46. Vigo
VIGO
The so-called gala was boring as fuck. Seriously, who wanted to mill around like sheep with a bunch of rich people, looking at fancy jewelry you couldn’t wear anywhere fun, waiting for the fireworks show that was slated to end the evening (which I only knew about because I’d overheard one of the guards talking abut it), the one and only fun thing in the whole night?
Rich people, am I right?
Why not just cut to the fun stuff?
It was something I didn’t understand about most people: the way they forced themselves through a grinder to get to a good thing, like they had to do penance for having fucking fun.
No, thanks.
Who needed penance when you could just have the fun part?
I walked through the villa, trailing Alina Volkova. I’d spotted her almost as soon as I’d split from Hawk, fresh from our climb (if you could call it that, we’d slid down as much as we’d climbed) down the hillside over Villa Lysis.
And yeah, Alina Volkova was pretty, I guessed.
But that kind of pretty left me cold.
She knew what she was: a pretty rich girl with cookie-cutter features, expert makeup, and designer clothes, a girl whose only purpose in life was jet-setting from one party to the next.
Maybe it turned me off because it shone a light on some part of myself that understood her, the part of myself that hadn’t been that different before we’d met Cassie.
Hadn’t I been a version of Alina Volkova? Someone who parkoured from one thrill to the next with no thought for anyone but myself?
Except I wasn’t that person anymore. That person wouldn’t be hunting the crowd for signs of Cassie.
That person wouldn’t be itching to put a bullet in Dimitri Kaprolov’s head to avenge Cassie and her parents.
That person wouldn’t be thinking ahead to the future, a future where fun sounded like fucking Cassie for the rest of my life, putting a baby inside her, waking up to her every fucking morning and going to sleep with her every fucking night.
And don’t get me wrong. I was still going to rob banks, was still going to have fun.
Life was too short for anything else.
But my fun was going to be with Cassie from now on.
I spotted Hawk across the room but didn’t acknowledge him. He had eyes on Alina too, and I knew he was clocking her security, three men in identical black suits who rotated casually around her, like planets rotating around the sun.
I scanned the crowd around her, looking for Dimitri even though my hopes for finding him here had already started to fade.
It wasn’t that we hadn’t spotted him yet: it was the vibe.
Dimitri was a ghost, a man who drifted through the background of other people’s lives, a man who let other people do his dirty work.
It made sense that he wouldn’t be here when I thought about the pictures of Alina that included him, pictures that usually showed the two of them at a restaurant or on a boat.
This was Alina’s scene, not Dimitri’s.
Which didn’t mean the trip was wasted. Because Alina would eventually meet up with her father, and now we had Alina in our sites.
Plus, we’d come prepared.
Now one of us just had to get close enough to her to execute the backup plan.