by Rachel Rust
Eddie’s arms pulled me in tighter. “Guess you don’t need me anymore if you can kick ass like that, huh?”
I smirked. “I’m going to ignore the condescension in that remark.”
Eddie gave me wounded look. “I’m not being condescending.”
I cocked an eyebrow which made him laugh. The notification on my phone stated that Luke had texted me.
Luke: Where are you? Call ASAP.
“I need to call Luke.” As soon as I dialed his number, Eddie snatched the phone from my hand. “Give that back,” I demanded.
A moment later, I heard Luke pick up and start yelling at me—or rather, at Eddie.
Eddie chuckled. “Shut up. She’s with me. I got this.” He ended the call.
“But…” I stared at the blank screen. “I needed to talk to Luke.”
Eddie ignored me and threw my phone into a large garbage can next to the wall.
“What are you doing? Get my phone out of there!” I moved toward the trash, but Eddie stepped in my way, grabbing my upper arms.
“You need to leave it here,” he said. “It’s being tracked.”
“But it’s brand new, no one from the FBI has even touched it.”
Eddie grinned, not even trying to hide his inner, arrogant FBI persona. “They don’t need access to your physical phone to start tracking it.”
“Well, that’s not surprising,” I said, hands on hips. “I’m basically a microchipped dog.”
“You’re far too pretty for that comparison.”
I glared at him. “Don’t patronize me. And give me my phone, I need to talk to Luke and find out what happened to that Remy Elena chick. And he needs to tell me where I’m supposed to spend the night.”
“You’re staying with me. You can’t stay at the dorm anymore. Like I said, you’ve been responsible for two of Sergei’s people going down and he is most likely rethinking his plan to keep you alive as bait to lure me in. He’s probably pissed and has decided to just deal with you the way Sergei normally deals with people.”
“A bullet.”
“Exactly. You need to lay low.”
“But what about my classes? I can’t not go to class.”
“It’s the first week. Nothing important ever happens in the first week.”
I stepped back from Eddie. “Well, excuse me, mister college boy. That’s easy for you to say since you’re old and wise and finished with school. But my dad will kill me if I don’t go to class.”
“Sergei might kill you if you do go to class.”
I snapped my jaw shut. Fuck. I hated being outsmarted.
If I didn’t show up to class, if I blew my Columbia opportunity, my dad wouldn’t look at me the same ever again. But Eddie was right. If I did show up for class, if I stuck my neck out, I might not be alive long enough to see my dad hate me.
I glanced around the dingy passageway, praying there weren’t sleeping bags around the corner. Eddie had an apartment somewhere in the city, but there was no way we could stay there. Sergei and the FBI likely had multiple eyes on that location.
“Where are we staying tonight?” I asked
“I have a place. It’s not fancy, and it’s a long walk, but it’s safe.”
I steadied my breaths, trying to convince myself that this was really happening. I had no sooner arrived at college only to be scurried away, my safety at risk.
Glancing at the garbage can, I asked, “What if someone finds my phone? They’ll think I’ve been kidnapped or something.”
“Tomorrow’s garbage day. It’ll be hauled off overnight. For tonight, anyone who’s tracking your phone will think you’re in the library. By the time they figure out you’re not, you’ll be long gone. And if your dad can’t get ahold of you for a while, he’ll just assume you’re busy making friends.”
My eyes closed at mention of my dad. When they reopened, I found Eddie staring at me. If I had to be in this situation, at least he was there, finally in front of me again. I rested my forehead against his chest. Feeling his solidity, his protection, his very presence. Our lives were on the line. One misstep and it’d be all over. There’d be no more us, only the memory of us.
He kissed the top of my head.
“Let’s go,” I said softly, as though a low tone of voice would make leaving campus less scary.
Eddie took my hand in his and led me deeper into the passageway. I clung to him, trusting him, but not having a damn clue where life was leading me.
Chapter Five
The passageways went on longer than I had expected. We turned a few corners and I lost all sense of direction. Most corridors had pipes, some that steamed as we walked past. We passed through one small room that had a fenced-off section with what looked like water meters or some kind of gauges inside. They hissed at us, as though passing judgment on our actions.
Around the next corner, we went up a few steps and through a heavy door. Eddie and I emerged into a long hallway with white tile flooring and walls punctuated by heavy, wood-paneled doors. The building was dark, closed up for the night.
“Where are we now?”
“Beats me,” Eddie said. “An administration building, I think.”
“Do you even know where you’re going?” I asked as he led me further into the building.
“Sort of. We just need to find an exit.”
“What if Sergei’s men or the FBI are around here when we exit?”
“They think you’re in the library, remember?”
We came upon an exit at the middle of the hallway—large double doors leading out into the street.
“It’s locked,” I said.
Eddie dropped my hand and moved to a white alarm box near the door. He pried the cover open, inspected the wires for a few seconds, and then yanked one free. After closing the cover, he kneeled down next to me, in front of the door. From his pocket, he retrieved a slender, silver tool which he jimmied into the lock. A moment later, the door unlatched. He stood up, holding it open. “After you.”
