Page 4 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
One guess who was the second.
Chapter Two
Present Day
Location Unknown
It wasn’t the first time Alexandra Sterling had woken up tied to a chair in the dark, but it was the first time she couldn’t remember exactly how she got there.
Her head hurt, and her throat burned, and she didn’t even know if it was day or night, winter or summer. If she was dead or alive.
She shifted on the cold metal seat, and a sharp, searing pain streaked down her spine.
Alive, she decided.Definitely alive.
When she heard the clang of handcuffs hitting a metal chair, Alex had to wonder how much longer she could stay that way. But Alex didn’t panic, thank you very much. She was too well-trained for that and far too jaded. Panic was for the very naive, the supremely unprepared, and the extraordinarily stupid, and no one survives ten years in her business by being any of the three, so Alex tried to focus on what shewas: Confused. And concerned. And, most of all,caught.
Alex had been caught, and no matter how hard she tried to think—how desperately she needed to remember—she couldn’t put her finger on how.
So that brought her back to the hard chair and the dark room and the pain in her neck that told her she’d been sitting there for way too long.
She had to get free, and that was one of very few things she knew for certain.
Things That I Know
A List by Alexandra Sterling
My name is Alex Sterling.
I’m in a dark room that smells like dust and mold and other people’s feet.
I’m handcuffed.
My head hurts.
My neck hurts.
My stomach hurts.
I don’t know who brought me here or when or how or why.
But the most important thing was simple:
My name is Alexandra Sterling. And I used to be a spy.
It was the past tense that mattered. For a moment, in the darkness, with nothing but the beating of her heart to mark the time, Alex had to wonder if the last year had been a dream. Maybe she was still undercover with Kozlov? Maybe she was waking up at the Farm? Maybe she was still a little girl and she was going to look over and see Zoe sleeping in a twin bed on the other side of the room... But no.
Her head hurt and the handcuffs rattled, and Alex couldn’t help but remember icy falls and hard landings and then walking—no,running—away from her job and her world and her life. She remembered hiding and worrying that someone might find her. She remembered wondering if that would be better or worse than waking up one day and realizing that no one had bothered to look.
Of course, someonehadcome looking, it turned out, but she didn’t have a clue who. Or why. And Alex couldn’t make it all make sense.
For a time, every intelligence service in the world had been trying to track her down, but that was more than a year ago, and Kozlov was dead now. Alex hadn’t officially resigned from the CIA, but disappearing without a trace for a year was the same thing, wasn’t it?And, besides, Alex had been a very good girl since she jumped off that mountain in Italy—literally flew into the sunset and disappeared.
But maybe that was her first mistake. People liked Alex more when she was bad.
Her Agency-assigned therapist had told her once that most of her issues stemmed from childhood trauma and survivor’s guilt and the need to act out first—cause trouble and drive people away because, on some level, Alex felt like she didn’t deserve them. It wasn’t her fault she’d gotten the good heart and the good veins and the good nutrients—sucked them right up in the womb.
She hadn’t activelytriedto kill her sister, but Alex had been a greedy little embryo, and she doubted ten years in the field had made it any better. So maybe it was just a matter of time until she ended up tied to (yet another) chair in (yet another) room waiting for (yet another) bad guy to come try to boss her around.
