Page 145 of Lethal Obsession

This time the voice is mine, coming from somewhere deep inside me.

I picture Alexei’s scarred, hard face, the fierce light in his eye when he looks at me, and move slowly forward.

When I get out of here, I think with an almost savage certainty, I’m coming to you.

Ironically, in the thick black silence, that thought is starkly clear.

I’m not spending one more day of my life adrift, waiting for someone to decide my future for me.

I take a step, then another, walking toward the future I’ve continually allowed other people to determine, and as I walk, I stop thinking about the fetid water and darkness and start thinking about what I’m walking toward.

I have no idea how long I walk like that for. But eventually my fingers find a metal railing.

I grope along it and realize it’s a ladder. I pause for a while, wondering if it’s safer to just stay here in the darkness or try to climb it.

If they make Seline talk, she’ll tell them you’re down here.

That prospect is enough to galvanize me.

I hang off the ladder, testing it with my weight. When it seems solid enough, I pull myself up onto it and climb. At the top, I feel around on the curved roof and find a workman’s hatch. It takes a few heavy shoves to dislodge it. I raise one edge of the round grate cautiously and peek beneath it.

I find myself staring at a rather grimy back alley and the window of a bakery closed for siesta.

I lower the grate and lift the other edge. There are a few shuttered shops nearby, but at midafternoon, the alley is deserted.

I push open the hatch and pull myself out, then kick it back into place. I walk to the end of the alley and peer around the corner along a busy road I recognize. In the distance is a café I recognize from tutoring one of my students in Zaidín. It’s about three kilometers past the bridge.

I know where I am.

From memory, the airbase Alexei mentioned should be no more than six or seven kilometers away.

I see a dirty cap discarded in one of the doorways. Tucking my hair under it, I put my head down, turn away from the busy main road into the smaller back alleys, and start walking.

An hour and a half later, I reach the white gatehouse at the entrance to the airfield.

I linger by a parked car nearby, unsure whether it’s safe to approach the gate openly or not.

That’s not the only reason I linger.

Where are you going, Ofelia?

I’ve passed at least four working phone boxes since I started walking. I could have used any of them to place a collect call to my father for help.

But I didn’t.

And now that I’m here, I know I should ask Alexei’s contact to fly me to Papa’s finca.

It’s the safe thing to do. The smart thing to do. For all I know, the Novikovs are still tailing me, just waiting for me to lead them to Alexei.

Except I’m sure they aren’t. The most dangerous thing I’ve seen since I left those tunnels is my own filthy reflection in shop windows. I stopped at a fountain soon after to wash the worst of the mud off.

The truth is that right up until now, I’ve been so focused on getting to safety, I haven’t stopped to think about what I’m going to tell my family. Now, just the thought of those conversations feels even heavier than the darkness in the tunnels.

Flying home covered in mud, having recently escaped Russian bratva soldiers, who kidnapped me to lure Alexei out of hiding, is a scenario designed to send my father stratospheric.

Any explanation I offer will be moot. Whatever slim chance Alexei and I might have had to gain his approval would be instantly shot to hell before it even breathed.

And there’s no lie I could tell that my father would believe. Not after this.