“Hard to keep hold of the tail,” he says. “You learn that pretty fast.”
“Yow.” I switch arms. My right hand needs to thaw.
“As a woman, I gained access to realms that guys couldn’t get into. I also had nursing skills, which made me valuable in a crisis. I could sometimes stay long after they were shooing the civilians out. War zones. Or refugee situations. Disasters.”
“You’re also resourceful, Ann. I saw you at the hospital, the way you were. You never gave up. You kept fighting no matter what.”
I rest my chin on my non-fishing arm and look into his eyes. Some men, when they look at you, it’s like they’re taking from you. But Kiro gives. He looks with his heart.
It makes it easy to tell him the hard things. I tell him about the hospital bombing. “I was working alongside Worldcorps Medicale, doing this long, in-depth NGO story, when the hospital we were in was shelled. I’d been shelled before, though I’d always been in bomb shelters. This was like nothing I’d ever been through. The building groaning like a monster. Metal girders screaming. I pulled four kids from the unit into a stainless steel meds cooler just as everything collapsed around us. We were trapped, the five of us. In near darkness—just a tiny sliver of light. The smallest boy was badly injured on the way in, and by the time the chaos quieted, I knew he was dead. The other kids were hysterical from the collapse alone. I couldn’t let them know, so I pulled the dead kid into my lap. I said he was sleeping. Sometimes I pretended he was moving around. We were in there for thirty-nine hours, trapped, listening to people—”
“You held a dead child for nearly two days?”
“The other kids would’ve freaked out. The kids and I sang a lot of songs. When we got out, everybody was really amazed at how I kept my famous cool.”
He just lies there. Fishing. Listening.
“My editor at the time wanted that story instead; obviously it was better than the NGO story I’d gone to cover. That means nongovernmental organization. Like an aid group. It was a coup to have an actual journalist trapped in rubble with kids. But every time I tried to write about it, it was chaos in my mind. I couldn’t find the story. I couldn’t find my way in. I couldn’t find the right detail.”
I describe how she held a feature space open for me and I blew two deadlines and they had to run something from the can. I couldn’t handle even a Q&A with another reporter. I wasn’t sleeping anymore.
“I felt so numb in those days after, and there was this sense I had suddenly that every single detail from those thirty-nine hours weighed exactly the same. That maybe doesn’t sound important, but it really is. When you’re a reporter, you’re always sifting through the pebbles of a story, looking for the one detail that weighs the most, that means the most. I couldn’t find it. And every time I’d go near a hospital, the antiseptic smell would seriously fuck me up.”
“Oh,” he says.
“Right.” I tell him how I had another gig lined up after that, also in Afghanistan. “It was a glorious story—an interview with a notorious and nearly mythical female warlord from out of the Hindu Kush mountain range.”
“The one you missed. You were two hours late.”
“You were listening.”
“Every word.”
“Everyone was jealous I landed it. A career-making story. And the kitten incident made me miss the only chance at this interview. Made me trash months of legwork by a very major publication.”
“You saw the little paw. You got men to move the rock slabs,” he says. “That’s what you said. You talked about your…fixer. I wondered what that was.”
“A fixer is a helper, often in places where the order has broken down. Sometimes just a driver.” I swish my hand around. “So yada yada yada, I’m supposed to be this pro, and I’m kneeling in a road with a kitten. I suppose you remember that part.”
“I do,” he says, listening intently, chin on the rough bark.
“That’s when you held my hand, Kiro.” I grin. “Fuck, do you know how much that shocked me? You nearly sent me through the ceiling.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it was beautiful…I felt…not alone.”
There’s a beat where he just watches my eyes. “Me too.”
I feel so close to him right then. Us lying on the logs. Fishing with our hands.
“Tell me the rest, Ann.”
“Well, fixers talk, journalists talk. I suddenly had myself a reputation for zero objectivity. Overly emotionally involved, the kiss of death. There are plenty of other hungry journalists to send for a story. I was also out of money, so I couldn’t even freelance it, which means going out and doing a story on your own dime in hopes of selling it to somebody. And the biggest thing was that I couldn’t think straight. It was like, the kitten was the biggest detail. A detail as big as the sun.”
I go on. Me coming home career-less and more or less friendless.
“You saved the kitten.”
“I got it to this mountain village.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“No,” I say.
“Does telling it make you feel better?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say. “You listening makes me feel better, though. The way you look when I tell you. Everyone in the world thought it was sad and fucked up, including me. But you don’t.”
“I don’t,” he says softly.
Something cool brushes between my thumb and forefinger. I grip and pull. A fish wriggles in my hand. I’m so startled I let it go. It splashes back out, back into the water.
Kiro is laughing.
“It’s not funny!”
“You caught a fish with your bare hands, Ann.” He grins. “Who’s the savage now?”
I dangle my hand back in the water.
Kiro stretches back out in front of me, facing me.
Birds sing above—long, elaborate calls. Animals rustle in the leaves up and down the bank.
It’s peaceful. I pull my hand out of the water now and then when it feels too cold. I flex my fingers. Shake it out.
