Page 8 of Hide or Die

It was probably meant to be symbolic of the resurgence of the Church in Eastern Europe over the past couple of decades. Or... something. If nothing else, the architecture was apparently well regarded by people who were interested in such things—not that there was likely to be much time or spare energy for playing tourist during the summit.

The motorcade pulled out of the hotel’s grand circular drive and into the bustle of the city. Kam and I were in the middle car, with Jax riding shotgun in the front seat, next to a driver I didn’t know. The other two alphas, Alex and Flynn, were in the lead car, while Beckett was in the one bringing up the rear, along with some additional support staff from the Foreign Office.

I gazed through the tinted bulletproof window, idly watching the city slide by as I attempted to center myself in preparation for what promised to be a grueling few days of negotiations. Romania’s capital was an attractive muddle of old and new, but it was mostly the old that dominated. Even some of the relatively new landmarks, like the massive Palace of the Parliament, had been built to evoke a sense of times past.

It took almost an hour to negotiate the morning traffic and reach the outskirts of the city. For a while, cropland dominated. Before long, however, the landscape turned into parched and dusty scrubland. Even here in Europe, the twenty-year drought had driven agriculture down into the river valleys, where reliable irrigation was simpler to engineer.

Through the front window, I could just begin to make out the Carpathians, shrouded by morning haze. Mountains always made me think of home—not Montreal, but rather, the tiny town in Colorado where I’d been born. Not that the place was reallyhomethese days—my beta parents lived far away from there, having taken on new identities and moved to the Caribbean, where the Committee held less sway.

They’d had to uproot their lives to protect themselves becauseIexisted. In fact, I’d insisted on it, once my career in the diplomatic corps started to take off. They’d given me a chance at a respectable beta life—but the moment my cover was blown, theirs would have been blown, too. They had aided and abetted an unregistered omega throwback, rather than handing me over to the authorities and washing their hands of me as soon as they’d discovered my true sex.

Now, whenever my house of cards inevitably came tumbling down, an investigation would find that both of my parents had been tragically killed in a car crash six years ago. Mr. and Mrs. McCready were no more, and meanwhile, an unremarkable expat couple was living quietly in Jamaica. The guilt of placing them in that position was ever-present in the background of my thoughts, but it was nothing to the guilt I would have felt if they’d come under the magnifying glass of the Committee.

I focused once more on the here-and-now, aware that my mind was wandering—another symptom of approaching heat, though one that I could control well enough as long as I paid attention. Our surroundings out here were downright bleak. It had been more than fifteen minutes since I’d seen a car pass in the other direction. There were likely to be other motorcades using this route, though many of the delegates would have left Bucharest last night and stayed in Târgoviste to avoid the early morning commute.

The car in front of us—the one with Flynn and Alex—slowed.

“What the hell’s this?” Jax muttered from the front seat. His hand delved beneath his jacket at the height one might expect to find a shoulder holster, and my pulse quickened. Beside me, Kam straightened in his seat. The driver muttered something in Romanian, slowing as well.

I craned forward, trying to see, and got a confused impression of several off-road vehicles parked some distance away from the roadway ahead of us, nestled among the brownish scrub. Before I could draw breath to ask what was going on, a massive noise deafened me, and the limo went tumbling sideways like a child’s toy beneath the force of a fiery explosion.

FOUR

Leona

THE SEATBELT dug intomy chest and shoulder, squeezing the breath from my lungs as the car rolled. Metal shrieked around me. The side of my head slammed into the window, my skull predictably proving softer than the bulletproof glass. Pain exploded from the site of impact, my awareness fading to a distant sensation of everything moving around me as my arms and legs lolled, beyond my control.

My vision flared white, then dark. My hearing dulled to a liquidshush-shush, shush-shushin time with my heartbeat. When my senses cleared enough to make some kind of sense of my surroundings, I was hanging upside down. Something warm dripped from my temple.

“Leo!Leo!” A voice was calling my name from somewhere very close by. I thought maybe it had been calling for a while, and it seemed odd that I hadn’t noticed it sooner. Sharp sounds came from somewhere farther away—rat-a-tat-tat... rat-a-tat-tat. The combination was loud enough to echo through my aching head and make my ears ring unpleasantly.

A grunt of effort came from next to me, and I turned in time to see a dark shape fall free, landing with a pained yelp on the floor—roof?—of the battered metal and glass cage.

The last few minutes gradually reassembled into something that made sense... though my head felt like an overfilled water balloon as gravity dragged too much blood into it. We were in a limo, headed to Târgoviste. The car had flipped over. The noise outside was gunfire. The shape next to me was...

“Kam?” It emerged as a bare rasp.

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