We left the coveralls on, just in case we were caught. Maybe we’d be mistaken for crew fooling around. I took the hard hat and hearing protection off.
He crawled in next to me, closing a thin curtain that gave a small bit of privacy. It was a tight fit, but with my back against the wall, it was comfortable enough.
“How do you know they won’t look for us here?” I whispered.
He brought a finger to my lips, silencing me.
“Trust me,” he whispered.
He turned onto his side and faced me, his wide body easily hiding me. I turned toward the wall.
His hand rested on my hip.
He kissed the back of my head.
“Raven,” I whispered.
He said nothing, but his hand drifted up to my waist, warming me.
I took his hand, drawing him in, meaning to pull him into my back for warmth, but ended up putting his hand on my breast.
Worked for me. It was oddly calming and comfortable. I covered his hand with mine, just holding it against me.
He tucked his other arm under my head, providing extra support, and held me like that.
“Little thief,” he whispered against the back of my head. “My mushka.”
With his warm, strong body behind me, his comforting hold, it was hard to be angry with him for throwing me over. I still thought he could have gotten us off the boat, or found another way, but he’d thought he had no choice and I accepted that. That he’d tried to save us.
He has his own moral code, Axel had said. Sometimes even he didn’t understand it.
I wasn’t sure I ever would, either, but I wanted to.
??????
I slept deeply. So did he, although we flipped around inside the small, contained space.
He got up once to get a bottle of water and some cellophane-wrapped muffins. He was back so quickly, I suspected he’d stolen them from someone’s stash.
Sometime during the night, we woke up hungry and split the muffins, careful to not drop crumbs on the bed. Once we were done, we went back to sleep.
I took aspirin around every four hours because the headache kept returning through the night, waking me up.
We listened when anyone came into the room, but we must have ended up in the quiet cabin. People came in and went to bed, or grabbed something and left the room. We remained dead still when other people entered. Nothing else. No one bothered us.
Still, I didn’t feel safe. Every time someone entered the room, I anticipated one of them would pull back the curtain.
The way Raven tensed next to me made me realize he did, too.
When the room was clear in the morning, Raven drew back the curtain and jumped out. He reached for me, pulling me down.
My headache had eventually cleared up, which Raven said was a good sign. If I’d woken up with it when it was time to go, he’d have had to take me back to the doctor.
The spot where I’d been hit was still sensitive when I touched it, but I could skip the aspirin.
“We shouldn’t have slept for so long,” I said.
“You did,” he said, “I didn’t.”
I glared at him. “You were here the whole time.”
He smirked. “Only at first. I’ve been up and down for a while now. You slept pretty hard.”
Crap. “You shouldn’t have gone out alone.”
He pushed a finger toward my lips again and nudged me toward the door.
“Time to go, little thief.”
The Cold Room
When we were alone in an empty hallway, I said, “I think we should start with Sam.”
“I’ve been checking in with him. He doesn’t have Blake, at least I don’t think so. I’ve been hinting around to see if he had someone stored away, and he doesn’t seem to. Security doesn’t appear to be looking for him, only her. The girl they don’t recognize who was hanging around the spa.”
“Me dressed up,” I said.
“So technically they’re looking for you.”
I wasn’t sure what time it was, but Raven told me guests had been permitted out of their rooms.
We arrived at an intersection. Raven checked out the options and headed right.
After a few turns, I realized we were still on the spa side of deck two. Raven took another hallway and I caught a whiff of nail polish.
Raven poked his head into open doors along the hall, especially as voices echoed to us. He told me he was not just heading somewhere, but also scouting potential hiding spots for later.
The first time someone came into the same hallway, I hid behind Raven, head down.
When they disappeared, Raven turned to me. “Don’t do that. You look like you’re hiding.”
Whoops.
“Keep your head up,” he said. “Just don’t look at anyone for too long.”
Still, the hallways were narrow, and I fell behind him naturally as people passed because we needed to make room. I kept my head up, though, looking once in someone’s direction and then at Raven and at things we passed by, like doors. I only got brief looks at the people we walked past. No one I recognized. No one even looked at us too long. We weren’t just crew. We were maintenance. Invisible. The earmuffs helped some as I wore them around my neck, giving some cover to my face since they were pretty big.
One more turn and we were in what I recognized as the main hallway for the spa. The front desk was ahead of us. I knew there was a camera looking into the lobby and where it was.
Raven went close to the desk, just out of view of where the camera would be looking. He waved to a girl working the counter, avoiding the camera, but anyone in the waiting room would probably think we were just trying to stay out of the way.
I could hear people behind the various walls separating sections of the spa. There was one person out on the sundeck, wearing a robe with a towel wrapped around her hair. No one familiar.
The spa receptionist was short and Asian. She noted Raven, and when she was finished dealing with a customer, she walked up to speak to him. She only briefly looked at me. Uninterested.
“It’s about time someone came up here,” she said. “The ice room isn’t working again. How hard is it to keep a room cold?”
Who would want a cold room?
“On it,” Raven said, giving her a salute. “By the way, Sam said he was looking for someone?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. Did you see something?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Can he come down?”
She nodded. The phone rang, and she waved him off. She pointed to the hall opposite the one we were standing in. “Last door on the left.”
Raven grabbed my wrist and tugged once, encouraging me to follow.
I did and kept my head tilted, looking at the desk. Just in case security could recognize me, I wanted to make sure to hide my face.
We crossed through into the other hallway. This one had the relaxing flute and piano music playing a little louder. There was more bubbling, too, like water fountains.
We passed some rooms with signs indicating they were massage rooms.
I tried not to listen too closely to what was going on in those rooms.
When we got to the end of the hallway, the white walls were replaced with glass ones. There was a sauna, something called a salt room, and on the left at the end was the ice room.
Stepping in, it looked just like the sauna, except the benches were stone, and it was already a little chilly. The music was piped in, though it was soft in the background. There was a mosaic made to look like ice crystals in the tile on floor. Plastic white crystals jutted out from the corners.
It was cool, like the air conditioner had been left on all night. This wasn’t cold enough? Why didn’t they just install a walk-in freezer and put a stone bench inside that?
I had to hold my tongue just to stop myself from asking Raven why on earth people paid for the craziest things, like cold rooms.
He looked around and found a panel cut into the wall near the benches. He pulled a pocketknife out from his coveralls pocket and used it to open the panel.
As he peered inside, I knelt next to him, not seeing much over his shoulder other than shadows. “Are we really going to fix this?”
“Don’t talk,” he said.