I jabbed my elbow up and back and connected with Karl’s thick jaw at the same time, I whirled and knifed the edge of my palm into his throat. In another fluid movement, I withdrew his nightstick and swung it up into the other guard’s groin as he moved toward me. He howled and sunk to the ground. The first guard, Karl, had somehow recovered from my neck punch and managed to get in a closed-fisted blow to my face before I was able to take out his kneecaps with the nightstick, sending him to the floor. With both men collapsed and groaning, I turned to face Solange. The whole thing had taken less than five seconds, but it had given her time to arm herself.
She stood behind her desk, face bright red, arms extended, both hands grasping a massive silver handgun pointed my way.
“Plus un geste! On ne bouge plus! Ne bougez plus!”
I didn’t speak French, but I got the gist. Without looking, I reached behind me and twisted the doorknob, opening the door.
“Ne bougez plus!”
I watched her eyes. She wouldn’t pull the trigger. I raced out of the office and down the hall. I had nowhere to run.
What was I going to do? Jump overboard?
Fuck me.
I ran. I headed for the door marked “Stairwell” and took off toward the upper decks. For some reason higher felt safer. But as soon as I ducked into the stairwell, I saw a security camera bolted to the corner near the ceiling. I remembered that Solange had said they had some cameras operational.
I was still holding the security guard’s nightstick. I got a running start, jumped up, and whacked the camera, hearing the satisfying crunch of plastic and metal. The red light stopped blinking, so I figured it worked. I did the same on the next level and the next. Then I raced back down to the landing with the first broken camera and slipped out into the passageway. Having them search three decks would buy me some time.
In the hall, I searched the ceilings but didn’t see any more security cameras.
A group of men turned into the hall at the opposite end. All sandy-haired. Scandinavians, I’d bet. I was still in my bikini.
It was a long hallway, and several men peeled off, unlocking cabin doors and giving me sideways glances before slipping inside. By the time I met up with them, only one man remained.
“I know this sounds crazy. But I need your help. Can you please hide me in your cabin? Just for a few minutes? Please? My boyfriend is chasing me. He did this.” I gestured to my cheek where I could feel a bruise forming from the guard’s punch. I also knew I had a split lip.
The man looked concerned. “Shouldn’t we call security? Or the ship’s doctor?” He had a Swedish accent.
“Yes. But first get me out of this hall.” I shot a desperate look behind me. It wasn’t an act. Any minute, security could come bursting out of the stairwell or elevator.
He snapped out of his daze. “Of course.” He slid his keycard.
Within seconds we were inside his suite
I took in the man before me. He had nice smile lines around his eyes. He reached for the phone. “We must call security.”
I put my hand on his wrist, stopping him from picking up the phone receiver. “My situation? It’s complicated. Can we wait. Can I just rest here for a bit? Maybe we can have a drink and watch TV?”
He raised an eyebrow, his arm still outstretched toward the phone.
“Please.” My eyes met his. He hesitated for a second before saying, “Okay,” and heading for the bar.
“What can I make you?”
“Bourbon. Straight.”
We ended up playing cards. The man, who said his name was Sven, had loaned me some baggy sweatpants and a T-shirt that I’d thrown on over my bikini.
But as I played and laughed along, my brain was furiously trying to figure out how the hell I was going to stay hidden from the detective and her goons until we reached port.
Then my cell phone rang.
Chapter Nineteen
Black Widow
“The Engine Room.”
It was Natasha.
She said the words and then hung up.
I turned to Sven. “Thanks. Gotta run.”
It took me a while to find my way below decks to the engine room. It was eerily deserted—convenient, as I wouldn’t have to come up with an excuse as to why I’d wandered into a crew-only area.
The engine room was at the end of a long hallway. I turned the door lever slowly and stepped inside. The room smelled like gas—both gasoline and natural gas. The engine sound was deafening.
