by Naomi West
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“I’m not going to talk about it in the car. It might be bugged.”
She nods and goes still, her head tracking backward to read a sign that we’re passing. A sign for the airport. I know she’s putting it together. And suddenly she’s lifting up her butt and reaching around to her pants pocket, scrabbling for something. She pulls out her wallet and her passport.
“Just in case,” she mouths to me, looking so proud of herself for thinking of it back when she was packing at home. I look at her for a second, the bruise turning a deep purple around her eye, the bridge of her nose starting to swell. Her hair is a tangled mess and the collar of her sweater is stretched and torn like somebody was dragging her by it.
And it hits me like a ton of bricks. I’m in love with this woman. Completely and entirely. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. I’d die for her. It isn’t the first time I’ve had that thought but this time I fully understand what I’m thinking. There is no living without her. I realize that I don’t care about whatever dumb ass plan she concocted with her brothers. I don’t care that she started this relationship with me on false pretenses. All I care about is her safety.
The thought makes me drive even faster. We’re squealing into the airport in ten minutes flat and I’m instantly jumping out of the car and running around to her side. I leave the car running and race into the terminal. I hope their car gets jacked.
I run up to the Delta terminal, Alessia puffing behind me. “I need two tickets to your next flight out of Detroit,” I tell the woman behind the counter.
She’s about sixty five with bright red hair and big glasses, her uniform is immaculate. Her eyes bounce back and forth between the two of us and I know she’s taking in Alessia’s black eye and the blood below her nose. I really should have helped clean her up a little bit, but every second counts.
“Where to?” she asks. I notice her name tag says Bonnie.
“Doesn’t matter, Bonnie. Whatever flight you have that’s leaving next. Preferably a short flight. Under an hour and a half.” If Greco’s people track us to the airport and figure out where we’ve flown to, I don’t want them to have time to organize their people in the destination city and send somebody to that airport for us.
“Alright,” says Bonnie, her eyebrows raised. She clicks and clacks on her keyboard for a second before she looks back up. “How about Ontario? Flight leaves in 45 minutes and the flight length is an hour and ten.”
Perfect. And it’s across a border, so it would be even harder for Greco to get someone from his team to follow us there.
“Yes, we’ll take two.”
“We only have first class left.”
“Fine.”
Bonnie looks me up and down like she doesn’t believe there’s an ice cube’s chance in hell that I can afford first class but she shrugs and holds her hand out for my credit card and our identification.
It takes her another excruciating ten minutes to get everything in order. She prints out the tickets but doesn’t hand them over.
“Go stand over there a minute,” she says to me.
I blink at her. Unable to even comprehend the fact that this little old lady is holding so much power over me right now.
“I said, go stand over there for a minute and give me a second with this child.” She nods her head to Alessia.
I calculate my options and realize that this whole thing is going to go faster if I just do what she asks. I pace about twenty feet away and turn and watch her lean in and talk to Alessia. I see Alessia nodding, then shaking her head. Bonnie barks out a laugh and lifts her hands in surrender. She hands the tickets to Alessia.
Alessia immediately walks right over to me and I’m tugging her toward security. I won’t be comfortable until there’s an ocean between her and Greco. Apparently, Bonnie gave us priority boarding so we get right through to the gate.
We have just enough time for me to duck into an airport shop and pick up a few items. I don’t let Alessia sit down. As soon as we board the plane I push her into the first class bathroom.
Immediately I strip off her torn, bloody sweater and throw it in the trash. She peeps and tries to cover herself from me. I attempt to ignore that but her action slices right through me. God, I’ve been so cold to her over the last day that she doesn’t even want to be seen by me.
I quickly rip the tags off a simple blue sweatshirt I’d just bought and tug it over her head. I thought she might want the hood to help cover her face both for the privacy and for the black eye. Next I pull out makeup removing wipes I just bought as well and gently swipe the blood and sweat off of her face. She holds her face up to me like a child. Her eyes closed. She must be exhausted. Lastly, I plunk a baseball cap over her head and pull the brim down low, over her face, and complete the look with a pair of mirrored sunglasses. She pulls the hood up and looks at herself in the mirror. She gives a mirthless little chuckle at her covert appearance but she doesn’t look recognizable and she doesn’t look like she’s just been beat up. So, mission accomplished.
Now that she’s reasonably presentable, I tug her back out to our seats, ignoring the lascivious grins of the other passengers at the fact that we’ve just come out of an airplane bathroom together.
I give her the window seat and buckle her in.
“How much crap did you just buy?” she asks in amazement as I pull out a bottle of water, a bottle of Gatorade, an apple, a cheese stick, and some Ibuprofen.
“It’s kind of an emergency kit for shock. We’ll get a meal on our next flight, so this should be enough for you until then.”