I didn’t move. I just stared at him. I had witnessed Eddie in action as an FBI agent several times before. I had seen him gun-in-hand, I had read criminal files he’d put together. I thought I had a decent grasp on his skills as an agent, but there was a lot more to him than I had once thought. He could be sneaky, disabling alarms and picking locks. More like a criminal than law enforcement—though when it came down to sly talents, maybe those two groups weren’t very different at all.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked as I continued my stare.
“That was cool, what you just did. Like, super illegal and cool.”
He shrugged, but the smile that curled up on his lips threatened to destroy his modesty.
The building exited onto a side street. From there we moved south, through what appeared to be off-campus housing for older students. We stuck to small streets and alleyways. We walked for blocks, hand-in-hand, no questions asked. The city was alive with scents on every block, from coffee and food to garbage and piss.
After a while, our silence got to me, and my feet started to hurt. I should have grabbed my Nikes.
“How much longer?” I asked.
“A few more blocks.”
“So, what happened to Remy?”
“Elena.”
“Whatever. I didn’t see any cop cars show up at the dorm. Who came for her?”
“The FBI. We don’t like to come with lights and sirens like the cops do. We like back passages and slipping in and out silently whenever possible.”
His use of the word we when talking about the FBI gave me hope that he himself hadn’t given up hope. In his mind, he obviously still thought of himself as part of that bureau and had every intention of being reinstated as an agent.
“What’s going to happen to Elena now?” I asked.
“She’ll be turned over to ICE, since she’s here illegally. Although, she won’t make it back to Russia.”
“Why not?”
“Sergei’s employees are one of tw
o things—currently working for him, or in a body bag. Kind of like with Brandon, no one lives to identify Sergei Romanov. And no one is an ex-employee of his. It’s an inexpensive retirement plan … a fifty-cent bullet in the back their head.”
“So, she’s dead.”
“Yes, and if not yet, then soon.”
“Great,” I said, jumping off a curb over a puddle of water. “I’ve basically killed two people now.”
“No,” Eddie said, stopping and swinging me around by my hand until we were face-to-face. “You did not kill either Brandon or Elena and you need to get that through your head. You are not responsible for their fucked-up careers or their deaths. None of that is on you, do you understand?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said in a small voice.
Over the summer, my psychologist, Cate, had expressed the same sentiment—that none of this was my fault. Not the danger I was in, not the terrible events I had witnessed, and not any of the deaths. Intellectually, I knew she and Eddie were right, but I had a hard time convincing my guilt to go away. Wherever I went, terrible things happened and people got hurt, or worse.
Eddie pulled me to him and kissed my forehead. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
We continued down the block, which was littered with garbage men collecting neighborhood trash. The trucks grumbled as the workers dragged plastic garbage cans down the concrete sidewalk.
“Did you like my Romeo and Juliet note?” Eddie asked with a grin.
“Yes, but you shouldn’t have chosen Romeo and Juliet.”
“I thought it was romantic.”
“They both die in the end.”
He paused a moment. “But it’s romantic up until then, right?”
“No, it’s a story of communication errors and it drives me crazy. I hate Romeo and Juliet.”
Eddie laughed. “Okay, next time I’ll use something else. How about Othello? Is Othello romantic?”
“Othello kills his own wife.”
“Oh. What about MacBeth?”
“MacBeth kills everyone.”
“Damn. Shakespeare is a bummer.”
“King of the tragedy.” I latched on tighter to Eddie’s hand, aware there was no guaranteed amount of time that I’d be able to hold onto him—to have contact with him in any way. I needed to seize whatever time we had together, in case our own tragic ending was just around the corner. “No more talk about Shakespeare.”
He squeezed my hand in response.
After another block, we turned left into an alley. He led me to a fire escape and motioned for me to go up first.
“Seriously?”
“You wanna live?” He pointed to the ladder. “Then climb.”
I groaned and grabbed the first rung. This sort of adventure was way more awesome-looking in movies than in real life. In real life, the metal was cold, wet, and creaked as we climbed to the third floor.
We slipped inside through a small window which led to a hallway. The walls were off-white and grimy with age. The carpet was red along the edges—probably its original color—but brown in the middle, courtesy of heavy foot traffic. Two doors down, Eddie put a key in the doorknob. His other hand reached around and gripped a gun that was in the waist of his pants.
He opened the door a few inches and waited. Then a few more inches and peered inside.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said, nodding for me to follow him into the room.
The red décor of the hallway continued into the small motel room. There was a double bed covered in a red bedspread, off-white walls, and red carpet. The bathroom was to the left, just large enough for a toilet, a sink, and a shower.
Under the window, a small air conditioner grumbled. Though the stagnant, sticky air of the room made it clear that noise level did not equate to productivity. The little thing couldn’t keep up with the humidity of the late summer.
“I know it’s not fancy,” Eddie said. “But like I said, it’s safe.”
“It’s fine,” I said, pushing down my discomfort. I didn’t like to think of myself as a total snob, but my experiences with hotel rooms had included plush mattresses, nice-smelling shampoo samples, and fuzzy robes. Not dingy, low-lit places that charged by the hour.