The lights were dim and the ceilings low. It took me a minute to make out Natasha standing near the door. As soon as I stepped inside, she slammed the door behind me and then stood in front of it.
She looked older, jaded, wiser. She held a massive dagger in front of her.
It was if we’d never met. The woman before me was completely unrecognizable. Sure, the surface was the same, but everything down to the way she held herself—defiant, angry, hard—was different.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Were we ever friends?”
She didn’t answer. She turned her head slightly, her chin jutting to one side. Her gaze reached somewhere over my shoulder, not meeting my eyes.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“It’s not personal.” She pointed the dagger my way. My instinct was that I could easily take her out, but I remembered her talking about her martial arts training. I didn’t want to underestimate her. I’d wait and watch.
“I never expected the detective would focus on me,” she said. “She was supposed to arrest Sharon Long. Nothing was supposed to happen this way. There wasn’t supposed to be any blood. Henry was just supposed to fall overboard—a mysterious disappearance. I was never supposed to be a murder suspect! I had to do something to take the attention away from myself.”
“What about Sharon Long? Did she have anything at all to do with this? Why did you kill her, too?”
Natasha, or whatever her name was, had the good grace to bite her lip and look down.
“Another convenient scapegoat for you?”
“Sharon had to die. She found out about my past.”
“You mean the string of dead husbands you’ve left behind.”
It was a guess, but when she looked up, I knew I was right. Her gaze was icy and filled with hate.
“If she hadn’t told Henry, she’d still be alive. But she warned him. When we were in Gibraltar, she told him. He didn’t believe her at first. I had to move up my plan and that’s how everything went wrong.”
“You are the Black Widow.” I was stalling, trying to figure out how to distract her and then disable her.
“You don’t know. You don’t know anything about me.” She flung out her hand. “You don’t know anything about struggle, or poverty, or being a girl in the Ukraine.
“You don’t know what it’s like to grow up so poor that your father lets the soldiers rape you so he can keep his crops. Where your father puts a bullet through his head because he’s forced to do this to his daughter. You don’t know me. You don’t know my life.”
I hesitated. Her life and childhood could not have been more different than mine. That was true. But it was no excuse.
“None of that gives you the right to kill.”
“Did you arrange for Sharon to meet you in Tangier?”
“She suspected me. I told her I’d tell her what I knew in the medina. She was foolish. She thought she could take me. Stupid woman.”
I tilted my head. “Actually, I think she was the only smart one in this whole ordeal. She was the only one who knew what was going on. You had me and Henry fooled. And frankly, I don’t think you’ve been too smart about this, either. Might as well turn yourself in now. It’s over, Natasha.”
She glared at me and waved the dagger. “You are wrong.”
“Put that away. Let’s go. I don’t want to hurt you.”
When she burst into laughter—that familiar tinkling sound I’d heard as she’d first approached the ship—I paused.
There was an unshakable confidence there that I hadn’t expected.
She spun and I felt the blade of the knife sink into my arm. Before I could react, she withdrew it and sliced at my leg, going for my femoral artery. When my leg didn’t start shooting blood, I knew she’d missed.
I screamed in pain and anger at the same time one of her feet slammed into my chest and sent me plunging to the floor, smacking my back on the grated floor and knocking the wind out of me.
That’s when I knew I’d seriously underestimated her.
Chapter Twenty
Out of Time
She came at me again, a blur of red hair and rage. Still fighting for breath, I propelled my feet forward into her stomach. She gasped in surprise and tumbled back into the metal wall with a thud. I scrambled to my feet. The effort sent waves of pain through my leg.
I stood, my good arm in front of me in a defensive position. The other hung useless at my side, dripping blood onto the grated floor.
Natasha pushed herself off the wall and advanced toward me. She stopped about six feet away. Her feet were shoulder-width apart for balance. She grasped the knife with the blade against her forearm. My blood trickled down the edge.
Motherfucker.