“Next flight?” she asks as she absently takes the bottle of water I’ve put in her hand.
I tip it up to her mouth and she takes a sip. I don’t speak until she’s taken a good long drink. Then I hand her the Ibuprofen. She takes two and I hand her the apple. She sighs and rolls her eyes, capping the water but she takes a healthy bite of the apple and I relax a little.
“Yes, we’re going overseas. Somewhere they won’t be able to find us. We’ll lay low for a while until I can figure out what to do next.”
She nods and doesn’t ask where we’re going. I’m grateful. I don’t want to talk about it out loud with prying ears all over the place and I don’t want to have to lie to her only to re-explain again later.
Absently she reaches into her pocket for her phone but comes up with nothing. “Oh my God, I left my phone in the Tahoe.”
“That’s okay,” I shrug. “We would have had to leave it behind anyways. It might be traceable.”
“You kept yours.”
“Mine is untraceable,” I say. I take pains to switch my sim cards and providers as often as I can. The only thing that remains the same is my phone number.
She shrugs and it’s as if she’s barely even heard me.
“Alessia,” I say and she turns to me, but her eyes stay cast down. “What did Bonnie say to you when we were buying our tickets?”
A little smile flickers across her face and I could have kissed Bonnie for giving us that right now. A moment of levity.
“She asked if I really wanted to go with you. She said she could have a security team escort you away at the gate for ‘NSA’ reasons if I needed time to make a getaway. She said she’d wait and drive me away.”
My eyes grow wide as I sit back in my seat. “Damn, Bonnie.”
“I know!” Alessia smiles again and my heart leaps.
“What did you tell her?”
“That you were protecting me from the people who gave me a black eye. And that I was safe with you. But she was right when she sensed that you were a total dickhead who gets off on bossing me around.”
I bark out a laugh, pretty shocked that I even have it in me at a moment like this. “I guess I can’t argue with that,” I say. I want her to turn and smile at me like she did before, but she doesn’t. I can tell her mind is already miles away.
She’s quiet. So quiet. She just turns to lo
ok out the window of the plane and watches as we pull away and says nothing as I take her hand in mine. She’s limp. Halfway removed. If her eyes weren’t open I would think she was asleep.
Thankfully the flight is short. In little more than an hour I’m tugging her to another ticket counter. She stands next to me, completely out of it, as I buy four sets of first class tickets. Each to different parts of the world. I check in to all of the flights via each airline kiosk just in case Greco is tracking us.
Finally, we’re boarded again. I gently tuck the blanket provided by the airline around her legs. As soon as we’re airborne, I recline her seat and try to make her comfortable.
“We’re gonna be in the air for about seven hours, baby,” I whisper to her. “You should try and sleep.”
She says nothing and her eyes don’t close. So I dig through the bag of things I’ve bought and hand her a bottle of Nyquil.
“Trust me,” I say.
She looks up at me, in the eye, for the first time since she was attacked. Does she trust me? Does she trust anyone or anything right now? I can see her eyes dilating in and out and I know she’s about three seconds from completely freaking out. She needs to rest or she’s going to crash, hard.
Finally, she looks away, shrugging. She unscrews the cap and pours out a portion into the little cup, shuddering as she swallows the bitter liquid.
I activate the screen on the seat in front of her and turn on some chick flick for her to zone out to while she waits for the medicine to kick in. After about twenty minutes I look down and notice that her eyes have fallen closed and her breathing is even. Her head is tucked onto the pillow and, selfishly, I move the pillow and arrange her on my shoulder instead.
I just want to be close to her. I want to have some part in her comfort. I need to. She’s been through so much in the last day and half of it was because I wasn’t gentle enough. I wasn’t understanding enough. As soon as we get to our destination, I’m going to make it right. Explain to her that I don’t care about anything but her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Alessia
I blink my eyes against the bright morning sun and I realize that I’ve slept through the entire plane ride. The flight attendant comes over the intercom to say that we’ll be landing in a few minutes. I look out at the rolling green landscape underneath us and I realize that I have no idea where we are or where we’re going.
And weirdly, I don’t even care. I feel as numb this morning as I did when I fell asleep at the beginning of the flight. It almost feels like I’m watching myself in a movie. Like this isn’t even happening to me in my real life.
I look over and see that Dare is awake. He’s typing something into his phone and doesn’t notice that I’m awake. His tray table is down and there’s two glasses of orange juice, two paper cups of coffee, two mushed little croissants in plastic bags and two apples.
My stomach rumbles for the food, but I don’t move. I don’t want him to realize I’m awake yet. I take the opportunity to study him. He’s as handsome as ever. Painfully so. I realize that I didn’t always think he was handsome. Captivating? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Deeply attractive? Yes. But handsome? That’s a recent development. It probably happened about the time I fell in love with him.