Eddie’s fingers landed on my bruised temple.
“She rammed my head into the wall, but I’m fine.”
“You sure?” he asked.
Pride curled up on my lips. “I took the bitch down. That’s all the matters.” I stepped closer to him, wrapping my arms around his torso. For two months, I had longed to do just that—to feel him against me and make up for lost time.
The heat of the room enclosed us, a perfect match to our body heat. We were finally together—and truly alone for the first time since the night of our doomed study date. We needed to make the most of it, because time was not on our side. Any moment could be the one when Sergei busted in and ended it all. Or any second Luke was likely to blow up Eddie’s phone, pissed as hell.
Up on my tip toes, I had the perfect access to Eddie’s neck. My lips pressed to his flesh, the scent of which filled my nose and stirred my libido. I dragged my mouth along his jawline until it bumped his earlobe, sending a small sigh from his mouth.
But he drew his head back, pulling away from my kisses.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
With raised eyebrows, he huffed a single laugh, looking around the crappy room. “Where shall I start?”
When I realized he wasn’t kidding, that he really was rebuffing me, I stepped back from him, releasing my arms around his waist.
I didn’t want to let him go, but I couldn’t use my lips and hands to pretend nothing was amiss. Deep down, I knew he was right—everything was wrong. The time. The place. We weren’t on some romantic getaway with island breezes and palm trees out the window. Hell, we weren’t even back at the Cartwright Hotel downtown Rapid City. We were in survival mode.
Eddie reached for me as I turned to the bed, but I slipped from his grasp.
“Natalie, wait, I didn’t mean…”
Ignoring him, I kicked off my black flats and lay on the bed. The firm mattress barely moved under my weight. Even without being here himself, Sergei was ruining what little romance Eddie and I could find.
Eddie joined me on the bed, lying on his side, facing me. His thumb caressed my cheek as he spoke. “I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just this place isn’t exactly … you deserve so much more than this shit-stain of a motel room. You shouldn’t have to be here. You should be back at your dorm room, excited for classes, meeting new people.” He paused, pulling his hand away from my face. “You shouldn’t even have to know me.”
Hearing his last words, I looked directly at him, challenging him with my stare. “Don’t say that. Maybe the circumstances about why I know you are pretty messed up, but I could never regret knowing you.” I grabbed the bill of his hat and flipped it off his head before he could stop me. My fingers brushed through his brown hair. “You’re kind of handsome, too.”
He smiled and my insides churned.
“This isn’t how I pictured us being in New York together,” he said. “But the important thing is that you’re safe. Elena Novka is bad news and you’re lucky as hell to be out of her grasp. Most people who have met her can’t say the same.”
“Because they’re dead?”
“Yeah,” he said, hooking a strand of my hair behind my ear. “How about we talk about normal things now? Tell me about the rest of your summer.”
I struggled to speak at first—how did one switch from survival mode to quaint chit-chat? But as the words began coming out of me, it got easier. Eddie was a good listener and it didn’t hurt that his pretty brown eyes never left my face.
I told him about working at November with Luke. The crappy mall food, and my hope that I never had to work retail again. I told him about how I finally broke down and began seeing a counselor to work on my fear and anxiety of everything that had happened. I went back further in time, telli
ng him about my graduation, how Josh had tripped into his cake, rendering it inedible. So we’d had to split my cake into even smaller pieces to make sure there was enough. Eddie laughed when I told him about Josh’s born-again Christian roommate out at Central Dakota University. And he gave me a pained look when I told him about being disappointed that my mom hadn’t come to New York to help me move to campus. She hadn’t even called or texted to check in with me yet.
He talked about the last two months he had spent in hiding, though the stories were vague and stilted, as though not wanting to worry me with all the gritty details. He had spent some time in Rapid City, but also went back to Omaha where his FBI task force had once been assigned. From there, he came back to New York, though he hadn’t been back to his own apartment, stating that it was “the first place they’d look for me.”
We’d had two very different summers, but the one thing Eddie and I had in common, besides Sergei, was each other. Not being able to see or speak to one another had affected us both.
As we spoke and commiserated, our voices lowered and our bodies nudged closer, until we whispered, just inches apart. The stifling air had coated our skin with a thin layer of sweat, but neither of us complained. Because as we talked and shared more stories, it became increasingly evident that we were bound to get much sweatier before the night was through.
As Eddie was telling me about how he had been pulled over for speeding by an Illinois State Trooper while on his way to New York, I zoned out. I still heard the words, but my brain pushed them aside, preferring the visual instead. Eddie’s smiling eyes, his straight, white teeth, and muscular neck.
My lips cut him off mid-sentence. This time he didn’t pull back. He kissed back and reached around me, cupping my ass, yanking me up against him. There wasn’t any more talking after that—at least not the conversational kind, just the grunted, dirty kind.
When we finally fell asleep, it was to the sound of garbage trucks rumbling outside, and with a thin bedsheet clinging to our sweaty bodies.
Chapter Six
