Page 159 of Lethal Obsession

“No more secrets,” she says quietly. “I want to wear the ring where everyone can see it. Because I was always yours, Alexei. This has always been forever, for me.”

Sliding my arms beneath her, I lift her into the water. “So is that a yes?”

She gives a gurgle of laughter as she wraps her legs around my waist, encircling my neck with her arms. “Of course it’s a yes.”

“I love you.” I don’t think about the words. I don’t need to. They’ve been in every kiss, every touch, since Paris, if not before.

“And I love you.” She touches her lips to mine for a long moment, then pulls back. “I’ll love you even more if you hand me that glass of Krug.”

I start laughing. “We’re seriously going to need to address your day drinking, Miss Borovsky.”

“Soon-to-be Mrs. Petrovsky,” she says primly, taking the glass I hand her. “And I thought you said this was a celebration.”

“Oh, believe me, it is.” I touch my glass to hers. “To us, angel.”

“To us.” Ofelia sips her drink, then raises it to the sky. “And to whoever is trying their hardest to kill you,” she says, giving me a mischievous smile, “since they managed to bring us together, whether they meant to or not.”

I force a smile, but I don’t raise my glass in response to her toast.

I can’t.

We both know that the perfection of this moment exists precisely because it cannot last.

Whoever is trying to kill me won’t stop because I’ve put a ring on Ofelia’s finger, just like that ring won’t protect her from being used against me.

We just upped the stakes in a very deadly game.

One I’ve never had more reason to win.

32

Alexei

I set a course for Sicily but order the crew to take it slowly. We meander through the Ligurian Sea to the island of Elba, then anchor off Corsica and Sardinia, before slipping into the Tyrrhenian Sea. We stick to isolated passages, covering no more than a few nautical miles a day.

I need time to think.

Now that Ofelia is with me, my brain seems to have found a gear that has previously escaped me. In her absence, I spent the bulk of each day in the cyber room, pretending to work, while in reality I was glued to the cameras, worried for her safety and longing for her to be here.

Now I sit on the upper deck with the modified laptop Lars gave me, the sweet sound of Ofelia’s daily practice floating up from the cabin below as I work. Sometimes I rise in the middle of the night, my only company the gentle lap of water against the hull and Ofelia’s peaceful breathing. I work by the open cabin doors as she sleeps, pausing occasionally to watch the way the moon slides across her skin, feeling a deep contentment I could never have imagined possible.

That peace allows my mind to wander in directions it didn’t have the space or time to find before. I follow the money trails from Marty Hunter’s campaign into the Miami waterways, patiently working through the saw grass of companies and false leads to the bodies concealed below.

Lars wasn’t wrong in saying he needs my knowledge of the bodies in Miami’s swamp to follow this money trail, I think late one night, working out on the deck while Ofelia sleeps and the lights from Sardinia glitter off the water. The trail isn’t marked by names, dates, or events that any algorithm could connect in a meaningful pattern.

But that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

Behind every donation lies a connection, either directly or indirectly, to someone I’ve killed.

The existence of those connections isn’t necessarily evidence, of course.

The famous six degrees of separation between any two people on earth has, Mickey once told me, shrunk to less than five degrees in the last century.

The fact stuck in my mind, because when you narrow the geographical survey sample to a city the size of Miami, that statistic gets even tighter—and I’ve dumped a lot of bodies over the years.

The truth is that if you traced every donation made in Miami to any candidate, somewhere between one and five degrees of separation, you’d come across a corpse I dumped in the swamp.

So it’s easy enough to draw a line. But the missing link lies in what, if anything, joins one body to another.