“I guess your Hopak training was more than just a finishing school, wasn’t it?” I said, stalling. My arm oozed blood. I had to find a way to staunch the flow.
I slipped the tee over my head. I wrapped it tightly around my wounded arm, cinching it with my teeth. I kept my eyes on Natasha, wary of her next attack. I gave my leg a pat. My hand came back wet with blood, but it wasn’t bad. It did, however, hurt like a bitch.
“I didn’t do the traditional Hopak,” Natasha said, panting. “My uncle wanted me to be a warrior—a fighter for our country. I trained in combat Hopak. A lot like your MMA fighting.” She cocked her head. “You know what that is?”
“You’re not so helpless after all, are you?” I said.
“It is our advantage as women. We will always be dismissed, ignored, underestimated.”
She was right. It made me sad that a smart, beautiful, skilled woman like her had to be my enemy instead of my friend. Her eyes were dead cold. Flat like a shark’s eyes.
All sympathy for her disappeared.
“You are heartless. You killed a man who adored you. And for what? He would have given you everything you ever wanted, Natasha.”
“I want money on my own terms. I don’t want to be a kept woman. I want to be the one who keeps the women. I want to live life on my own terms. I want to be so powerful that nobody can ever tell me what to do again,” her voice rose in anger.
She slipped her free hand into her pocket and withdrew something small and pink. Metal glinted in the dim light. She ran a finger over the top of it. A small, disposable lighter. Mine. I hadn’t even realized it was missing.
The smell of gasoline suddenly seemed overpowering. My eyes roamed the room. In the corner, I saw dark liquid spilling from a pipe with an open valve. At that spot, dark liquid spilled out, dripping down the inside of the ship’s wall to the ground where it formed a puddle.
Natasha flicked the lighter. The small orange-red flame reflected in her eyes. She blocked my path to the door. Given my injuries and her training I wasn’t sure I could take her out. If I could get her on the ground, however, she was mine.
But she kept her distance.
She knelt to the floor without taking her eyes off of me. In the light of the flickering flame, I saw madness there. She lowered her arm toward the floor. There was a “whooomp” as the gasoline caught, and an inferno engulfed the back of the room. Flames crept up the wall, leaving a trail of black in its wake. She drew her arm back to her, still not taking her eyes off me.
The flames began to travel up the wall. I calculated the distance between us. I needed to take her out and get through the door before we either burned up or the compartment exploded.
Suddenly, torrents of water screamed out of a series of overhead sprinklers. The overhead lights went out and blinking, red emergency lights lit up the room.
“So much for that plan,” I said.
But the sound quickly died in my throat as I watched Natasha throw her head back and open her mouth, eagerly embracing the water.
She licked a few drops of water off her lips and smiled. “My plan is going exactly as I wanted.”
“How so?” I tried to distract her with the question as I slowly inched toward her, keeping my back on the rounded wall behind me. I winced as my foot brushed up against something on the floor, sending a shooting pain up my leg.
I heard a click above me. I looked up. A cylinder had dropped from the ceiling near the sprinklers. It was suspended in the air.
“What’s that?” I shot a look at Natasha.
She just smiled and reached behind her.
I looked again at the cylinder. I remembered Natasha deep in conversation with the captain of the ship one night at dinner about the ship’s fire safeguards.
They’d discussed a crystalline substance that sucked all the oxygen out of a room.
Without oxygen, the fire would die.
And so would we. Maybe she was that desperate.
Natasha pulled a mask from a peg. “Ironic that the same material that is about to kill you, will save me, isn’t it?” With one hand, she deftly pulled the mask over her head and pressed a button near the jaw. The knife she held between us never wavered.
Her eyes were beady through the plastic mask.
That’s when I understood. She was waiting. For me to die.
For a second I wondered if there was anything I could say to get myself out of there, but I couldn’t afford to waste what precious air there was on words.
I’d have to fight my way out.
