Page 22 of A Trap So Flawless

If they showed up…

“What happened?” I don’t recognize my own voice. “Where is she?”

I should never have left her.

“Right now, she’s in a cab. I’m following. She’s unharmed.”

Relief, like sweet whiskey, pours through my veins. I breathe in and out, in and out, not knowing how badly I needed to hear those words. She’s unharmed.

She never should have been in fucking Montréal.

And I never should have been here.

“Can’t say the same for her da, though,” Tommy is saying now. “He took a hit. Looked like it was right to the fucking heart. The Di Mauro boss got hit in the head. Curse Titone took two bikers down. Then the sirens started up and everybody scattered.”

Her father and her husband both got shot, probably fatally. She must have been sitting with them. Maybe even between them.

The first time I saw her on the rooftop, when I realized who she was, when I realized she was choking, I remember briefly thinking, What a goddamn miracle. I get to watch a Titone die tonight.

Now, I think it’s a miracle she’s still alive. Salvatore took a shot to the head…

One wrong move, one minute misfire, the slightest shift of fate, and Valentina would be the one with a bullet in her brain right now.

The mere thought makes me feel like my very inner being is being unspooled. Like someone’s taken hold of my spine and is unwinding it nerve by nerve. Until there’s nothing left.

“Where is she going? Who is she with?” I ask, forcing myself to focus on reality. The reality where she’s alive, but her husband isn’t…

“She’s alone in the cab,” Tommy says. “Her mother is at the hospital. Curse and a bunch of others are with the cops.”

My pet, alone and unprotected in the city. My little lamb. Lost in a labyrinth.

But then again, Valentina’s never been a lamb.

“We’re pulling up to the airport. She’s going inside. I’ll follow.”

The airport?

Fuck.

She could end up anywhere.

“Don’t let her out of your fucking sight,” I hiss into the phone. “I’ll be on the next flight to Montréal.”

But the flight is almost seven hours long.

She’ll be long gone by then.

“She’s at one of the desks. Looks like she’s booking a flight. I’ll get closer.”

No fucking shit, she’s booking a flight. Why the hell else would she have gone to the airport?

My clever Valentina saw an opportunity, what with her daddy and her husband dead as fucking doornails and me out of the country.

She’s going to goddamn run.

“Shit. I thought maybe she was getting on that flight to Dublin,” Tommy says. “It leaves in less than half an hour. But she booked a flight to London.”

London. I could be there to meet her. I’d arrive before she did.

---