She was an afterthought, at best.So maybe she shouldn’t have put so much hope into her desperate shout for help.
If only the stupid cell phone she’d taken off one of the crew who’d delivered her dinner four days ago had had more than a wink of juice left, she might have been able to make a call to her boss when they got closer to port.Instead, in the fading life of the battery, Emberly had connected to the Internet and taken a chance.
A drastic, reckless chance.
She’d left a message on the contact form of the King’s Inn.Because of course she couldn’t dredge up Steinbeck’s cell number—had she even gotten it?And the idea of connecting with Nimue and maybe having some Russian hacker trace the connection put a fist in her gut.So yeah, she hoped Stein was still the savvy SEAL he’d once been.
Probably hoped too much.Steinbeck Kingston wasn’t going to be waiting with some magnificent plan as the Bratva dragged her off the ship and into the trunk of some old Lada.He wasn’t going to overpower Igor and Boris, the rather grumpy men who had guarded her at the home of some Cuban official, or any of the other Ivans who’d watched over Prisoner 24601 in the crew cabin in the aft superstructure of the boat.
Steinbeck wasn’t a superhero.Just...
Well, he was heronlyhero.And even that might be going too far.
He had too many reasons not to rescue her, not to trust her, and if it weren’t for his response to her wordsI think you should kiss me...Her words shifted again in her head, but really, she’d probably lived too long on and read too much into the way his mouth had curved into a smile, the way his blue eyes had roamed her face.His sardonic words before he’d taken her up on her suggestion.
“Really?I feel like we’ve been here before.”
Oh, they had.Once, in an alleyway in the city of Krakow.Quickly in a mine tunnel on a Caribbean island.And over and over and painfully over in her head for the past three years.
But in real life, she’d ghosted him.Also over and over...
No.Steinbeck wouldn’t come for her.
Still, her entire body seemed to thrum with a sort of radar, an anticipation, when the door to her quarters opened and Boris stood there.“Poydem.”
Right.“Let’s go.”
His beefy hand gripped her upper arm, the mouth of a gun pressed to her spine as he marched her down the portside gangway.
They hit the dock, a long concrete pier that jutted into the water, and she glanced at the IMO number on the hull of the ship.Please let her have typed it right.
The sun baked her skin through the worn clothing she’d stolen from some liveaboard trawler over a month ago.Thankfully, her cabin had come with a shower, but please let her not die in a pair of salt-soaked, baggy, and ripped cargo pants and a white T-shirt that saidStay Positive.
Good life advice, maybe.Especially for a woman heading to the tundra.
She couldn’t help, however, scanning the wharf for a tallish, scruffy blond sailor, maybe in sunglasses, and perhaps pretending to be one of the dockworkers who drove forklifts and trucks or operated any of the giant cranes overhead.The redolence of diesel fuel and the briny tang of the rusty, bleeding metal fouled the salty air and bored into her bones.
Run.
Mooring lines snapped, and the growl of machinery overhead could mask a small scuffle, probably, but Boris’s hand viced her arm, the handgun still burrowed into her spine, and now Igor flanked her other side.
She was a thief, not a fighter.
So she walked and hoped, and jerked when a container landed on the wharf with a thunderous boom, and even then?—
No hero.
Another ship sat docked beside them, its shadow cool as she walked into it, the darkness momentarily blinding her?—
Now, Stein!And she even tensed in Boris’s grip, just in case.
He yanked her, hard, against himself and laughed.“They said you were a fireball.”
Firebird, hello.The name she’d left burned a trail through her throat and into her chest.Oh, she’d been too full of hope.Too?—
Gunshots.
She flinched, looked?—
