate even more that he knows it.
I straighten. “And if I decide I’m leaving anyway?”
Vadim’s expression remains unreadable. He doesn’t answer, and the silence between us stretches long enough to become its own answer.
I look at him for several seconds, waiting for something reassuring, something that would make this sound less like an order delivered by a man accustomed to obedience, but he gives me nothing.
Fine.
I walk toward the table, pull out the chair opposite him, and sit with enough force to make the porcelain rattle slightly.
Marek’s mouth curves. “I take it breakfast has won.”
“I would like to be close enough to stab him with a fork if necessary.”
Anton glances down at the place setting. “There are no proper knives.”
I look at him. He’s right. Everything within reach is designed for butter and pastries.
I look back at Vadim. “Did you arrange that?”
“No.”
Marek says, “We probably should now.”
Vadim gives him a warning look, and Marek immediately reaches for the fruit.
I pick up a piece of toast, mostly because my hands need something to do, and discover after the first bite that I’m much hungrier than I intended to be.
Vadim is still watching me. There’s a faint satisfaction in his expression that makes me regret eating at all.
“Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”
“I said you should eat.”
“That doesn’t make this a victory.”
“You are eating.”
“I can stop.”
“You won’t.”
I bite into the toast purely out of spite.
He almost smiles. I hate him a little for that.
After several bites, I set the toast down and return to the issue that matters. “Now tell me where my phone is.”
Vadim leans back slightly. “It was being checked.”
I stare at him. “You took my phone while I was sleeping, went through it, and then sat here waiting for me to wake up as though that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do?”
“I needed to know whether there was anything on it connecting you to the tracker or the men at the airfield.”
“There isn’t.”
“I know.”
That answer stops me. “What do you mean, you know?”
He reaches beside his chair, picks up my phone, and places it on the table between us.
I grab it immediately. The screen lights when I press the button, and I swipe through my messages, calls, photographs, and apps as though I expect to discover that half my life has been rearranged overnight.
Everything appears normal.
Vadim watches me check. “We found nothing that connects you to Petrov’s people.”
“Petrov?”
Marek glances toward Vadim.
Vadim does not elaborate.
I file the name away. “That means you believe me.”
His expression shifts slightly. “It means there’s nothing on your phone.”
The relief I felt lasts less than a second. “So you still don’t trust me.”
“I don’t know enough yet.”
There it is. Not an accusation anymore. Not innocence either.
I put the phone down more carefully than I want to. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since last night. I don’t know how the tracker got into my bag, I didn’t know where the plane was landing, and I didn’t even know who you were before you boarded that first flight.”
“There appears to have been some kind of mix-up,” he says.
I stare at him. “A mix-up.”
“Yes.”
“You accused me of helping armed men find your plane, and now you’re calling it a mix-up.”
“I said there appears to have been one.”
“That’s not an apology.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
Marek suddenly becomes very interested in spreading butter across a piece of bread.
Anton looks toward the window.
Cowards.
“What made you look into my bag?” I ask.
“We checked everything,” Anton says. “We weren’t specifically targeting you.”
“How generous,” I say. I still don’t understand how the tracker got in my bag. “What exactly have you found?”
Vadim hesitates just long enough to tell me there’s more. “The device was hidden inside the lining of your bag, not simply dropped into it.”
I stop. “Hidden how?”
“The seam had been opened and closed again.”
A cold sensation moves down my back. I think of my bag at the airport, then every moment before the flight when I stopped paying attention to it because there was no reason to imagine somebody wanted to sew a tracking device inside.
“But I cleared airport security with it?” I say.
“It’s small enough to pass through undetected,” Anton says.
I swallow. “So how long has it been sitting in my bag?”
They look at me as if they expect me to answer the question. And maybe they do. After all, I’m the guilty party here. I sit back, frustration tightening in my chest.
The worst part is that I can see the logic from his side now, even though I don’t like it.
A tracker was found in my bag. His enemies arrived at an airfield nobody was supposed to know about. I appeared on his plane at the last minute and desperately needed money, got close to him…way too close, and he randomly got attacked not long afterward.
If our positions were reversed, I might have questions too.
That doesn’t make the way he looked at me last night hurt less.
I wrap both hands around my coffee cup. “If you still think there’s even a chance I did this, why are you keeping me here instead of getting rid of me?”
Vadim’s expression gives nothing away. After a while, he says, “I need some time to think.”
And then what? I want to ask. You’ll ditch me in the middle of the desert, drop me at the deepest point of the ocean?
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.”
“Good, because it doesn’t.”
“You asked why.”
I look down at my phone. For the first time since waking, the anger gives way to something colder.
Yesterday I was worried that I had ruined my chance of working more private assignments because I had annoyed the wrong man.
Now I’m apparently involved in an assassination attempt I knew nothing about.
My life has become ridiculous.
Vadim watches me absorb it. “You understand why you cannot simply leave.”
“I understand why you think that.”
“That’s enough.”
“No, it’s not.”
His eyebrows draw together.
I continue before he can interrupt. “If I go with you, I’m going because I’m choosing the option that currently seems less dangerous than wandering around Bucharest alone while somebody may or may not think I know something about a tracker. I’m not going because you ordered me to.”
He studies me for a long moment. “If that distinction matters to you, keep it.”
I glance at Marek. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, caught between a frown and scheming. Am I imagining it or does he know something?
Anton finally intervenes. “We need to leave within the hour.”
“Leave for where?” I ask.
Vadim answers before Anton can. “Somewhere more secure.”
“Which is?”
“You will know when we arrive.”
I stare at him. “You really enjoy withholding information.”
“I enjoy limiting information.”
“Same thing.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
His mouth almost curves.
There’s something deeply irritating about the fact that we are already slipping back into this rhythm after everything that happened last night.
He still doesn’t trust me.
I certainly don’t trust him.
Yet I’m sitting at his table wearing one of his hotel’s robes, eating his breakfast, holding the phone he had searched, and agreeing to follow him somewhere he refuses to name.
It should feel absurd. Instead, it feels like we have quietly entered some kind of contest without setting the rules.
He watches me for lies. I watch him for whatever he’s hiding. Neither of us wants to give the other too much. Neither of us seems willing to walk away.
I pick up my coffee and meet his eyes over the rim. “All right. I’ll go.”
Vadim nods once. There’s no triumph in his expression, which somehow makes me trust the decision slightly more.
“But if you take my phone again while I’m sleeping,” I add, “I’m going to pour something much worse than champagne on you.”
Marek laughs into his coffee.
Vadim holds my gaze for another second before answering.
“I believe you.”