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“Wally Henderson is highly connected,” Peter explained to me a couple of weeks ago. “He caught wind of what’s going on long before anyone else on my list, and he staged a disappearance worthy of Houdini. So far, every lead our hackers have followed has led exactly nowhere. As far as we can tell, he’s not in contact with anyone from his former life—neither friends nor coworkers nor distant relatives—and he hasn’t made a single slip. No appearances on social media by his teenagers, no credit card use, nothing. A lot of his background is classified, but rumor has it, he was a CIA operative at some point, possibly a field agent working deep under cover. And while we haven’t been able to discover the specifics of how he’s doing it, it seems he’s been pressuring the authorities to turn up the heat from wherever he’s hiding.”
“You think he knows he’s the last name on your list?” I asked.
“I’m sure he does,” Peter replied. “Like I said, he’s connected, and not just in Washington D.C. He knows everyone in the international intelligence community, and he’s leveraging that to make me as high priority as any ISIS leader.”
I’ve been trying not to think about the implications of that, but it’s impossible. I can’t put my worry for Peter out of my mind. By all rights, I should cheer for the general and hope the authorities find my captor, liberating me in the process, but rational thinking seems to be beyond me these days.
“Why don’t you stop these jobs altogether?” I ask now as we approach the stream. “You must have enough money already.”
Peter shoots me an oblique look. “There’s no such thing as enough money when you’re on the run,” he says and pulls off his T-shirt, exposing a powerfully muscled torso. “Private planes and helicopters don’t come cheap.”
I look away to avoid flushing as he steps out of his shorts—he’s commando underneath—and wades into the stream after kicking off his boots. I see him naked all the time, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of his tautly muscled body on my senses. Nature has blessed my captor with a perfectly proportioned male frame—broad shoulders, narrow hips, long, strong-boned limbs—and intense military training has given him a physique Olympic athletes would envy. But it’s not his looks that fill my veins with liquid heat; it’s the knowledge that if I so much as glance at him in a certain way, the dark fire that always simmers between us will blaze out of control, and I’ll end up in his arms, screaming his name as he takes me against the slippery rocks.
“You know, you wouldn’t need all those planes and helicopters if you didn’t venture out as much,” I point out when he’s safely covered by the water. My voice is huskier than I would’ve liked, but at least my face is not bright red. “You’d be safer, and you wouldn’t have to… you know.”
“Kill people?” he suggests dryly.
“Right.” I busy myself by stripping down to my swimsuit as Peter turns to float on his back, leisurely moving his arms to offset the current. I don’t like thinking about the gruesome reality of Peter’s profession, not in any kind of depth, at least. I’m obviously aware that he’s a killer, but as long as I don’t dwell on it, it’s more of an abstract concept than something that’s constantly at the forefront of my mind.
Today, though, I can’t push it out of my thoughts, and as I wade into the deeper portion of the stream next to Peter, I find myself asking, “Do you like it? Is that why you do what you do?”
I expect him to deny it, to claim necessity or upbringing as the driving force behind his career choice, but he turns upright to face me, a dark smile curving his lips as he answers, “Of course I do, ptichka. Did you ever imagine otherwise?”
I stare at him, my skin pebbling with goosebumps as the current rushes around me, the water covering me up to my chest. The stream that felt refreshing a moment ago now feels like liquid ice, as chilling as that storm we were caught in. “You like killing?”
He nods, his eyes bright silver in the sunlight. “Death, like life, has its own allure,” he says softly, stepping closer to draw me against his large, warm body. “It’s a dark allure, but it’s there, and every soldier knows it. As a doctor, you must’ve seen it sometimes: the way pain transforms into the bliss of nothingness, agony into the peace of nonexistence. Death ends all struggles, heals all hurts. And dealing death… there’s nothing quite like it. You feel it: the vulnerability of yourself and everything surrounding you, but also the power. The control. It’s addictive, once you’ve experienced it… once you’ve held someone’s life in your hands and extinguished it on purpose.”
