Page 207 of Made in Love and Blood

“But everybody thinks she’s in Milan.”

“Doesn’t matter. Things happen, people talk, and then they’ll go looking. Or an attack on the property could leave her vulnerable—”

“Attack?”

Larkin dragged in a heavy breath and then exhaled harshly. “Okay, this is part of the reason we’re not supposed to talk and discuss in detail.”

“Don’t you have a dove, too?” she asked quietly in the backseat. “Shouldn’t she be kept safe?”

Larkin chuckled under his breath. “Don’t worry about her. Sissy’s a better shot than all of us combined. She knows what to do.”

The same Sissy who couldn’t kill a spider?

“Never would’ve guessed,” she admitted.

“Who do you think she learned how to shoot for?”

•••

Somewhere, USA — Location Unknown

Three weeks later...

Frankie edged closer to the sliding glass doors leading to a private closed-in balcony attached to the suite of rooms where their group currently resided. A week earlier, the group finally stopped moving from place to place, day to day, and no one bothered to explain why.

She knew better than to ask, too.

“So,” she heard Carina say just outside the doors, “he’s called them all in.”

“They sit down today,” Larkin confirmed.

“He’s got them that far, then.”

A throat cleared behind Frankie. She rolled her eyes, but glanced over her shoulder to see one of the two men that accompanied Larkin on this adventure of theirs.

“Yes?” she asked him.

Gabriel, that was his name. Larkin just called him Gabe.

“Stop spying.”

“Mmm, no thanks.”

As he hadn’t come from the estate’s security staff, she didn’t know where Larkin found him or how he got the job of protecting and escorting them all over hell’s creation.

Another thing not to ask.

The other man, currently showering, she did know from the estate. Dannik. He spoke very little English, but understood it well enough, the Frenchman, but he’d sure mastered how to tell Frankie no without a hint of accent.

Could she go outside for a walk? No.

Could she change the movie to the news? No.

Could she order her own food from a hotel she didn’t even know the name of? No.

She couldn’t remember a time, ever, in her life when she had been told that word as much as she heard it in the last three weeks.

“If they all come to an agreement at the table today,” Larkin said outside, “then we’ll be back home soon enough.”