29. Sloane
SLOANE
The hand over my mouth tightens when I try to scream, and for one violent second I’m certain whoever has me is going to drag me back into the garden, back toward the gunfire and Camille’s body and Vadim standing beneath the lights with a weapon in his hand.
I drive my elbow backward as hard as I can. The man behind me grunts and catches my wrist before I can do it again.
“Sloane.”
I freeze. The voice is familiar.
He pulls me farther behind the hedge, away from the path, and only when the gunfire becomes more muffled does his hand finally leave my mouth.
I spin around. “Daniel?”
The pilot’s shirt is untucked beneath a dark jacket, there’s dirt across one side of his face, and his hair has fallen forward over his forehead as though he has been running.
He keeps glancing past me toward the house, one hand still wrapped around my wrist while the other holds a small flashlight pointed toward the ground.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.
“Keeping you from getting yourself killed.”
“You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“I didn’t exactly have time to introduce myself.”
Another series of shots comes from somewhere behind us.
Daniel looks toward the sound. “Come with me.”
“What?”
“We have to move.”
“Where?”
“Sloane, please.”
The urgency in his face makes me hesitate.
I know him. At least, I think I do.
Tonight, I’m beginning to understand how little that means.
“Why are you here?”
“I’ll explain in the car,” he says.
“What car?”
He catches my hand. “This way.”
I should refuse. But another gunshot breaks through the night, followed by men shouting somewhere much closer than before, and fear makes the decision for me.
Daniel leads me away from the gate rather than toward it. There’s a narrow section of wall behind the hedge where the landscaping becomes dense enough that I would never have noticed the small service opening concealed between two trees. Daniel moves through it without hesitation.
“You knew this was here?” I ask.
“Yes.”
That answer creates several more questions, none of which I have the breath to ask while following him down a steep strip of ground behind the property. Branches catch at my dress. The soles of my bare feet hurt with every step, but stopping feels worse.
The sounds from the compound begin to fade behind us. We reach a narrow road running along the outer wall, little more than a strip of pavement between trees, and Daniel looks both directions before pulling me across.
A car waits farther down with the lights off.
I stop. “Daniel.”
“We have to go.”
“I’m not getting into some random car with you until you tell me what’s happening.”
He turns toward me. For the first time, I notice how frightened he looks. “If they find us before we leave, none of this matters.”
“None of what?”
He looks past me again. Then a figure steps out from behind the parked car.
I stare. “Mila?”
She freezes when she sees me, and her face goes completely blank.
For a second, neither of us says anything.
Mila is wearing dark trousers and a sweater rather than the dress she had on at dinner, and a small backpack hangs over one shoulder. Her hair is tied back, and there’s something about the way she’s standing beside the car that makes the entire night become even stranger.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
Her eyes move to Daniel. Then back to me.
I turn to him. “You brought her?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he says.
“Yes, you did. What’s going on here?” I say. I haven’t seen the two interact since the day he startled her.
Mila closes her eyes briefly. “We don’t have time.”
I look between them. “What the hell is going on?”
Mila opens the rear door. “Get in.”
“I’m not getting into that car until someone explains why you’re sneaking out of your brother’s compound during a gunfight.”
She looks at me. There’s guilt in her face. Real guilt. “Sloane, if we stay here long enough for Vadim’s people to regroup, Daniel will never make it out.”
I look at Daniel. Then back at her. “You two are together.”
Neither answers. They don’t need to.
Mila reaches for Daniel’s hand, and their fingers close around each other automatically. The gesture is so intimate and so natural that it tells me more than anything either of them could have said.
“Oh.”
Mila looks almost embarrassed. “Please get in.”
This time, I do.
Daniel takes the driver’s seat while Mila climbs into the front beside him. The engine starts, the headlights remain off for several seconds longer, and then we pull away from the compound along a road so dark that the trees seem to swallow everything beyond the narrow beam in front of us.
Nobody speaks for nearly ten minutes.
I sit in the back seat trying to make sense of what just happened. My mind keeps circling the same images without finding anywhere safe to stop. Camille—the sweet woman is dead, and the one who pulled the trigger is the man I…
I shake my head. I can’t let myself go there.
After what feels like forever, Daniel reaches into a bag and turns around. “Here.” He holds something out.
My passport.
I stare at it. “How did you get that?” I ask.