Already, I could feel the lack of oxygen. For a split-second I was overcome with euphoria—an inexplicable hope and happiness in this shit-poor situation. At the same time, I could feel a headache coming on. I felt dizzy and a little confused. I stared at Natasha. Why did she want me dead? I shook my head as if to clear it. I knew these were all signs that my body was deprived of oxygen. Then, it hit hard when I found I couldn’t catch my breath.
I tried to clear my fuzzy thinking. I needed to do something while I still had my wits about me. My throat was scratchy and painful, and my chest fought to find oxygen.
I didn’t have a plan. At least not anything that would work. But I was out of time.
I rushed her, ignoring the screaming pain shooting from my leg up to my skull.
She jabbed at my side, as I expected she would, so my attack came in a wide circle. I ended up away from the knife and slightly behind her. I kicked at the back of her calves with my good leg, and she stumbled.
As her head dipped while she tried to regain her balance, I yanked the oxygen mask off her head and flung it in the corner. She whirled on me in a flurry—a blur of fists and feet and a silver blade—all heading my way. I used the side of my palm to thwack her wrist and the knife went flying. But her other hand was at the ready, moving toward my head. I tried to feint but the oxygen depletion had made my reflexes slower, and I took a hard fist under my chin, sending me reeling back.
The momentum and my injured leg sent me off balance, and I crashed into a piece of engine equipment. It scraped the shit out of my bare back, but at least it kept me upright. I dodged her next volley of punches, keeping an eye on the oxygen mask to my right. It had landed on a set of pipes.
I braced myself and kicked with my wounded leg, surprising Natasha. Pain exploded up my thigh, but I managed to sweep her legs from under her. I saw her fall in slow motion toward the sharp corner of a piece of engine equipment. I even started to raise my arm to catch her. There was a sickening crack and the pipe rang out with a clang.
Fear shot through me. Even though I’d been fighting for my life, I’d been holding back. I didn’t want to kill her. She deserved to die, but a part of me still cared about her. The first real female friend I’d had. But then
I remembered she wanted me dead. I meant nothing to her.
Keeping my eyes on her, I reached over and plucked the oxygen mask off the pipe where it dangled and strapped it on. Natasha remained motionless. Her chest heaved as she sucked for air that wasn’t there. She needed medical attention. The door was just beyond her. I stepped over her, expecting her to kick me or throw a knife at me, but she didn’t move. I wrenched at the door handle and then leaned all my weight on the door to push it open. I was weak, but the oxygen flowing through the mask was helping. I started to feel a little more clear-headed. Natasha groaned. She was alive. In the flickering red light, I could make out a darker spot, a small puddle near the back of her head and dripping down into the grated floor. I stepped into the hallway. On the wall was a big red button. I wasn’t sure what it would do, but I knew it would summon help. I punched it and alarms blared.
Within moments, the area was bustling with security, ship workers, and a very perplexed Detective Solange.
Chapter Twenty-One
I Can’t Afford To Have Friends
Sitting in a police station in Lisbon, the officer handed me my passport and told me I was free to go. I took it with my good arm. My left arm was thickly bandaged. The doctors had told me that I might need surgery once I got back to the states. My leg had thirteen stitches in it.
When I stepped out, Detective Solange was standing in the hall, her back against the wall. She didn’t seem happy that I’d been cleared of two murders, but once I’d told her what had happened with Natasha after I’d escaped her office, she’d gone to investigate Natasha’s penthouse suite.
They’d found the case with the passports and on a laptop, her online journal detailing her identities and the lives she’d lived. Later, they’d traced her passports, and each had led to the missing wife of a man who had mysteriously disappeared or died. After they took her into custody for trying to kill me, they’d found blood and brain matter on her wedding ring—some type of splatter from the attack on Henry. The blonde woman, Greta, had caved under questioning and admitted that Natasha had paid her twenty thousand dollars’ cash to say Natasha had been in her suite until three the morning of Henry’s murder.
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