Page 169 of Lethal Obsession

“They’re the truth.” He cuts me off abruptly, his mouth hardening. “You can’t be here, Ofelia.” When I don’t answer, his fists clench at his sides. “Go.”

For a moment I’m twenty-one again, standing back on the Granada patio the night of my party, reeling under the shock of his flat-voiced rejection: “Go. For Chrissakes, Ofelia. Fucking leave . . .”

“You told me to leave once before,” I say quietly, “and I made the mistake of listening to you. I won’t do that again, no matter what you say or do.”

Still he doesn’t speak. I want to move forward, to touch him, but some primal instinct warns me not to.

Instead, I hold up my hand, the ring he gave me sparkling in the sunlight. “You told me this means forever.” I stare into his lone eye, trying to convey with every ounce of my soul how much I feel. “Forever means we don’t walk away, Alexei. Certainly not because of the idiotic things my brother said.”

“We both know Mickey is no idiot.” The sun beams full on his face, highlighting every one of the crisscrossed scars, turning his lone eye to glittering arctic ice. “And he was right, about all of it. You and I had both forgotten the world we come from. Marrying me does mean signing your own death warrant. And whether you want to see it or not, Ofelia, I am a sadistic, murderous psychopath.”

Reaching behind his head, he pulls off his eye patch, exposing the sunken hollow and twisted scar tissue to the merciless midday sun. “I could have had this scar repaired long ago.” His voice is cold and hard. “Inserted a prosthetic eye, had the scars on my face removed. But I’ve never lied to myself about what the Orlov blades made me become, Ofelia. They cut away whatever man I might have been, and I carved what was left into what I needed to be to defeat them. What did Mickey call me?” His silken smile might be sinister if I hadn’t learned to read him long ago. “The Swamp Surgeon. There are many other names. The Biscayne Butcher is a more recent one—”

“I know all of this!” Afraid that he’ll misinterpret any attempt to touch him as pity, I remain still, my voice shaking with the emotion I can’t hold back any longer. “I’ve always known—”

“You think you know.” He cuts me off with flat precision. “But knowing it and living with it are two different things. This isn’t about defeating one enemy and then living happily ever after. There will always be someone coming after me, Ofelia.” He passes a hand over his face, staring past me with that same look I saw in his eye when he was working late on the yacht the last few nights. “There’s always going to be another body in that fucking swamp,” he says, almost as if he’s talking to himself, “trying to pull me down into the mud.”

“I don’t care if there are hundreds of bodies in the swamp.” I move toward him, determined to find a way through whatever nightmare he is seeing behind that thousand-yard stare. To reassure him that whatever he sees late at night when he stares into that void only makes me love him more for having endured it.

But whatever reassurance I might have offered is lost, cut off and swallowed by a weird, sucking sensation that momentarily steals the air from our clifftop.

Afterward, I’ll never recall what came first—the strange silence, the deafening boom, or the orange ball on the horizon.

What I will always remember is Alexei’s body hitting my own, the sun-warmed gravel hard beneath my back as he hurls himself atop me, covering me completely. I understand in that moment what people mean when they say something happened in slow motion, just as I smell the acrid scent of smoke in my nose even though logic says that must be my imagination, since Lars’s yacht is too far out to sea for me to smell the explosion.

Don’t move. I see Alexei’s mouth move rather than hear him, see the fierce blaze in his lone eye, then he’s leaped from my body, and the world snaps into focus as he calls curt commands to the other men on the clifftop. He draws his gun and shots crack the air, breaking whatever spell I’ve been under.

There’s a rush of yelling and movement, during which I remain on the ground, completely winded from the explosion or the fall to the earth or both, unable to move even if I wanted to. I hear the unmistakable sound of bullets hitting flesh at close quarters, a wet, meaty thud I’ve heard too many times in my life to mistake for anything else.

Finding my breath, I’m starting to move when a bullet smashes into the rock behind my head, barely inches from where I’m lying.

“Stay down!” Alexei materializes beside me. “There’s a fucking sniper,” he snarls to Jack, who is low to the ground several paces away.

“I know,” comes Jack’s voice. “I’ve already got people on it. Stay down until I know we’ve got him.”

Alexei crouches beside me, gun still in his hands. His face is the mask I know all too well. “Ofelia,” he says curtly, “are you hurt?”

“No.” I can barely croak the word out. “The yacht.” I stare up at him, dread twisting my stomach. “What—is it—”

“I don’t know.” He cuts me off before I can ask.

Mickey.

Lars.

Lourdes.

Benny.

My brother. My closest friends in the world.

They can’t be dead.

It can’t happen. It’s impossible.

My brain won’t allow it.

You were in a bomb blast before and survived. It’s the first truly coherent thought that enters my mind, and I cling to it like a buoy in a storm. A blast doesn’t mean death.