“I took it from your room,” he says.
“When?”
“Before dinner.”
I take it slowly. “You went through my things?”
“I needed to make sure you had it,” he says.
“For what?”
Mila looks at Daniel. Then at me.
“In case we had to bring you,” he says.
That makes no sense. “Bring me where?”
“Away,” he says, simply.
I look out the window. The lights of the estate are long gone. There’s only road now.
“How long have you been planning this?”
Mila faces forward again. “A while.”
Daniel reaches over and squeezes her hand. She squeezes back. The sight does something uncomfortable to my chest.
Vadim does that.
Not often. Not in front of other people. But sometimes when we’re sitting beside each other and he thinks I’m upset, his hand finds mine without him seeming to decide to do it.
I turn toward the window before the memory can settle too deeply.
We drive for hours. By the time the sky begins changing from black to a dull gray at the horizon, exhaustion has turned everything inside me heavy.
Daniel says we’re approaching the border. He doesn’t tell me which crossing until we’re nearly there.
I don’t ask many questions. I’m beginning to suspect I won’t like the answers.
We stop at a roadside café not far from the border because Daniel says we need fuel and because none of us has eaten since the birthday dinner.
The place is nearly empty. A truck driver sits alone near the window, and an older woman behind the counter barely looks at us when we order coffee and sandwiches.
We take a table in the far corner. Mila sits beside Daniel, their shoulders touching.
I sit opposite them with my passport in my bag and dried blood still hidden beneath the coat Daniel gave me. Nobody mentions it.
I eventually look at Mila. “Start talking.”
She lowers her coffee.
Daniel looks at her.
She nods. “We were leaving tonight.”
“That part I gathered.”
“We’ve been planning it for the past week or so,” Mila says.
“What?” I say, still confused.
She glances at Daniel, and something passes between them that’s so intimate I almost feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a private conversation.
Daniel answers this time. “It happened quickly.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Mila looks down at their joined hands. “I know how it sounds.”
“I don’t think you do.”
A faint flush rises into her face, but she doesn’t let go of him.
The first time I saw the two of them together comes back to me almost immediately.
Mila screaming in the hallway. Daniel standing there looking horrified, one hand still around her arm because he had caught her when she stumbled away from him.
Vadim appearing seconds later with murder already forming in his face.
I look at Daniel. “You scared the hell out of her.”
“I turned a corner.”
“You grabbed me,” Mila says.
Daniel looks at her. “You almost fell.”
“You appeared out of nowhere.”
“I was walking.”
“You walk too quietly.”
His mouth twitches.
“That was your first conversation?” I ask.
“More or less,” Daniel says.
Mila gives him a look. “You apologized about twelve times.”
“I thought your brother was going to shoot me.”
“He probably considered it.”
“I know.”
There’s something almost absurd about the ease between them now, considering how badly that first meeting went.
I look at Mila. “And after that?”
She hesitates. “We kept seeing each other.”
“Because neither of you could exactly go anywhere.”
Daniel gives me a dry look. “That helped.”
Vadim had made it very clear that Daniel wasn’t leaving until the people around him were satisfied he had nothing to do with Hale or the attack, and I’d been given essentially the same treatment under much more comfortable packaging.
Mila looks down at the table. “He was there all the time. At breakfast. In the garden. In the library when he got tired of sitting in his room.”
“You were watching me?”
“You were difficult not to notice.”
Daniel smiles slightly. “So were you.”
Her expression softens. It’s small, but I catch it.
I’ve seen that look before. On my own face, probably.
That realization makes me uncomfortable.
“You fell in love in a few weeks?” I mean for it to sound skeptical, but it mostly sounds surprised.
Mila looks at Daniel before she answers, and the way he looks back at her tells me the answer before she gives it.
“Yes.”
There’s no embarrassment in it. No attempt to make it sound more reasonable than it is.
Daniel rubs his thumb slowly across her knuckles. “It wasn’t planned.”
“That seems to be a theme lately.”
Neither of them laughs.
Mila glances at me. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”
It does.
A few weeks. A man she met because her brother was effectively holding him at the estate. And now they’re sitting across from me holding hands as though letting go is not an option.
It should feel impossible. Unfortunately, I have very little room to judge anyone for becoming attached to the wrong person too quickly.
Vadim enters my mind before I can stop him.