Page 179 of Lethal Abduction

But we’ve come this far.

I take a deep breath.

“The first thing I remember,” I say, “is the peacock hanging on our wall.”

Leonand I talk until dusk falls over Hyde Park, and then we go back to his house and keep talking, this time over a lot of wine. Abby and I are flying back to Spain tomorrow with her parents, and this is the last chance we’ll have, for a while, at least.

“Yakov was still living as Jacob Cohen to the outside world when you knew him,” Leon tells me as the night grows deep. “But by then, he’d made a small fortune selling intelligence.” He gives me a rueful smile. “Not unlike I do now, but where I tend to deal with different agencies, Jacob sold highly classified secrets to dangerous, very greedy men. Eventually, he became a liability to several of them, which is when he decided it was time to cash in and disappear.”

His smile fades, and the stark grief that never seems far away steals back into his eyes. “Your mother’s last letter didn’t say much,” he says quietly. “She didn’t know if I was alive ordead, or if it would ever reach me, so it was deliberately cryptic. And I didn’t even receive it until many years after it was written. She told me the name of the orphanage where she’d left you, and the name of the yacht she was going to find. Despite the cryptic language, I understood that the yacht belonged to Yakov and that she intended to kill him. Ekaterina—” His voice stumbles on her name, and he swallows. “She was always fierce. And she had a lot of reasons to hate Yakov, more than I even understood then, from everything you have told me. I don’t doubt that she would have found a way to end his life.” The lethal undertone in his voice doesn’t escape me. “I wonder often, now, if maybe she wasn’t telling me the truth when we were younger, about what he did to her before she ran to me in the night.”

“She hated him.” I say it bluntly. “We both did. But she never let him get to her, no matter how hard he hit or what he did to her. She always told me never to run from hardship or hide from pain.”

Leon winces. “I wonder sometimes if that’s what caused all of this,” he says sadly. “Running. Perhaps your mother was right. Maybe if we’d stayed, talked it through with Yakov back in the beginning, none of it would have happened.”

I shake my head slowly. “Yakov was a sadistic bastard, Leon. He was when I met him, and from what you’re saying, he was long before that. And now he’s dead.” My mouth tightens as I stare into the fire, seeing Yakov’s face dissolve under our bullets. “I don’t regret killing him,” I say softly. “I just wish I’d done it sooner.”

I glance at Leon, and he nods.

“Has there ever been anyone else for you?” I ask. “My mother... It was a long time ago.”

“No.” His answer is short, his mouth hard. “No, I don’t think there ever will be.” He looks at me, and though he triesto smile, it doesn’t reach his eyes. “There are some people who love lightly,” he says quietly. “Then there is... what your mother and I had.” He shakes his head. “You can’t replace that kind of love. And I’ve never wanted to.”

He rubs a hand over his face. “I always thought I’d know if she was dead.” He says it into the fire, as if he’s talking to himself, rather than me. “All this time, I always thought I’d find her again. That she had to be alive somewhere.” He looks down into his glass. “I guess I was wrong,” he says softly.

We drink for a time in silence.

“One thing I keep forgetting to ask you,” I say, frowning.

Leon raises his eyebrows.

“Did you know Juan Cardeñas before all of this?”

He grins. “Juan and I crossed paths long ago, in the art world. Then later, when he came to Thailand, looking for the daughter of his friend, I suspected we were on the same trail. Zinaida got word from a contact that he might be in danger, and I got word to Juan just in time for him to avoid being blown up. That made us firm allies. Several more months of hunting Jacey together made us friends.”

“No wonder you were so fucking keen when I called for help,” I say, giving him a dry look.

Leon inclines his head. “True. But by then, I had more than one reason to be interested in you, too. So there’s that.” His smile fades as fast as it arrived. “The girl that went missing was Juan’s goddaughter, did you know that?”

I shake my head. “No wonder he wanted Yakov.”

“He hated him.” Leon drinks. “And now the bastard is dead.”

I lift my own glass. “And now the bastard is dead,” I echo.

We drink, and I feel nothing but relief that it’s over.

It’s the early hours of the morning when I finally put my head down for some sleep, but I don’t feel tired.

I know my mother a little better now than I did.

And while I’m never going to forgive Yakov for what he did to us, at least now I understand why. It won’t ever change the hellish torture he put me through. But it helps, in some strange way, to know it wasn’t my fault.

The future stretches in front of me.

A future I don’t plan to run from, ever again.

Epilogue

---