I’m up against elite ex-soldiers, not regular men, after all.
Still, I add the gun to my mental wish list, just in case an opportunity to acquire one arises before my escape. I might not be able to bluff Peter and his men into complying with my demands, but the same can’t be said for some Japanese farmer. I’d try the civilized approach at first, of course, but if I’m having trouble gaining access to a phone, I’m not opposed to waving a gun around—unloaded, of course.
As I work on these preparations, I also start keeping an eye on the weather, casually asking the guys for a forecast each day. We haven’t had snow yet, but it’s already October and winter comes early at this altitude.
The last thing I want is to get caught in another icy storm.
“I don’t like the cold,” I complain to Peter when we return from a walk one day. “And I especially don’t like it when the day starts off at one temperature, and by evening, it’s twenty degrees colder.”
“Poor baby,” he croons, taking off my jacket to rub my arms. “Come, let’s take a shower and get you nice and warm.”
I let him warm me up with a hot shower and two orgasms, and the next day, I resume complaining about the weather—that way, no one will think it strange if I keep asking for a daily forecast.
As I’m doing all this, the guys are engaged in planning of their own. After a long break to throw the authorities off their scent, the team agreed to take on another job—a highly paid, highly dangerous assassination of a politician in Turkey.
I’ve been trying not to think about it, because each time I do, I get so anxious I can’t eat or sleep. After what happened in Nigeria, just hearing the word “job” raises my blood pressure.
“Why do you have to do this?” I ask Peter in frustration as mid-October—the client’s deadline to complete the job—draws nearer. “You said yourself, it’s especially dangerous out there for you these days. You got paid millions—millions—for that Nigerian banker. You can’t have gone through all that money so quickly.”
“Of course not, but we have to think ahead,” Peter says. “Aside from some of our more expensive toys, our hackers cost a fortune, and we need them to continue evading the authorities—and searching for Henderson.”
Shaking my head, I take a breath and head into my recording studio, both to distract myself with music and to avoid another argument. Because if Peter is inflexible about the necessity for these jobs, he’s absolutely immovable on the topic of Henderson—the one man still remaining on his list. The one time I cautiously brought up the possibility of forgetting the general and moving on, Peter shot me down so harshly I haven’t been inclined to try again.
“He personally issued the order for the Daryevo operation,” my captor snarled, his handsome face so twisted with rage it was unrecognizable. “He did this”—he shoved the phone with pictures of the massacre at me—“and I’m not going to rest until he and anyone who’s helping him are rotting with the worms, just like the corpses of my wife and son.”
I nodded then, backing off, because as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I do understand Peter’s need for vengeance. I can’t imagine losing people I care about in such a horrible way, and I know it had to have been even worse for him. From everything he’s told me, those short years with Pasha and Tamila were the only time he’s experienced anything resembling family and love.
Last week, for the first time, Peter talked a little bit about his son. It was after he woke up from a nightmare about his family’s deaths, his big body shaking and covered with cold sweat. He reached for me then and fucked me, and in the quiet aftermath, he admitted how much he misses his little boy—how acutely he still feels his absence.
“Pasha was… life,” he told me raggedly. “I don’t even know how to explain it. I’d never met a child who took such joy in the mere act of existing. Birds, insects, trees, the sky and the rocks—everything was new to him, everything was fun. And he had so much energy. Tamila could barely keep up with him. He drove her crazy. And cars…” His powerful chest rose with a deep breath. “He loved cars. He wanted to be a race car driver when he grew up.”
“Oh, Peter…” I lay my hand over his. “He sounds wonderful.”
“He was,” Peter whispered, turning his palm up to squeeze my fingers, and the intensity of pain in those words gutted me to the quick.
For all of his obsession with me, my captor is still grieving the loss of his family—the people he truly loved.