Page 70 of You Can Run

Dante’s hand slid down, his palm cupping the damp heat of her breast. He felt the flutter of her pulse, a frantic, rhythmic plea. Every instinct he had—the gangster, the lover, the man—was screaming at him to pull her in, to bury his face in the crook of her neck and let the world outside burn to ash. He wanted to drown in her.

His fingers tightened slightly on her skin, his thumb brushing her nipple the way he knew she liked. Jessica made a small, soft sound—a broken note of surrender—and started to lean forward, her hands rising to find his chest.

Dante’s hand was a rough, calloused contrast to the heat of her skin. When his thumb grazed her skin, the friction sent a jolt through her that grounded her more than the floor beneath her feet. He didn't just look at her; he mapped her, his eyes searching for every change time had carved into her, and every part of her that still belonged to the girl he’d loved in Chicago.

Jessica reached out, her fingers catching in the coarse fabric of his shirt, pulling him in. Her mouth found his with a desperate, jagged hunger. It wasn't a soft kiss; it was a collision. It tasted of the Macallan on his breath and the salt on his skin, a frantic exchange of breath that felt like they were trying to breathe for each other.

Dante groaned low in his throat, a sound of pure, unadulterated surrender. His arms wrapped around her, his hands splayed against the small of her back, crushing her against him.

He lifted her, her legs instinctively locking around his waist, and she felt the heavy thud of his boots as he backed her out of the steam-filled bathroom. He didn't take her to the bed. He pressed her against the cool, dark wood of the bedroom door, his weight pinning her there.

“Jessica,” he rasped against her neck. “Tell me to stop. If you don't… I’m never letting you go again.”

“Don't you dare stop,” she whispered, her hands tangling in his dark hair, pulling his face back to hers. “Don't you dare.”

TWENTY-SIX

The Sicaria satin the dark of the rental car, engine off, tucked into the shadow of a warehouse a few miles down the coast. In her side mirror, the police barricades were still visible—blue and red strobing against the low sky, unhurried now, the chase's frantic energy dissolved into the slower work of documentation and tape. She watched them without urgency.

She reached into the glove box and took out a travel pack of wet wipes. She cleaned her face first, then her neck, then her hands, each finger individually, working into the creases of her knuckles. The wipe came away grey with soot and salt. She folded it, set it on the passenger seat, and took another.

She'd been ninety seconds away from shooting Ferrera when the cop pulled the trigger. Ninety seconds, maybe less. She'd had the angle. She'd had everything she needed. And then the universe had decided to be efficient about it, and now a dead Corpus Christi detective was doing the work she'd spent three weeks positioning herself to do, and the result was the same. But the circumstances were different, and different circumstances required different management.

She picked up the phone from under the seat and dialed.

Two rings.

“Sofia.” Borya's voice came through clearly and calmly, not sleep-fogged, despite it being three in the morning.

“Ferrera is dead,” she said. “But it wasn’t me. It was a local variable—a cop from Corpus Christi who followed the targets independently. He's also dead. Galveston PD chased his vehicle to the Seawall an hour ago.”

She listened to the silence and kept her voice level and thought about nothing that would change the quality of her breathing.

“The girl,” he said.

“In the wind. Castaño is with her. They were gone before the police established a perimeter. They're still on the island.”

“You're certain.”

“The causeway was monitored within four minutes. There was no exit window.” She looked at the strobing mirror, the methodical sweep of it. “They're here. On foot. When the sun comes up, they'll need to move, and when they move, I'll find them.”

He hung up without another word.

She set the phone face-down on the dash and looked at the mirror again. In an hour the sky would start to change. In two, the island would shake itself awake—dog walkers, early joggers, the first fishing boats clearing the jetty.

She checked her watch. She would give it until morning. Let the adrenaline wane, let the exhaustion win.

Then she'd go finish what she'd started years ago. Not the job Borya had given her, but the one she'd given herself, in a room she didn't think about anymore unless she had to.

Eleven thousand kilometres away, Borya Sokolov sat at a small Formica-topped table in the kitchen of his house outside Constan?a, peeling an apple.

The skin came off in one long, unbroken red spiral beneath the paring knife. His hands were thick-fingered and liver-spotted—still the hands of a man who'd spent his youth hauling crates on the Vladivostok docks, though the docks were forty years and several lifetimes behind him. The kitchen smelled of strong coffee and the faint, pervasive damp of the Black Sea coast.

A television murmured in the corner, muted, tuned to an American news feed. He watched the footage from Galveston: the burning truck, the barricades, the breathless reporter standing in front. Borya took a crisp bite of the apple.

The cop reminded him of his brother Sasha.

Not in any meaningful way. Sasha had been genuinely intelligent, which was what had made him dangerous rather than merely reckless. But they shared the same fundamental miscalculation: the belief that proximity to power was the same thing as possessing it. The cop had thought he could insert himself into an operation he didn't understand and come out the other side holding something. Sasha had thought the same thing, thirteen years ago, when he'd decided that his intelligence entitled him to a private future.