I close my eyes at that thought. Love. With Dare. What awful timing to admit something like that. In love with a man who thinks so little of me.
But how could I not love him? I think about the way he holds me, looks at me, gives me pleasure, carries my bag, listens to me. Sees me. And then I think about the sight of him sprinting across that parking lot. How half of me was weak with relief that he was there to protect me, and the other half was terrified that he was about to get himself killed.
I push that thought away. I’m not ready to think about yesterday. Any of it. Not the phone call with Dante, or Fabi’s disappearance, or Rett’s disappearance, or the fight with Dare or the men in the car.
I purposefully make my mind go blank. Needing a distraction from my thoughts I start to stretch and yawn. Dare immediately puts his phone down and turns to me.
“Hi,” he says, so simply it breaks my heart for some reason.
I don’t have it in me to greet him back. I can barely look at him. “Any of that for me?” I ask, nodding at the food on his tray.
“Half of it,” he says and gives me a little smile.
I reach for the coffee and the orange juice, nursing both of them. The hot and the cold feels so good on my throat. I realize that I’m parched.
“How’d you sleep?” he asks.
I shrug, not really wanting to talk. I feel like if I do, I’ll lose it. If I say anything, I’ll have to say everything. I’ll have to talk about what happened. My fears for my brothers. My shock over my father’s arrest. I’ll have to tell Dare that I’m so mad at him and so sad that he thinks I’d do any of the things he accused me of and I’ll have to tell him I love him.
So I say nothing. And just watch out the window as the ground comes up to meet our plane.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alessia
We’re in Scotland. The flight attendant announced our arrival as we landed and I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Dare’s family is Scottish. He says he used to spend his summers here and that after he enlisted in the army, his parents returned to their homeland.
But it did surprise me. I don’t know why, but it felt weird to be someplace so beautiful after going through something so ugly.
I’d planned to sleep on the car ride to wherever we were going, but I found I couldn’t. The landscape was just too beautiful. Dare paid a man at the airport in cash for the tiny little car he used to drive us north. We pass rolling green hills and dark green forests but the further north we go, snow covers the ground. The landscape blending in with the puffy white clouds in the sky.
I’m blown away by the beauty of it. It lulls me into the closest I could get to relaxation at a moment like this. The car ride is long. Almost six hours and by the time we pull up to a small house on the ocean, I’m starved, exhausted and utterly stretched to my limit.
“Alessia,” Dare says, coming around to my side of the car and pulling open the door. I look up at him, but not into his eyes. I can’t handle his eyes right now. He doesn’t say anything more. He just takes me by the hand and leads me toward the house.
The house is small and tidy, covered in peeling white paint and ivy. There’s a periwinkle door with a small Christmas wreath pinned to it. There’s patches of snow outside but it must have been a warm day because pools of the green-gray grass show through in the yard. I can smell a woodsy, burning scent and I look up to see smoke curling out of the chimney of the two-story house. I can see the steely gray ocean out beyond. It looks cold, impenetrable, constant.
Dare walks into the house without knocking and I hesitate at the threshold. Who is in here? But I don’t have the words or the energy to ask. I just keep following him. He leads me through the dated but tidy house, past the lumpy couch with its crocheted afghan, past the rosebud wallpaper and the crooked pictures on the wall I don’t even have time to look at. He leads me straight into the kitchen.
Two people sit around the small, wooden kitchen table. Dinner cooks away in a pot on the stove. A woman jumps up from the table, her salt and pepper hair in a neat braid down her back and an oversized sweater and men’s jeans covering her soft frame.
“Little one!” she yelps. “We didn’t even hear you pull up!” Her Scottish brogue is musical but subtle, as if there is an American accent mixed in there as well.
She rushes around the table and directly into Dare’s arms, pulling his kiss down for a cheek and tossing her arms around him. Little one? She was referring to Dare? The man is easily twice her size.
The man at the table is up almost as fast as the woman, coming around to greet us as well. He’s just a few inches shy of Dare’s tremendous height and his hair is a steely white, standing up off his head in just the way that Dare’s does. He we
ars almost the exact same outfit as his wife, an oversized sweater and men’s jeans. And when he gets close enough, I realize that he wears the exact same eyes as Dare.
Dark, hypnotic. Eyes that see right through you.
I immediately avert my gaze. If I’m not ready to get caught in that stare from Dare, then I’m certainly not ready for it from a stranger.
“Adair,” the man says, grinning and holding out his arms. His accent is much stronger than the woman’s. Dare and the man embrace as well, a manly hug filled with back slapping and affection. Before he pulls away, the man kisses Dare heartily on the cheek.
When the two strangers step away from him, all eyes turn to me. Dare immediately comes to me and puts his arm around my shoulder, fortifying me.