And it comes to me that that’s probably what hurt him the most with the reporters at the hospital—not their aggressiveness or the lights and flashes, but the way they made him less than human. A bizarre object for the consumption of the nation.
I don’t know what to say. I want to apologize on behalf of all journalists, to tell him he’s amazing, but I know it won’t mean much to him. Words never do.
So I reach out to him. I hook my pointer finger to his.
He looks into my eyes in that honest, unselfconscious way he has. Something wild and good sparkles through me.
The connection of our gazes feels more intimate than fucking. More dangerous than the mob. We lie there like that, fingers hooked, hands trailing in the water.
He smiles. “You remember when I was lying there and you said, ‘oh fuck you, you fucking faker’?”
“Oh my God. That was such a jerky thing to say.”
He stares at my knuckle where our fingers hook. He stares with that fierce intensity of his, then he leans forward and brushes a kiss onto it.
Shivers go over me. He looks up into my eyes. Kiro needs no words.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kiro
I catch three fish. She manages to touch another one.
I bring her to the cave. The place where I nearly died. Where I would’ve died if it hadn’t been for those first wolves. I picture Red and Snowy. It feels like there’s a hole in the world.
“It’s…nice,” she says, walking into it.
It’s not nice, not when I look at it through the eyes of a woman who’s used to furniture and a dry bed with sheets and blankets. I kick aside the dirt and leaves, showing how it can be made clean. I point. “That’s the good side for sleeping. We’ll make a fire here on this side.”
She looks out at the hillside. Her eyes are a dazzling green in the setting sun. I start the fire, but we need more wood.
“Go on,” she says.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll unpack.”
I go to her and kiss her, then I grab the small hatchet. “This is good. It’s good that we brought it.”
She smiles, but it’s not a real smile.
I set off toward an area of downed trees just over the next hill. They’ll be nice and dry for a fire. I slam at the largest log, hacking and hacking. It feels good to slam the hatchet against something, to do this violent thing, to stop myself from thinking. If I tire myself out enough, maybe I’ll stop thinking about those wolves suffering and dying out here at the hands of hunters.
And maybe I’ll be able to stop thinking about how much I love having her out here, like a window into a life I’ll never have.
Because I know now I have to bring her back. It was wrong to take her the way I did. It was wrong to tie her up. Wrong to make her beg just because I could. Wrong to keep her.
She belongs to me. It’s the best thing in the world to feel like she belongs to me, that she’s mine. Mine to care for.
Ironically, that means I have to let her go.
We’ll set back out tomorrow, back to the truck.
I’ll say goodbye.
I’ll let her go.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Lazarus
I’ve always hated nature.
Especially the shrubberies. Are they even called shrubberies when you’re in the wild? Or would that be bramble? In any case, they’re annoying, and they block your way from every direction.
Nature.
Like they say, you don’t have to taste much to know it’s cottage cheese.
My wilderness guide finishes tying down the canoes and scolding my guys to stay silent. He’s extremely eager for us to catch Kiro unawares.
He’s a rugged specimen of a man in hiking boots and purple Gore-Tex and the kind of sunglasses that have a leather band keeping them attached to your head so that they stay on no matter what peril you encounter—with the possible exception of a beheading, one would suppose.
I got him at a resort at the edge of this wilderness. I asked for the best guide money can buy, and he was it. He was booked up until I paid a few thousand bucks to his handler.
We got here by helicopter. Our Gore-Tex-clad guide put together an idea of where Kiro’s home might be from the anecdotal intel we provided him and from reports that filtered down through the years.
We landed six miles away from where our guide thinks Kiro is. Out of hearing range, he explained. “Who are we hunting here? The Bionic Woman?” I joked.
“You never know,” he said simply.
We went with it. He’s a real high-performance type and highly motivated, thanks to the live feed of my men sitting in his living room, threatening his wife and kid.
We went by foot and boat after that. He climbed a peak not an hour ago—scrambled up there just like a monkey with binoculars. He saw smoke. He thinks he knows where they are.
An hour later, we’re stepping out of our canoes.
My guys and I have sprayed ourselves with deer piss. This is something you get in a bottle when you’re a wilderness guide. It’s a way a hunter masks his scent. If Kiro is out here somewhere and really did live wild all those years, our rugged leader theorizes, it could help mask our approach.
My guys gear up their rifles and adjust their night-vision goggles. We’ll be underestimating Kiro exactly zero more times. An orderly named Donny out at Fancher Institute gave us a lot of good intel on the man.
Sir Gore-Tex-a-Lot finishes tying down the canoes with a bungee cord. I stand over him, watching while the men spray more deer piss on themselves.
“What time is it when your favorite hobby involves spraying yourself with deer piss?” I ask him.
He looks up at me, confused. “Are you asking me the time?”
“No, I’m asking you, what time is it when your favorite hobby involves spraying yourself with deer piss?”
He gives me a stony look.
“Time to get a new hobby.”
He doesn’t find it funny.
Garrick the journalist snickers.
Garrick and his clipped British accent accused me earlier of not holding up my end of the bargain with his editor, Murray. He informed me that the idea of an embed is to be where the action is, where Kiro is, not hanging back with the man directing the action. He’d accused me of scuttling the deal.
“You still feel like I scuttled that deal, Garrick?” I asked when we found the bodies of my forward team, buzzing with flies. “This the kind of story you were looking to be embedded in? Would certainly give new meaning to the term ‘embedded.’”
He had little to say to that. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure he got the joke, though admittedly it was a stretch. Our guide wanted to radio back about the bodies, but I put him off of that idea easily enough.
Garrick took a few photos. He even shifted a body to get a better shot, much to the disgust of our guide.
“They’re dead,” Garrick informed him clippedly.
We make our way through the forest and around a bluff. Our guide has a topographical GPS that tells us there’s a cave system to the south, and between that and some sort of triangulation involving the wind and the smoke, he has their location.
I find it dubious until we actually get the cave in view and see the smoke puffing out the entrance.
We trudge nearer. When we’re quite near, he steals up and scopes it out with a mirror on a retractable rod, then returns to inform us that there is one person in there—a woman.
“No man?”
“I’m sure.”
“Thank you, Santa,” I say.
It’s the girl—it has to be. Orderly Donny has informed us that Kiro would do anything to protect her. That’s the mistake my first group made. Not going for the weakness.
We tie up our guide with his precious bungee cords and head up to the cave, picking around the trees and boulders.
“Kiro?” she calls.
It’s not the smartest for me to head in first; she could be armed, after all. Garrick has a passing acquaintance with the girl, and he assures me that she’d know perfectly well how to shoot. But a leader who stops taking risks becomes brittle; that’s something that Valerie likes to say.
And I really, really want to see her face when I pop in.
I whip on a tie for the occasion. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. I walk in casually. “Why, hello,” I say. “Haven’t we met someplace?”
It’s every bit as rewarding as I imagined it would be. The color literally drains from her cheeks.
I snap my fingers. “Oh, don’t tell me, I have it—the insane asylum. You were trying to keep us from finding Kiro.”
She stands, eyes wide, as my guys crowd in. Her eyes go even wider when she sees Garrick. “What the fuck?”
“You didn’t want to do the job.” Garrick takes a few pictures. “Is this where he lived?”
“Garrick!”
“Where is he?” I ask.
She turns to me. “He’s gone. He’s not coming back.”
“Not buying it, sister.” I press the business end of my Ruger to her forehead and back her up to the cave wall.
“No need to hurt Ann,” Garrick says.
He couldn’t be more wrong. There is a great deal of need to hurt Ann. “Hands knit on your head, Ann.”
She complies, eyes wide.
My guys crowd in. They’ll have left a few in the bushes. Sharpshooters, but we want Kiro walking in alive. Walking out, not so much.
“Kiro’s not here.”
“No, but he’ll come for you. I’ve learned the Dragusha boys tend to come for their mates. I’ve learned that the hard way.”
“I’m not his mate.”
“Should we test that? Garrick, are you rolling?”
“I’m just here to get the Savage Adonis story. Ann should be kept out of this.”
I nod, and my guy puts his piece on Garrick.
I say, “The answer I was looking for, Garrick, is,
‘Yes, I’m rolling.’ You’re going to get this on film, and most of all, you’re going to get when Kiro comes through that opening. You are going to keep filming no matter what happens. We’re going to kill Kiro, and you’re going to record it.”
Garrick stiffens, looking affronted. “That’s not something I’m willing to do.”
“No? Do you want to guess what happens if you don’t get the footage I need? Do you want to take a guess on that?” I wait. Only serious footage will put the prophecy to rest once and for all. I need serious proof.
“Kiro! It’s a trap!” she calls.
One of my guys puts a light on her. Garrick apologizes to her and films.
“What the fuck, Garrick?”
“Call out to Kiro again,” I tell her.
“Fuck you,” she spits.
I slide a glance at Garrick, who’s holding his camera on her with a resigned look. He was a war correspondent. He knows how to film fucked-up things. Probably already running through his defense, too. Under duress and all that. It’ll hold up in a court of law. The legal system gives you a lot of leeway when your life is in danger.
I’ll edit myself out of it later.
“We can do this so many ways,” I say to her, backing up. “You call to him, or I kill you and guess what? He’d still come. When these brothers get emotional, they get stupid. It runs in the family.”
“He has a family?”
I narrow my eyes. She doesn’t know who he is?
Interesting.
She glares. “What’s his family?”
I can’t believe she’s still going for the story.
Garrick regards her wistfully. “The Dragushas. Albanian mafia. There was some kind of coup when the boys were babies.”
“He has a family,” she whispers.
“Does that mean you’re going for the killing option? Because I haven’t heard you call out.” I pull out my piece and aim for her belly.
The look of a woman who thinks you’ll shoot her is radically different from the look of a woman who thinks you’re bluffing. Ann thinks I’m bluffing.
Garrick knows I’m not. He’s spent a bit more time with me.
Savage Mafia Prince: a Dangerous Royals romance Page 26
